Failure is cool (?)

A story that begins with the end; a tale of failure. Well, maybe not.

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Dear James,

I would like to think that we could organise something too. I’m not sure about a conference, but perhaps a set of workshops, with a few keynotes. What do you think? Did you have particular geographers in mind? Making sure it doesn’t clash with the AAG is key, I agree.

I will find out the details for hosting it at Oxford with the departmental administrator and get back to you about that. Perhaps we’ll see each other at the RGS-IBG conference in early September?

Best,

Thomas

Dear Thomas,

I think we could organise a conference without a budget. Just have to be two days in a row rather than a gap inbetween the sessions. Most people will put everything on expenses from their own university. Just need to get some decent Geographers to speak at the event and make sure it doesn’t clash with the AAG. What do you reckon? I know I could give it a go in Exeter but it might be nicer and easier for people to go to Oxford.

James

Dear James,

Thanks for your email – not heard back yet but keeping my fingers crossed! I’m not quite sure when we are due to hear back but I will let you know as soon I know anything…

Actually, hold on, just visited the website and found this page, which wasn’t there the last time I checked. It’s a shame but we don’t seem to be listed. It seems to have been announced in early June (see here).

Hope your trip to Berlin was fun/rewarding and that your PhD is going well. Perhaps we can think about doing something in place of the hitch-hiking, or re-think how we might do it without a budget?

Best,

Thomas

Hi Thomas,

Just wondering if you’ve heard anything back from ‘Beyond Text’ about the funding application?

Regards

James

IMPROV GEOG: HITCH-HIKING AS FIELDWORK

[...]

3.6 Describe the aims and objectives of the initiative, including goals for both the organisers and participants and how these reflect the aims and objectives of the Beyond Text Programme.

This student-led initiative is an attempt to develop fieldwork training for doctoral students which incorporates performance, improvisation and experimentation. Open to postgraduate researchers from across the arts and humanities, the proposal provides an opportunity to reconsider how we can think, generate, and present fieldwork materials during a series of events, what we are calling a distributed event.

The event will be channelled through the technique of hitch-hiking as a point of departure for the exploration of improvisation, performance and experimentation in fieldwork. The initiative is not a valorisation of hitch-hiking per se, but rather a means to grapple with the contingencies of fieldwork and to open up encounters with publics. This initiative will enable doctoral students to make distinctive contributions to a conceptual and empirical study and hopes to stimulate further research which takes method seriously and encourages collaboration. With a group of around 20 students (plus the organisers), this project affords the opportunity for debate and discussion amongst students, but is not merely inward-looking. By actively moving ourselves beyond the academic community through a set of fieldwork events, this work is at once collaborative and open-ended. This openness is a key aspect of the project and by working with those we encounter, may in turn generate all sorts of materials, approaches and questions. Establishing a community of enthusiastic researchers who are interested in method will provide the chance for further collaboration between doctoral researchers, as well as continuing activities beyond the remit of this particular proposal.

The opening session will be composed of a set of talks followed by break-out sessions; this will provide a platform for research. The second session will look to techniques more directly, with a scheduled fieldwork event over the course of a weekend. There will be a third, and final, session which will be concerned with presenting or animating the fieldwork done and how it might be translated or transformed into new materials, through a set of performances which are not restrictive. This session will actively seek to connect with a variety of audiences during the course of the day.

The organisers will support and ensure the smooth running of what will be a completely new initiative, and rather than teaching, will look to facilitate discussion and exploration of experimental fieldwork. Part of this project will involve turning to everyday practices, such as hitch-hiking, as means to think through these issues. Participants will be expected to think critically about questions of fieldwork, and how it is entangled with themes including improvisation, enabling constraints and the politics of performance. Further, how might this distributed event disrupt the notion of academic conferences or what counts as fieldwork? In these ways, this project clearly fits within the thematic strand ‘Performance, Improvisation and Embodied Knowledge’, as it seeks to question acts of resistance and subversion, data and evidence, method and engagement, through hitch-hiking.

This project, therefore, is keenly aware of Beyond Text’s ethos:  it proposes to engage in research involving processes and practices that are not limited to those associated with the written word and seeks to actively connect with those both within and beyond academia.

Lines to where?

hitch // hiking: adventure is dead

gerlach, j. & jellis, t.

09:29, walking the slip-road on the A34, playing another Situationist trick, a dérive of sorts. Hitchhiking to where, we didn’t know, but that, after all, was the point. Thomas and Joe had sketched this psychogeographical experiment in the departmental coffee room a week beforehand, fretting over whether two guys together would ever get a lift, how far they might get and whether hitchhiking was illegal or not¹. The aim of the experiment: to trace and animate lines; lines of movement and lines of affect – traces which might point towards, or be generative of, micro-political actions, or what we’ve been calling ‘small acts of repair’².

We hoped to generate encounters. Different ways of meeting people, engaging with them, ‘doing’ research. We left postcards. Please draw some lines. Perhaps your journey, or journeys. It’s up to you. We’ve put an address and there’s a stamp on it too.

We chose hitchhiking as a field method for two reasons. Firstly, we wanted to recruit other things and other people into the society of molecules; by hitching lifts – intersecting and generating lines with others, we illustrated that abstractions are not so distant from lived experience. Secondly, we wanted to reclaim hitchhiking as a technology of experimentation, a geographical experiment where the only constraint was that we would accompany those who stopped and follow them, wherever it might lead us. An open-ended experiment, in which the lines travelled were constantly unfolding and never fixed.

Chaosmosis³ lent some direction and now we have three postcards back ⁴. Through a series of co-produced encounters along A-roads, motorways and hard-shoulders we have traced several maps of affects: the scores of everyday lives. Lines drawn, but lines to where? We still don’t know, but following Foucault, we’re all cartographers now. Experimental cartographers, radical empiricsts.

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