British seaside amusement arcades are enduring sites, yet their acoustic dimensions remain underexplored. This In Practice paper investigates the sonic environments of three seafront amusement arcades in Blackpool, United Kingdom, through a novel artist-ethnographic methodology that integrates five interrelated methods: walking, soundwalk field recording, time-based transcription, reflection and place writing. Together, these methods establish a process of embodied engagement, sensory documentation, interpretation and creative representation. Through this approach, the three amusement arcades are shown to be complex acoustic convergences that have evolved over time. This generates new understandings of the sonic, spatial and temporal dynamics that characterise contemporary British seaside arcades, demonstrating their contribution to the role of sound in seaside resort place experience. More broadly, the paper offers a transferable qualitative methodology for creatively and critically investigating complex sensory place experiences and producing new accounts of place. This extends existing sensory ethnographic and participatory observational frameworks, with relevance across interdisciplinary art, ethnography and human geography.
What does extinction sound like? A final screech in the hands of hunters? A recorded sound trapped, stationary, a museum piece in fixed form, its maker denied all avenues of evolution? A gap in the soundscape? An unnatural silence in the air? This paper documents the process of creating a musical work for solo voice and electronics which premiered in the crypt of Glasgow Cathedral. As a composer, my intension was to create a work that reflected bird decline and extinction rooted in the West Highlands of Scotland. My creation process involved listening to the voices of endangered birds, imagining the voices of those already extinct, finding those sounds with the human voice and a human emotional expression within those sounds. Through a creative memorial practice of mimicry and re-imagining of certain bird calls, this piece explores the sonic consequences of extinction and attempts to establish a practice of sonic de-extinction, contributing to and extending geographical interests in soundscape, composed music and creative practice as method.
This article reflects on the ethics and craft choices of writing about the at-risk ancient temperate rainforests of Coed Felenrhyd and Ceunant Llennyrch in North Wales. These are sessile-oak-predominant biomes, their light-dappled understory supporting rare plants, animals, fungi and lichen. These habitats are increasingly at risk. This article draws on critical plant studies to reflect on the ethics of plant representation via Patricia Vieira's concept of 'phytographia', to inform both theory and creative practice: namely, centring plants' particularity and form, and doing the imaginative work to - albeit always inadequately - honour plant specificity and locatedness. My creative writing project was comprised of two parts: a creative prose 'Litany of Hesitations' which uses an incantatory register to hold a sense of suspense, impossibility and urgency; and second, a short series of flash/micro written works, each describing a vivid moment between two beings. Temporality is key to the project's formal choices, using litany and flash form to create and occupy a vivid present tense of relationship. The project yielded two transferrable writing techniques which could be adapted to other creative practice: the use of a cautious, paradoxical incantation to hold open the aspiration and conscious labour to reach for less human-centred framings; and the use of present tense, a 'lyric now', to enhance micro-attention to specific relationships beyond the human.
This article reflects on what fieldwork taught me about empathy as a methodological tool in feminist fieldwork through three autobiographical encounters from developmental research in West Bengal, India. It traces how empathy – trained, performed and institutionally sanctioned – can function less as a bridge across difference and more as a buffer against confronting the extractive dimensions of knowledge production. It further questions how ethical conventions like anonymisation and reflexivity can become rituals of comfort that protect researcher credibility rather than community dignity. This piece draws on fieldwork conducted during my master’s dissertation; however, written at the threshold of doctoral research, this is an attempt to extend fieldwork practices that prioritise accountability, genuine participation and the right to refuse over the performance of ethical compliance. It asks what it would mean to design research that is not just empathetic but answerable.
The phrase ‘methodological vulnerability’ is conventionally used in the negative, denoting liabilities and risk factors to be designed out of research. Yet vulnerability in processes of knowledge production should also be understood as a strength in that it can alter the inherent power dynamics of research encounters. This article develops the proposal that foregrounding vulnerability in research methodologies engenders the possibility of different kinds of relation with a diversity of bodies and ideas. It thereby contributes to critical feminist, anticolonial, queer and posthumanist scholarly commitments to unsettle the ontological premises of fieldwork encounters and to disrupt given orders of structuration of power and knowledge. To support this proposal, the article reviews the use of observational drawing in a study of the encounter between humans and Eurasian cranes in the Huleh wetlands in Northern Israel-Palestine. A practice-led project, the study explored the possibilities of drawing as a method for becoming-vulnerable in multi-species fieldwork and in conflicted landscapes: opening up spaces of encounter with wider ecologies of human and nonhuman bodies and ideas. Building on this case study, the article distinguishes four important senses of ‘vulnerability’ – constitutive, differential, relational and methodological – showing how these manifest in a specific instance of ecologically and politically sensitive fieldwork. In conclusion, it argues that the particular set of open sensibilities which observational drawing enables can usefully be extended by other methods, thereby offering a powerful, though partial, corrective to persistent gendered, anthropocentric and colonial relations of power which continue to exert their influence in geographical fieldwork.
