Encountering the everyday: Place writing during geography fieldwork

Rawlings Smith, Emma and Otto, Kate (2023) Encountering the everyday: Place writing during geography fieldwork. In, Rawlings Smith, Emma and Pike, Susan (eds.) Encountering ideas of Place in Education: Scholarship and Practice in Place-based Learning. 1 ed. London. Routledge, pp. 53-64.

Abstract

In 1974, from a café window in Paris, Georges Perec (1975) noted everything he saw in An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. More recently, there has been a revival and experimental turn in place-writing which focuses on the complexities of place as assemblage (Cresswell, 2019). Constructing lists of objects and behaviours in mundane surroundings is a form of non-linear, yet powerful, writing exercise, which takes place in the field and can help geographers to know and better understand a place and how it functions. Within this chapter, we argue that common, banal and everyday places are an important setting for geography fieldwork, as these types of places are more familiar than ‘awe and wonder’ case studies such as London Docklands and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London, which students may not always relate to. We then evaluate the transformative possibilities of ethnographic approaches to fieldwork such as Perec’s exercise in observation for students completing fieldwork in everyday places. We finish the chapter by discussing implications for practice which support both student’s deeper understanding of place theory in practice and methodological diversity in fieldwork.

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Contributors

Author: Emma Rawlings Smith

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