Human Geography

Our Human Geography list tackles the big issues, from equality to population growth to sustainability, publishing in cultural and social geography, development geography, political geography, qualitative and quantitative research methods and urban geography.

The list includes internationally renowned names such as Danny Dorling, Loretta Lees and Anne Power. We publish a range of formats including research books that bridge theory and apply it to practice.

Human Geography

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Chapter four looks at i-doc aesthetics, showing how designing aesthetic features can help researchers to focus on dimensions of affect, mood, atmosphere, emotion, and feeling in their topics. It also examines how aesthetic design for i-docs, as a mode of encountering the world, can do important work of illuminating entanglements of moods and affects at different scales, revealing how localised moods and affects connect to more pervasive structures of feeling. The chapter explores this by focusing on the i-docs The Lockdown Game and The Temporary City.

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Chapter 6 focuses on co-creative processes of i-doc making, arguing for the value of i-docs as a participatory and activist method. The chapter explores how i-doc making can create shared worlds without homogenising differences and can counter ‘epistemic injustice’ by allowing publics to co-create knowledge that might contest dominant narratives. It also suggests that i-docs can tell stories with multiple heroes, emphasising collaboration over conflict. It focuses on The Lockdown Game as a participatory i-doc project and 18 Days in Egypt and Athens Report as activist i-docs.

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Interactive Documentary as a Research Method
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Interactive documentaries, or i-docs, are web based, multimedia documentaries that immerse audiences through dynamic, interactive platforms. This book unlocks the value of i-docs as a creative research method, providing an engaging guide on how to use i-docs to examine and communicate research subjects.

With examples, conceptual discussion, and practical advice, the book explores how i-docs can illuminate topics including temporalities, power and space, affect and feeling, freedom, and epistemic justice. The book addresses i-docs as a digital form but also shows that even just planning an i-doc on paper can open up new analytical perspectives.

Key features of the book include:

- An easy to use template for planning your own i-doc;

- Advice on how researchers can ‘think with i-docs’ without even producing one;

- Discussion of methodological work with i-docs including participatory i-doc making;

Insights into a range of examples of commercial, activist and research i-docs from around the world.

This book is a valuable resource for scholars, students, community researchers, creatives and activists who want to enlist and ignite the possibilities of i-docs.

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Chapter 5 shows how designing the interactive capacities of i-docs can focus attention on issues of freedom and compliance while inviting both researchers and audiences to consider their own complicity and agency in research topics. While i-docs, as a non-linear medium, are often associated with openness and potential, the chapter emphasises how i-docs are defined as much by what’s fixed as by what’s open and as much by frustrations of agency as by invitations to act. The chapter focuses on The Lockdown Game as well as briefly exploring several other i-docs.

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Chapter 1 introduces i-docs as a creative method. It places i-docs in a lineage of creative technologies that have, across history, reformulated human perception, and it argues that researchers can deliberately harness i-docs to develop and engage the new ways of seeing that are crucial when addressing contemporary challenges in society. It argues that the interactive, multi-perspectival, and co-creative capacities of i-docs can help us to untangle complex trajectories of multiple entangled crises, see avenues for connection and collaboration, and create shared visions that accommodate differences.

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Chapter three explores how designing the spatial infrastructures of i-docs – the layout of their pages and of content within those pages – can shed light on the ways that power dynamics are embedded spatially. I-docs can illuminate power dynamics that relate to spatial markings – for example, borders, boundaries, locations, and routes. They can also expose politicised tensions in how different people imagine and navigate space and problematise relationships between mobility and fixity. The chapter focuses on the i-docs Gaza Sderot, Refugee Republic, and The Lockdown Game.

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Chapter two addresses the ‘temporal architectures’ of i-docs. Temporal architecture is a term developed by Sarah Sharma that draws attention to the politics of temporal systems, including the unequal valuing of different people’s time. This chapter will show how i-doc making has helped me to interrogate and analyse the politics of time with precision as well as critique disciplinary assumptions and convictions about temporality. The chapter focuses on the i-doc The Temporary City as well as A Journal of Insomnia, Hollow, and The Last Generation.

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Chapter 7 shows how the modes of encounter developed through i-doc making can be extracted from the process of creating a digital interface. This way, the value of i-docs as a method can be more widely taken up and used by researchers. The chapter provides a practical template for how you can ‘think’ with i-docs that can be used by readers in their own research. It also suggests user-friendly platforms that enable low-tech and low-budget experiments with i-doc making.

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This concluding chapter reflects on what the next steps might be for social scientists and humanities scholars interested in using VR within projects. While VR is sometimes fiddly and frustrating to use, it can create ‘wow’ moments of experiencing a new type of environment. The key lesson discussed here is that significant research using VR can be undertaken without the apparent complexities of creating original content. Ethical researchers need to proceed with caution, however, particularly given the dominance of the consumer VR market by Meta, a corporation that minutely tracks the behaviour of consumers and erodes privacy. Nonetheless, given falling costs and increased ease of use, VR has great potential for application across a range of disciplines and topic areas to create tremendously innovative research.

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This chapter examines the production of 360° photography and video as a simple means of creating original content for VR. Images from two or more cameras with fish-eye lenses are stitched together to make a photo sphere. When viewed through a head-mounted display, users can turn their heads and look around these images as if from a fixed point at the centre of the scene. The technology has become popular for virtual field tours, journalism and tourism, allowing users to explore a site in the round. Existing 360° content can be reused within research projects, but it is also relatively cost-effective and straightforward for researchers to generate their own materials for use within specific projects. The chapter explores how 360° content can be combined with other mechanisms for sensory stimulation in VR. We examine this through a case study of a pilot project examining therapeutic landscapes and how the well-being effects of exposure to nature might be reproduced and interrogated through 360° video and audio.

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