In this presentation I will suggest that a renewed emphasis on “attentive observation,” as both a form of radical empiricism and a source of imaginative insight, might contribute towards building a more nuanced conception of fieldwork that is better attuned to the multisensory and multispecies textures of material geographies. I will focus on interactions with nature, landscape, and nonhuman others in an urban context but my argument has wider connotations for concerns with embodied methodologies, critical phenomenology, and slower forms of research.
Gandy, M. (2024) ‘Attentive Observation: Walking, Listening, Staying Put’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 114(7), pp. 1386–1404. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2024.2353841.
Gandy, M. (2023) ‘The Parking Lots of Tallinn: An Encounter with Marginal Ecologies’, Roadsides, 10, pp. 62-66. doi: 10.26034/roadsides-202301009.
Matthew is Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Cambridge. He is a cultural, urban, and environmental geographer with particular interests in landscape, infrastructure, and more recently bio-diversity. The historical scope of his work extends from the middle decades of the nineteenth century to the recent past. His research ranges from aspects of environmental history, including epidemiology, to contemporary intersections between nature and culture including the visual arts. He was Principal Investigator for the ERC Advanced Grant Rethinking urban nature. His most recent book Natura urbana: ecological constellations in urban space (The MIT Press, 2022) is winner of a 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize awarded by the Foundation for Landscape Studies and UVA School of Architecture.
Image rights: Walking action by the Stalker collective in Rome (c. 1995). Source: Stalker collective.