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Non-representational theorists have asked difficult and provocative questions of cultural geographers about what is intended by the conduct of research. The article opens out the non-representational scene to geographers. The research reviewed is organised into three themed sections: gardens, home and work.

This paper is concerned with the lifeworlds of place, and the significant part that the storied word might play in them. It considers the modern disciplinary history of place study, and styles of creative geographical writing presently being employed to configure place as a lived phenomenon, with a past, present and future. Across the piece, an experiment in place-portraiture unfolds, according to a series of episodes penned in non-fiction prose. The muse for these meditations is an arresting site reserved for burying the remains of loved ones: a seaside pet cemetery. Deep diving into the cemetery's place lore, and the life of its custodian, \"The Keeper,\" the essay explores the loss, love and longing felt for domestic companion animals by grieving humans, the better to understand a nexus of geographies; variously, of memory, emotion, intimacy, responsibility and creativity. The essay closes by reflecting on how a sustained fusion of site, subject and style can give voice to a language of radical parochialism and, simultaneously, reset the wider representational project by which geographers engage proprietary feelings about place, its presumed fate and possible prospects. In its avoidance of a more conventional academic mode, and adoption of descriptive geographical narratives, the paper offers an alternate literary model by which pressing environmental challenges might yet be affectively articulated and addressed.

Lately, geographers have been thinking hard about non-representational theory (NRT): thinking hard about its first principles, about its promise of a politics and ethics reborn, and about the necessity of certain philosophical postures being struck. The clutch of constructive criticisms now emerging are welcome (Thien, 2005; Saldanha, 2005; 2006; Cresswell, 2006; Tolia-Kelly, 2006; Laurier and Philo, 2006a) as, for the most part, are declarative statements made in response (Anderson and Harrison, 2006; McCormack, 2006). If NRT continues to be variously regarded a provocative, quizzical, enigmatic, unsettling or brilliant feature on the disciplines intellectual landscape, arguably its status is more certain as a result of thoroughgoing examination and dialogue, and efforts--still unresolved--to refine, recalibrate, extend or conjoin its original mandate with cognate sorts of social concern (Cadman, 2008). Should doubts remain over the stickability of NRT, or its seriousness of purpose, the expanded entry in the Dictionary of human geography sets out a concise manifesto for free thinking: Non-representational theory enacts a break with the specic version of culture as structuralizing/signifying that defined the new Cultural Geography. Such a move is understood to be a necessary response to a contemporary political moment in which various non-representational modalities--including affect--are caught up in the emergence of new forms of sovereign and bio power. (Anderson, 2008: xx) To begin reporting on recent exchanges, I turn first to debates centring on affect as a primary issue of concern. I then consider conditions for progress and matters of historicity in light of non-representational argument, before closing with a quick-re review of research based around geographies of bodily movement and practical association. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The question of what cultural geography is intended to achieve, & what else might be done is addressed in this brief literature review of the discipline to argue that the substantial fields of research are condensing around new kinds of organizational, conceptual categories. The author uses the work of Nigel Thrift as a starting point in the commitment to specialize theories of life & sciences. The works of Dewsbury, Wylie & McCormack share the ambition of radically reshaping the presence of cultural geographic research & the impression it leaves. The humanistic consideration of time-space rhythms of lived experience are recounted in works by Buttimer & Mels, & contrasted with the humanistic principles of the formation of personal identity and various works. The interface between humanity & technology addresses the actor network approach, the world of trans-human technologies, & the emergence of a new \"mobilities paradigm\" in the social sciences. The condensation around new kinds of organizational, conceptual categories is also discussed. References. J. Harwell

A geographical essay, styled as creative non-fiction, in which I present a suite of stories about one family’s history and scientific endeavours, organised according to the geographies of a preserved childhood home and its remembered hinterland. By entwining the lifelines of family members, the essay is intended to illustrate the potentials – and ultimately the perils – of journeying a landscape so intimately, according to memory and emotion, attachment and estrangement. As I discover, the need to settle personal history sits in complex relation with efforts aimed at recovering local memory.

Of late, a preparedness to experiment with different ways of telling has surfaced, and steadily spread, in contemporary cultural geography and cognate subject areas extending to the emergent field of geo-humanities.1 Modern precedents have been set, influential enough to induce a second and (depending on how you chart your disciplinary history) third wave of creative geographical writing.2 Critical mass has been reached as the range of ways of telling extends: evidenced by articles reviewing the assembled literature, earmarking specific approaches worthy of close attention, and opinion pieces that propose a typology or tactics for telling.3 If it can be argued that geographys telling-turn has come of age, what cumulatively can be said about the field? [...]it aspires to generate a particular mood for appreciation immersion even and not unrelatedly, is less intent on repeatedly pressing home a set of prefigured arguments; although parables, old and new, can also be imagined. [...]it explores the art of description, not simply for the pleasures this can bring (and these are great pleasures), but also to open up alternative routes to the sort of conceptual thinking that has generally come to be expected as an intellectual return from cultural research. [...]it tightly tethers language to place, sometimes to person too, and (without fear of contradiction) at a different level seeks to unhitch words from source or situation, so that stories and journeys themselves become significant gathering places.

