Publications

“To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. … What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms” (Georges Perec 1999: 210, my emphasis) This paper is about walking as both practice and potential method. It…

The journey to school is a daily ritual for millions of families. This form of everyday mobility gives shape to most children’s and their parent’s daily routines. Concerns over sedentary lifestyles, traffic congestion and environmental degradation have brought this rather mundane and commonplace travel behaviour into recent academic and policy focus. Among primary school children,…

Mobile methods, and in particular walking methodologies, are increasingly adopted by researchers wishing to engage with ideas of place and identity. Walking is a fundamental practice in our social lives, and it has also been a common method adopted in much anthropological and, increasingly, sociological fieldwork (Lee and Ingold, 2006). Such approaches are underpinned by…

Issue 12 of WISERD’s Qualitative Researcher contains: Editorial – Kate Moles The restorative dynamic of walking together – Karolina Ronander Exploring spatial (dis)locations through the use of roving focus groups – Joshua Inwood and Deborah Martin Toy tours: reflections on walking-whilst-talking with young children at home – Olivia Stevenson and Claire Adey Walking with Andrei…

Recently, social scientists have increasingly been seeking analytical purchase on the mobile nature of everyday life (Buscher, Urry & Witchger forthcoming; Buscher & Urry 2009; Ek & Hultman 2008; Ross, Renold, Holland & Hillman 2009) and the performativity of social action (Crang 2005; Cresswell 2002; Lorimer 2005; Thrift and Dewsbury 2000). The purpose of this…

In 2005, we conducted research that focused on the experiences of African American undergraduate students at a large U.S. university (Inwood and Martin 2008). Our goal was to better understand how race –or more accurately, “whiteness”- was evoked in the landscape of the university. As part of this research we employed two ‘roving focus groups’…

As the title of the book suggests, this is an introductory text to the fundamental aspects of the geographic and cartographic concepts that provide the basis for all GIS. However, it is not a traditional GIS textbook per se; in fact, it does not really discuss GIS technology in any substantive sense until chapter thirteen,…

As evidenced by a burgeoning literature base in the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in the number of studies that have demonstrated the use of geospatial technologies in a range of health application areas. Notwithstanding such research efforts the jury is arguably still out on whether this has led to wider…

Recent years have witnessed substantial advances in the precision and availability of digital infrastructure data, remote sensing data, and microscale socioeconomic data for urban areas in many parts of the world. However, these data still remain deficient in detail especially with respect to the fine-grained property-level structural attributes that form the basis of housing-market models…

This paper aims to review the state of play of GIS use in measuring accessibility to services drawing on work in areas such as health, public services, transport and environmental justice. The first section describes what is meant by ‘accessibility’ in the context of our research. To date this has predominantly been concerned with measures…