This paper discusses the ethical use and methodological value of ethnographic sketching in the process of framing fieldwork encounters. Drawing on Clemens’s sketches, made in the restricted context of a Dutch Asylum Seekers’ Residence Centre, we demonstrate how sketching enabled us to analyse fleeting, contingent and ethically sensitive encounters. Sketching was part of a situated ethical approach that reduced the risk of exposing asylum seekers involved, and allowed reflection on what it means to be present as a covert participant observer in a border-space marked by uncertainty and unequal power relations. Made from human eye level, his sketches of these encounters focus on face-to-face interactions with asylum seekers involved. The sketches show bodily positions and expressions adjusted to the encompassing institutional setting of the Centre. Based on his own spatial perspectives, Clemens reconstructed asylum seekers’ reverse perspectives in order to grasp what they may have seen and felt, and to reflect on his own embodied presence in these encounters. Insights gained in the process of sketching proved to be ethically challenging and transformative.
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 examines how embodied urban memory is reorganized through fragmentation, demolition, rebuilding, and digitally mediated spatial experience. Drawing on the method of loci (MoL), embodied cognition, and phenomenological approaches to spatial experience, the study conceptualizes the city as a dynamic memory palace structured through bodily movement, sensory engagement, spatial orientation, and habitual routes unfolding over time. Rather than treating urban memory as anchored solely in monuments or symbolic representations, the article argues that mnemonic continuity emerges through embodied relations between landmarks, pathways, atmospheres, and everyday practices of walking. Focusing on the transformation of & Idot;zmir's Kordon waterfront, the discussion explores how demolition, land reclamation, infrastructural intervention, and repetitive rebuilding destabilize the mnemonic structures through which urban space becomes recognizable and experientially coherent. From the perspective of the MoL, urban fragmentation affects not only isolated buildings or images, but also the broader spatial organization sustaining embodied spatial knowledge. The article further argues that profound experiences of urban loss emerge when the pace and temporality of spatial change exceed the adaptive rhythms of embodied orientation and lived familiarity. Under such conditions, contemporary urban memory increasingly operates through hybrid configurations in which archived street imagery, locative technologies, and digitally mediated environments coexist with material urban space within lived experience.
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.
