The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Human Geography

The process of learning qualitative research has altered dramatically and The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Human Geography explores the growth, change, and complexity within the topic and looks back over its history to assess the current state of the art, and indicate possible future directions. Moving beyond textbook rehearsals of standard issues, the book examines key methodological debates and conflicts, approaching them in a critical, discursive manner. Retrospective and prospective in its content, the book is divided into three sections:

Part I: Openings details the way that qualitative researchers address the foundations of research in their choice of methods and methodologies.

Part II: Encounters and Collaborations provides an introduction to particular methods and examines the challenges and queries that arise from using them.

Part III: Making Sense explores the way in which the researcher interprets their data and communicates their results.

Dr. Stuart C. Aitken is Professor of Geography and June Burnett Chair at SDSU. He directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Young People and Space (ISYS). Stuart’s research interests include critical social theory, qualitative methods, children, families and communities. His recent books include The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation (Ashgate 2014), The Fight to Stay Put (Verlag 2013), Young People. Border Spaces and Revolutionary Imaginations (Routledge 2011), Qualitative Geographies (Sage 2010) and The Awkward Spaces of Fathering (Ashgate 2009). Stuart has published over 200 papers in academic journals and edited book collections.

Mike Crang′s interests lie in the field of cultural geography. He has worked extensively on the relationship of social memory and identity. Within this he focused empirically upon on practices of public and oral history, photography and museums looking especially at examples in the UK and Sweden. This interest feeds into looking at what people make of museums and landscapes and thus the study of tourism more generally. He has an edited collection on this theme that was published in 2009(Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities, edited with Pau Obrador and Penny Travlou, Ashgate) and a previous collection (Tourism: between place and performance, with Simon Coleman, Berghahn 2002) as well as co-editing the journal ′Tourist Studies′ for ten years from its inception. He is currrently working on the intersection of film, photography and tourism - through a case study using Captain Corelli and Cephallonia.

From the angle of visual aesthetics and senses of temporality and rhythm, he has become interested in not just issues of preservation and conservation but also their converse -  destruction, dereliction and decay - as a collaborator on the ESRC project ′The Waste of the World′. On this project he has looked at the figuring of global flows through waste - especially ships in the work of differing photographic traditions. He has also explored the creation of wastescapes in (former) industrial sites, on beaches and between places. Subsequent work on the material cultures of waste is attempting to rethink approaches to the commodity through emphasising unbecoming things - that are both distasteful and unstable.

He is also interested in more abstract issues regarding time-space, action and temporality and co-edited the journal Time & Society from 1997 to 2006. His interests in this area led to a collection on spatiality and social theory (′Thinking Space′, edited with Nigel Thrift). The other strand to his work is the analysis of transformations of space and time through electronic technologies, with specific work based around Singapore′s ′Wired City′ initiative and the ′digital divide′ in UK cities. He completed an ESRC project on ′Multi-Speed Cities and the Logistics of Daily Life′ with Steve Graham and is now working on the notion of a ′sentient city′ and the politics of new forms of visualisation and locative computing.

In terms of service to the wider discipline he is a senior editor of the recently published International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography (2009, Elsevier) which was one of the ′CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles 2010′ in the Social and Behavioural Sciences category and co-editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (2010, with Ray Hutchison, Bob Beauregard and Manuel Aalbers), while being on the editorial board of Environment & Planning A, Geography Compass, Mondes du Tourisme, and previously Social and Cultural Geography. He was on the committee then secretary then chair of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG (1995-2006) and is curently on the scientific committee of the Societa Italianá di Scienze del Turismo. Within the department he has been Chair of the IT committee, convenor of research clusters, convenor of MA programmes in Space, Place and Culture and European Urban and Regional Change, and Director of the Geography and Cities degree programme and Director of Research (2003-6, 2008-10).

Linda McDowell is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford.