Practising lively geographies in the city: encountering Melbourne through experimental field-based workshops

ABSTRACT

This article explores diverse ways of experiencing the city through an experimental field-based workshop supported by the Institute of Australian Geographers and this journal. The two-day methods practice workshop attracted 40 participants and aimed to train doctoral students and early career researchers in practices of observing, feeling, listening, mapping and visualizing the city. This paper aims to demonstrate how learning new methods that include Embodied Observation, Qualitative GIS, Locative Media Ethnography and Sonic Methodologies enabled 16 participants to encounter and experience the City of Melbourne in novel ways. The group learning environment and co-authored pieces that assemble diverse reflections demonstrate that the workshop is a form of innovative teaching and learning that has implications for Higher Education in Geography, but is yet to be explored more fully in the pedagogic literature. The experimental workshop has ongoing pedagogical benefits given the leadership, participatory and collaborative skills that unfolded when leading scholars, doctoral students and early career researchers came together to produce lively geographies of the city.

KEYWORDS:

• Experimental methods
• embodied observation
• qualitative GIS
• digital technologies
• sonic geographies
• field-based workshops
• Melbourne

Acknowledgements

The ‘Cultural/Social/Urban Methods Workshop’ was funded by the Institute of Australian Geographers as part of a joint application from the Cultural and the Urban Geography Study Groups. The workshop was also funded by a grant from this journal - Journal of Geography in Higher Education. We would like to acknowledge the work by co-organisers, Dr Danielle Drozdzewski and Associate Professor Libby Porter. We would like to thank the scholars Heather Horst and Edgar Gómez Cruz, Andrea Witcomb, Michelle Duffy and Chris Brennan- Horley who developed and led the workshops. Thanks to RMIT University, Melbourne for hosting the event.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This workshop was supported by the Journal of Geography in Higher Education and the Institute of Australian Geographers.