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Cultural Geographies in Practice: Topographic Mixings: Images and Imaginations in London's Borough Market
journal contribution
posted on 2013-01-29, 14:36 authored by Benjamin F. ColesIntroduction: The photo-essay that follows this introduction tells a story of Borough Market, a
‘fine’, ‘ethical’ and otherwise ‘alternative’ food market located near London Bridge.
It is an account of place, a ‘place-writing’ – a kind of visual ‘topography’ – fashioned
from a collection of photographs and words and assembled into a narrative of place
and place making. As I position it here, topography is a methodological encounter
with place that utilizes different types of theoretically and empirically informed
writings, and more broadly, ‘texts’, to engage with place and place-making and to
(re)present the interrelations between its ‘surfaces’ and ‘structures’. Its theoretical
perspective is broadly, albeit cautiously, phenomenological in that it holds place and
place-making as the ways in which humans construct reality and engage with the
world. This perspective is tempered by a critical and reflexive position concerned the
powers and politics of place and place-making, the roles that Geographers (and other
practitioners) and Geography have in (re)producing and (re)presenting place and
geographical knowledge. Empirically, this topography draws from the usual sources
that otherwise inform qualitative research, such as participant observation, semistructured
interviews, site-writing, archives, and documentary photography. It is
crafted from the assembled output of these methods, the notes, the transcripts and the
photographs, into a writing of place much in the same way as an ethnography is
crafted into a writing of society or culture; it draws upon the same assembly of
‘fictions’ for its narrative, and, like ethnography, it is a methodology (rather than
method) that blends the empirical with the theoretical in its framing, analysis and
(re)presentation of social-spatial practice. Unlike ethnography, because topography is
a (re)presentation of place and place-making, it is itself a spatial practice where place
emerges through its writing, telling and its (re)presentation.
History
Citation
Cultural Geographies, 2013, forthcomingAuthor affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING/Department of Geography/Human GeographyVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)