Abstract
Rejecting the sedentary nature of current research practices, a growing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences have embraced mobile methodologies and immersive technologies like global positioning system (GPS) activated or downloadable audio tours. The new “mobilities paradigm” is encouraging scholars to engage with the materiality of the built and natural environments.3 While mobility risks becoming a mantra and is too often invoked uncritically, it offers us an opportunity to rethink oral history practice.4 The walking interview, for example, has emerged as a core practice of geographers and artists interested in place identity and urban change.5 The environment thus acts as a visual and auditory prompt to the stories being told whilst bimbling (aimless walking as a strategy to reconnect with the surrounding environment)6, soundwalking (the mobile exploration of ambient sound)7, or during the go-along (an interview done while walking, cycling, or driving through a person’s neighborhood or home place).8 “Walking, like telling stories, is the movement between places,” writes Jane Ricketts Hein.9
We are born and have our being in a place of memory. We chart our lives by everything we remember from the mundane moment to the majestic. We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer us a world where there is no death, where we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection.
—bell hooks, 20091
How can we as social science researchers, harness the power of place in our methodology?
—Jon Anderson, 20042
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Notes
bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009), 5.
Jon Anderson, “Talking Whilst Walking: A Geographical Archaeology of Knowledge,” Area 36:3 (2004), 257. Henceforth referred to as Anderson, “Talking.”
Jane Ricketts Hein, James Evans, and Phil Jones, “Mobile Methodologies: Theory, Technology and Practice,” Geography Compass 2:5 (2008), 1266–85. Henceforth referred to as Hein, “Mobile.”
I am sometimes dismayed by the ready equation of mobility with progress, as something to be celebrated. In emphasizing mobility rather than displacement, scholars sometimes assume it is a voluntary act. Tim Cresswell. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006).
Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A 38 (2006), 208. The “mobility turn” is evident in the journal Mobilities, founded in 2006.; See also Alison Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Migration: Mobility, Transnationality and Diaspora,” Progress in Human Geography (2007), 1–11.
Re. soundwalking, some scholars believe that everyday noise can prompt memories and stories during the walking interview. “We have been struck, listening to our recorded tours, not only by the extent to which everyday sound gives texture to settings, making places the places that they are, but also by the ways in which sound has acted to configure the routes respondents have shared with us.” Tom Hall, Brett Lashua, and Amanda Coffey, “Sound and the Everyday in Qualitative Research,” Qualititative Inquiry 14:6 (2008), 1019–40.
Re. the go-along, Richard M. Carpiano describes it in “Come Take a Walk with Me: The ‘Go-Along’ Interview as a Novel Method for Studying the Implications of Place for Health and Well-Being,” Health and Place 15 (2009), 263–72. I have certainly done interviews while driving and walking in the past, and I organized a chapter of one of my books around the stops selected by Gabriel Solano, a former Detroit autoworker interviewed by me on two occasions. See Steven High and David Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007).
Lyndsay Brown and Kevin Durrheim, “Different Kinds of Knowing: Generating Qualitative DataThrough Mobile Interviewing,” Qualitative Inquiry 15:5 (2009), 920.
Toby Butler and Graeme Miller, “Linked: A Landmark in Sound, a Public Walk of Art,” Cultural Geographies 12 (2005), 77–88.
Steven High, “Telling Stories: Oral History and New Media,” Oral History 38 (Spring 2010), 101–12.
Michael Frisch, “Three Dimensions and More: Oral History Beyond the Paradoxes of Method,” in Handbook of Emergent Methods, edited by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Leavy (New York: Guildford Press, 2008), 222.
Mark Riley and David Harvey, “Talking Geography: on Oral History and the Practice of Geography,” Social and Cultural Geography 8:3 (June 2007), 1–4.
Doreen Massey, “Places and their Pasts,” History Workshop Journal 39: 1 (1995), 182–192.
A similar point was made about the concept of class in the introduction to E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963).
Alastair Bonnett, “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography,” Theory, Culture & Society 26:1 (2009), 49.
Toby Butler, “Memoryscape: How Audio Walks Can Deepen Our Sense of Place by Integrating Art, Oral History and Cultural Geography,” Geography Compass 1:3 (2007), 360–64.
See also Toby Butler, “A Walk of Art: The Potential of the Sound Walk as Practice in Cultural Geography,” Social and Cultural Geography 7:6 (December 2006), 889.
Jeff Friedman, “Review of Drifting for Memoryscape Audiowalk,” Oral History Review 33:1 (2006), 107.
Toby Butler, “Memoryscape: How Audio Walks Can Deepen Our Sense of Place by Integrating Art, Oral History and Cultural Geography,” Geography Compass 1:3 (2007), 360–64.
Alex Himelfarb, “The Social Characteristics of One-Industry Towns in Canada,” in Little Communities and Big Industries: Studies in the Social Impact of Canadian Resource Extraction, edited by Roy T. Bowles (Toronto: Butterworths, 1982), 16. Henceforth referred to as Himelfarb, “Social.”
James E. Randall and R. Geoff Ironside, “Communities on the Edge: An Economic Geography of Resource-Dependent Communities in Canada,” Canadian Geographer 40:1 (Spring 1996), 21.
Rex Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown: Life in Canadian Communities of Single Industry (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1971).
Ray D. Bollman, Rolland Beshiri, and Verna Mitura, Northern Ontario’s Communities: Economic Diversification, Specialization and Growth (Statistics Canada, Agricultural and Rural Working Paper Series No. 82, 2006).
Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (London: Macmillan, 1984), 11. Scholars increasingly view spatial-ity as actively produced and “as an active moment within the social process.”
See also David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006), 77. Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite division of space as material (space of experience and perception), as conceptual (space as conceived or represented), and as lived (sensation, imagination, emotion) has been particularly influential in this regard.
See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991) and his The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production (London, Alison and Busby, 1976).
Kathryn Marie Dudley, The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 47.
Steven High, “Placing the Displaced Worker: Narrating Place in Deindustrializing Sturgeon Falls, Ontario,” in Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada, edited by James Opp and John Walsh (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 159–186.
Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture of War (London: Reaktion Books, 2006); see the introduction.
This was, and is, a very common sight in deindustrializing areas. See Steven High and David Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007), 23–40.
Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (Ithaca: State University of New York, 1990)
Daniel James, Dona Maria’s Story (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006), 6–21.
Joy Parr, Jessica Van Horssen, and Jon van der Veen, “The Practice of History Shared across Differences: Needs, Technologies, and Ways of Knowing in the Megaprojects New Media Project.” Journal of Canadian Studies 43:1 (2009), 39.
See also Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 115.
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© 2011 Shelley Trower
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High, S. (2011). Mapping Memories of Displacement: Oral History, Memoryscapes, and Mobile Methodologies. In: Trower, S. (eds) Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339774_11
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