This paper argues that collage-making offers geographers the opportunity to engage with art-ful ways of knowing in their research processes, reframing notions of productivity and time well spent in the neoliberal academy. The reiterative processes of collage; sifting for images, cutting out, arranging and rearranging, and sticking foreground lateral thinking, emotion and playful experimentation in processes of knowledge production. Moving beyond the use of collage as method in which creative processes are instrumentalised to gather data or disseminate research findings, the paper offers examples of how collage-making can be embedded in universities and other spaces of academic knowledge production to side-step the calculative logic of ‘productivity’ and centre other values in our research practice; slow scholarship, collegiate togetherness and open-ended creative play. Drawing on a flourishing body of work on embedding collage processes in geographical knowledge practices and our own experiences of facilitating workshops for academics and researchers, we suggest that collage-making workshops disrupt the rhythms of academic time through experiential engagement with questions of process, representation and art-ful ways of knowing. We consider collage-making workshops as a praxis of slow scholarship through which we carve out time for thinking, playful experimentation and togetherness.
This paper considers the digital scanning of geography slides held in a departmental collection, and how such work might re-animate aspects of geography’s visual culture, while also prompting reflection on the relationship of the analogue and the digital. The paper examines the connections between geography and photography, the particular role of the slide as a photographic format and cultural object, and the possibilities of description of scanned analogue slides. Digitisation allows close scrutiny of the kinds of material held in many geographical collections, and renewed consideration of earlier depictions of place and landscape. A collection of slides of the English East Midlands, produced in the decades after the Second World War and held by the School of Geography, University of Nottingham, is considered, and two photographic slides receive detailed scrutiny, one coastal and one urban. Illustrated descriptions of these pictures conclude the paper, giving demonstration accounts of what might be done with geography slides, after digitisation.
In an era of intensifying extreme heat, bodily exposure to the sun can generate disorienting, hallucinatory experiences historically described as sunstroke. Yet hallucination also names a much broader condition of our time - from AI fabrications to political gaslighting - suggesting we have entered a new era of hallucination where perceptions of reality are increasingly distorted. The remedy to such distortion, we are told, is to cultivate heightened awareness. But this demand presumes a 'switched-on' subject that may not actually exist. In this paper, I argue that all perception is, to a degree, hallucinatory, and I explore what this means for geographical theory. Through archival accounts of 19th-century colonial sunstroke, literary expressions of thermal delirium and contemporary reports of heat-stressed agricultural workers, I examine how solar radiation distorts bodily capacities, perceptions and beliefs, moving beyond critical heat studies' focus on thermal comfort and physical survival. In doing so, drawing on phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought, I develop our understanding of 'passive affects' - incoming forces that shape our capacities to sense and evaluate reality. These sunstruck scenes reveal how elemental forces like solar radiation can desubjectify bodies in ways that complicate geographical understandings of power. Rather than viewing distortion as a corruption of truth, I argue that distortion is a primary geographical process through which realities are made, and this has significant implications for how we theorise embodied experience in an overheating world.
This paper presents a doing of cultural geography through a walking research-creation project on a remote trail in arid Australia. Critical walking methodologies were engaged in fieldwork that in and through its doing generated a friction in which the awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across difference were laid bare. The paper shares glimpses of a 'fieldwork fail' through a retrospective assembly of moments that shed light on the practical application of creative walking methodologies - methodologies that changed unexpectedly during the fieldwork. In the beginning I was a researcher setting off on a group hike with a clear programme of fieldwork, and in the end, I was separated from the group and alone in a formidable landscape with an entirely new set of concerns. Four years later, my original expectations of the fieldwork have been thoroughly overwritten by the lived experience of its relational entanglements and ongoing reconfigurations of knowledge. Written with an awareness of being a small part of a larger equation, the paper advances the doing of cultural geography through reflection upon the displacement and lively extension of creative walking methodologies, resulting in the creation of new and surprising artworks.