This article examines how the practice of learning geography, and the arenas in which knowledge-making takes place, can be usefully positioned within changing histories of the discipline. It contends that networks of action - understood through the intersection of social sites, subjects and sources - present a conceptual framework and narrative focus for the re-consideration of specific episodes from geography's past. The interventions made here are informed and illustrated by a 'small story' about the doing of geography. Based on different personal accounts, the story revives a series of events, encounters, dialogues and images dating back to the winter of 1951 at Glenmore Lodge, Scotland. This educational institution in the Cairngorm mountains offered children from urban areas the opportunity to learn field studies and the skills of 'outdoor citizenship\". Initially, the focus falls on Margaret Jack, a 14-year-old field-course participant. Her learning experiences are traced through personal letters, a diary and a field journal dating from that time, and her recent recollections of this event. Margaret's account dovetails with the story of her field studies instructor, Robin Murray. Robin's role is traced through his learning experiences as a geography undergraduate at Aberdeen University, and the recent recollections of Catriona Murray, his wife.

A long-form essay, arranged in a sequence of eight segments, in which I travel the countryside in search of a missing person: the scarecrow. Different aspects of the centuries-old practice of scarecrow making and bird scaring are described. Traditionally constructed as a likeness of the human form and erected in newly sown fields as a visual method for warding off feeding birds, the existence of this striking farmland contraption is variously reported: as having all but vanished and yet of making unexpected reappearances; as materially functional and complexly meaningful; as a figure summoned up by cultural memory and personal recollection; and as a focus for mixed feelings of loss, nostalgia, estrangement, and community. A version of \"geographical portraiture\" accumulates, in which a single, scenic landmark stands as the essay's central fascination and simultaneously operates as a cipher for stories old and new, of agricultural society, country life, landscape politics, and rural values.

Following the path of Raymond Williams, Edward Said re-situated the novel within the contours of its political and physical world, the actual geographical nexus from which [its] narrative trajectory emerges to interpret the text as a heightened form of historical experience.5 And William Cronon found a place for stories when making sense of long term social-environmental processes, with non-human agencies and determinations, while focussing on the way different historical plots, of progress and decline, reshape valuations of one region, evident in its various place names, Great Plains, Wheat Belt, Dust Bowl, the Land Where the Sky Begins.6 The focus on matters of cultural heritage, in the meaning and marketing of places, has raised geographical questions of how sites and landscapes are a narrative medium, officially so, in pictures, on the ground or the many designed spaces such as museums, galleries, monuments, and archives, and how counter-narratives might be told in new forms of interpretation and display.7 To show and tell contemporary artists focus on passing time in landscape matters, like photographer Jem Southams documentation of soil creep as well as social transformation in his book Landscape Stories.8 Landscape designers narrativize their practice, as a way of moving beyond a narrow professional expertise, and reaching out to a wider world of natural and social processes, and ways of making sense of them.9 While narrative has been extended one way beyond written human history, even human presence itself, to matters of deep time, so it has been focussed within human individuals too, in a new, consciously creative conjunction of personal biography and natural history, often conducted as a place based form of writing, in fact a renewed relationship that demands some critical reflection on its own history as a literary genre. With both a popular readership and gathering academic attention, new nature writing reworks a centuries-old literary tradition of natural description and natural history publishing.10 Regional and topographical in orientation, the signature feature of this narrative-driven genre is a deeply personalized quality of expression, articulating anxieties about irreversible local change, nowadays in a context of resource depletion, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and atmospheric warming on a global scale. The retroactive force of these resources might be brought to bear not only on a given present but on conformist versions of the past as the way it really was, once upon a time, to seize hold of a memoryan imageas it flashes up.15 It is not surprising that cultural anthropology has paved a way for wider scholarly recognition of storytelling, as a sophisticated mode for communicating both experience and imagination, and as a form of practice, involving verbal and non-verbal ways of telling, well beyond the original field research.16 The work of Kathleen Stewart, in narrativising a local cultural real in coal mining communities in West Virginia, and Tim Ingolds reports of wayfinding as storytelling in hunter-gather cultures have influenced recent cultural geographic work on places in Britain.17 For Ingold, stories are a propulsive force, usefully bearing the weight of direct comparison to walking and to weaving, as organic activities formed from a meshwork of movement and habitation, and producing a more satisfactory ecology of life.18 A recent book on landscape design cites anthropologist David Gusss search to record the creation epic of the Kekua in the Venezuelan rainforest. While the doing may involve various ways of telling in dramaturgical practice, so performance survives as a cluster of narratives, those of the watchers and the watched, and all those who facilitate their interaction.20 In Mike Pearsons work questions of site, landscape and environment, in their various forms, studio, parish, field, disused factory, military training ground, are frameworks for overlapping forms of storytelling, antiquarian, chorographical, biographical, acted out in situ, recollected on the page.21 Beyond the academy, the work of John Berger, a cultural critic and creative writer centrally concerned with ways of telling as well as ways of seeing the material world, has been surprisingly neglected in geography.22 Decisively influenced by the writings of Walter Benjamin, Bergers oeuvre ranges across a repertoire of forms and genres (photo-essay, travelogue, memoir, letters, poetry, diary dispatches and fiction) his narratives turning on highly personal, deeply physical experiences caught up in the greater churn of social and environmental change.23 Here are stories of exile and migration, displacements and disruptions, landscapes and livelihoods, largely in overlooked, peripheral regions of Europe, or its edges, on a compass dial that takes in stories from Palestine, Anatolia and Lisbon.