2016/07/20 by Candice P. Boyd, Boyd, Candice
Social Sciences · #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism #Spatial and Cultural Studies #creative practices #non-representational theory #poetry as method #therapeutic space
paper · doi:10.14288/acme.v16i2.1396
openalex publication_date 2016/07/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
A call for cultural geographers to experiment with different ways of re-presencing their work has gained momentum in recent years (see DeLyser & Hawkins, 2014; Lorimer & Parr, 2014; Vannini, 2015). This climate of experimentation has seen a number of cultural geographers openly promote their interests in, and engagements with, the creative arts: some have explicitly developed practices in response to longer-standing geographical interests (e.g., Cresswell, 2013/2014; Gallagher, 2014; Gorman-Murray, 2014; Wylie, with Webster, 2014), while others have more established art practices that inform, and are informed by, their geographical work (e.g., Crouch, 2010; de Leeuw, 2012; Zebracki, n.d.). In this article, I explore the potential of poetry to animate accounts of geographical fieldwork via an intellectual engagement with the ideas and tenets of non-representational theory. I begin by outlining the history of ‘poetry as method’ in the social sciences and then acknowledge poetry’s status within phenomenology. From there, I consider what a post-structuralist account of geographical fieldwork might entail, drawing from Deleuzian philosophy. Then, using three conjoined poems of my own as a vehicle, I critically analyse the work that poems do as research as well as the ways in which they operate in literary terms.