Reflections on the go-along: how “disruptions” can illuminate the relationships of health, place and practice

Go-alongs are qualitative interviews conducted by a researcher accompanying participants on a journey, tour or place-specific activity. Go-alongs emerged as a distinct method amid increasing theoretical emphasis on place and a wave of methodological innovations seeking to investigate spatial experiences. In this paper we employ a lens of “disruption” to reflect upon our varied usages of go-alongs in qualitative research examining health and place. We observe that go-alongs generate physical and discursive disruptions that challenge the illusion of certainty and “tidiness” in the interview encounter. The researcher is exposed to unanticipated detours, creating diverse opportunities to explore health and place as emergent topics. The method also illuminates narrative inconsistencies that reveal the complex influence of particular contexts in real time. For health and well-being research, the value of the “disruptive” go-along lies in its capacity to offer new insights into the myriad interactions between place, practice and health experiences

Tasting as a social practice: a methodological experiment in making taste public

Based on fieldwork in the UK and Portugal, this paper considers the relationships between cultural analyses of taste and the embodied activity of tasting. As part of a wider project on the multiple ontologies of ‘freshness’, the paper conceptualises taste as an emergent effect of tasting practices. Drawing on evidence from a series of ‘tasting events’ (where research participants were recorded shopping, cooking and eating a meal with friends and family), the paper explores the multiple dimensions of taste concluding that even the most personal and sensory aspects of tasting food involve a social dimension which we interpret through the lens of practice theory. The paper identifies three specific dimensions of tasting as a social practice involving food’s material and visceral qualities; the links between embodiment and emotion; and the contextual significance of family and social relations. Our findings contribute to recent debates about ‘making taste public’, even in the apparently private context of household consumption

We came here to remember’: Using participatory sensory ethnography to explore memory as emplaced, embodied practice

Memory can be seen as an emplaced phenomenon rather than as an internal, psychological archive. Approaches relating to cognition and memory as practice, seeing cognition as an extended, distributed phenomenon, will be considered in theoretical and empirical contexts in this article. Theoretical approaches to emplaced, embodied memory will be explored in the context of my sensory ethnographic research on place perception. I curated a series of sensory ethnographic engagements to explore how three international students from Tunisia, Indonesia, and Germany used emplaced knowledge and memories of their city and of their previous homes. Using a participatory sensory ethnography, involving walking interviews, my collaborators devised unique memorial responses to evoke their new and previous places of residence. The collaborations presented here illustrate the embodied, emplaced nature of memory. The use of sensory ethnography has enabled me to construct memory as an emplaced, embodied, multisensory phenomenon, rather than an internal archive

black British feminisms: many chants

This article is an introduction to the Feminist Review special issue 'Black British Feminisms', jointly edited by Joan Anim-Addo, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Suzanne Scafe For us at Feminist Review, it’s hard to believe that thirty years have passed since the publication of the issue Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives (Amos et al., 1984). Many Voices, with its flamboyant pink, four-handed goddesses dancing across a green and black cover, was one of the first attempts to ‘provide a collection of perspectives’ (ibid: 1) of black British feminist thinking and projects