This article examines how the figure described in early European accounts as the 'Devil of Calicut' may reflect a European misrecognition of South Indian feline-human Shaiva imagery associated with figures such as the sage Vy & amacr;ghrap & amacr;da. The arguments presented here emerged through my encounters in October 2025 with hybrid sculptural figures in temples in Tamil Nadu (India), prompting a re-examination of early modern European descriptions of South Indian religious imagery. Focusing on Ludovico di Varthema's Itinerario (1510), one of the earliest printed European accounts of South Indian sacred forms, and on J & ouml;rg Breu's 1515 woodcut reconstruction of the Devil of Calicut, the article explores how unfamiliar iconographic features were interpreted through early modern European visual and theological frameworks shaped by Christian demonology. Drawing on comparative visual analysis across temple sculpture, travel narrative and print imagery, it traces how meaning takes shape through encounter, description, translation and visual reconstruction across sites, materials and media. The article also traces the linguistic slippage between daivam (god) and deumo (demon), alongside the reinterpretation of tiger-footed and hybrid sacred forms linked to Vy & amacr;ghrap & amacr;da as signs of monstrosity. Here, misrecognition is treated, not as an error, but as a situated interpretive practice through which unfamiliar forms were made legible within European systems of knowledge. In doing so, I position comparative visual analysis as a practice of cultural geography concerned with the movement of meaning across language, image and space.
In this article, I reflect on zine-making as a creative research practice for tracing memories in and of public libraries. These reflections draw on a collaborative project I developed with two local zine artists at the Central Library of Bremen, Germany. Together, we organised two open workspaces in 2024, inviting library visitors to create zines that capture their memories of libraries. The resulting collection, distributed in early 2025, forms both the empirical material and the methodological focus of this essay. Rather than treating zines as representations of memory, I understand them as a practice that can generate, mediate and spatialise memory. Through five examples, I explore how zine-making brings into view the sensory, emotional and everyday dimensions of library experience, how it surfaces intimate and biographical narratives and how it foregrounds the fragmented, layered and often ambiguous character of memories. Zines, as both method and outcome, emerge here as a way of attending to the lived and felt ways in which libraries are remembered and made meaningful. As a research practice, I suggest that zine-making can redistribute authorship, invite multimodal expression and shape the forms through which memories become knowable. In doing so, this article ties in with discussions on creative methods in cultural geography by asking what kinds of knowledges such practices enable and how they inform imaginaries of public spaces, such as libraries, as lived and remembered settings.
This article examines the imaginative geographies produced in Tom Waits’s music, focusing on how sound, instrumentation and vocal performance generate affective spaces of belonging, displacement and estrangement. Rather than treating songs as representations of place, the paper approaches them as spatial practices that actively construct environments through sonic texture, rhythm and narrative voice. Drawing on work in cultural and sonic geography, the article situates Waits’s music within debates on soundscape, affect and the non-representational dimensions of space. Particular attention is given to how distortion, timbre and unconventional instrumentation produce what may be described as ‘surreal soundscapes’, in which listeners are invited to inhabit unstable and emotionally charged environments. Through close analysis of selected tracks from Swordfishtrombones (1983), Rain Dogs (1985) and Mule Variations (1999), the article argues that Waits constructs a distinctive form of imaginative geography that operates beyond lyrical meaning. His music creates spaces that are not only narrated but sonically enacted, allowing listeners to assume shifting positions within landscapes of marginality, memory and affect. In doing so, the paper contributes to contemporary discussions in the geographies of music by demonstrating how popular music can function as a mode of spatial thinking grounded in sound, atmosphere and embodied listening.
This special issue aims to explore the geographies of science fiction (SF) as the literary genre that best interrogates our relationship to space. The analysis of SF is a lively field in literary and cultural studies, yet geography's engagement with it so far has been limited. This lacuna is certainly surprising, in that it leaves SF's unique geographical affordances - the functions that SF texts can be made to perform in a given context - unattended. As a mode of writing that is rooted in fictional mechanisms of displacement and deterritorialisation, SF enables spaces of reflection/diffraction that make our current predicament understandable and actable upon. In a time of unprecedented planetary crisis - one that entails extreme precarity and looming erasure - attending to the affordances of SF from a geographical perspective can help us rethink the ways we shape and relate to the space that we inhabit.
