Abstract

For many in geography, fieldwork is still an activity conducted ‘there’ and not ‘here’; often in distant and diverse locations and contexts. In this session, I’d like to take the opportunity to discuss some of the challenges in and of ‘the field’, when the field is rather close to home. Based on my experiences of fieldwork in London last year, I wanted to reflect on the methodological and practical implications of being away, without being away and the challenges of delineating where the field begins and ends (along with the dividing line between it and the rest of one’s life). Following this, the session will move onto discussing what some in anthropology have termed ‘following the thing’ – research, particularly ethnographic work, that attends to the mobility of material things and their representations.