Laurier2006b

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Laurier2006b
BibType ARTICLE
Key Laurier2006b
Author(s) Eric Laurier, Chris Philo
Title Possible geographies: A passing encounter in a café
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Geography, Fieldwork, Representation
Publisher
Year 2006
Language
City
Month
Journal AREA
Volume 38
Number 4
Pages 353-363
URL Link
DOI 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2006.00712.x
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

The rise of non-representational theory in human geography has prompted searching questions about how researchers might ‘represent’ what they encounter in their fieldwork. A central problem is that we reach an insurmountable impasse, an aporia, because we cannot share thoughts, meanings, feelings, etc., in a manner faithful to our experience of them or equally that certain spectacular or horrific events and encounters escape their retelling. We argue that this impossibility should not become a warrant for withdrawing from the world, and instead propose that close descriptions can still be offered of particular encounters, attending in the process to the situated, embodied sense-making work being (unavoidably) undertaken by the peoples involved that makes those encounters what they are. Such work may be threatened by scepticism, because it assumes the possibility of representation being at least partially successful, here and now, and relies on the ‘just-thisness’ of things. Scholars of social life can, scepticism contained, learn much from taking seriously how any encounter unfolds without transcendental or structural guarantee in the immediacy of the life-worlds where it is made and re-made.

Notes