D EFINICIÓN DE LA VIDA QUE MERECE LA PENA SER VIVIDA

Data have to be obtained and evaluated, and if necessary processed … Decisions have to be made about generalization, the process whereby unnecessary detail … is omitted in order to keep the map clear and uncluttered.

(Canadian Cartographic Association 2015)

Finding a route

Chapters One, Two and Three mapped out the research terrain. Chapter Four now describes my route across the methodological territory. This methodology is shaped by a borderland analysis of belonging in HE, and is sensitised to ‘the social as inexorably also spatial’ (Massey 1993, p.80). The research methods capture the ways in which the complexities of Massey’s power geometry are experienced in Brah’s contested diaspora spaces, and reflect the thread of socio-spatial relations running through Bourdieu’s work. My approach also reflects my ontological uncertainty about the world, and my

understanding of knowledge as socially situated and associated with power.

This chapter provides a discursive account of the rationale for my chosen methodology and methods, and the ways in which those methods evolved through the pilot study and subsequent fieldwork. It leads the reader on a thematic rather than a chronological tour, beginning with Strategies of Subversion, which sets out the spatial character of the methodology and how this is exemplified in three research strategies: activity space, campus dérive and the exercise of Mapping Belonging. Multiple Case Study reminds the reader of the project’s pre-determined methodological framework; summarises the case selection process, which utilised quantitative as well as qualitative data; and provides a pen portrait of the four case study institutions. Methods: From Pilot to Fieldwork describes the development and modification of my research methods as a result of conditions in the field. The final section, Making Maps of Data, addresses the demands of engaging with data through analysis and authorship.

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The discursive character of this chapter is complemented by a Methods Annex which provides the reader with an audit trail of case selection, data collection processes, questionnaire responses and students’ ‘maps’ of belonging. These are referenced within the chapter where relevant. Not every move and obstacle is delineated; the chapter and its annex edit what were lengthy and sometimes challenging procedures of designing and conducting fieldwork with multiple participants on five geographically disparate sites and analysing the data collected. Chapter Four condenses multiple stages of methodological exploration into a tidy series of themed sections, in practice, it was not so tidy:

It was a messy business … when researchers communicate with each other … little of this messiness emerges … I had written about the research process in such a way that it implied there were no false starts, no compromises and no mistakes … the text suggested a logical, seamless progression.

(Longden 2005, pp.105-6)

I include the early stages of my methodological exploration. They were not false starts or mistakes. They were part of a journey across methodological territory which became more complex than initially anticipated.

Strategies of subversion

One of my first methodological challenges was to clarify my role in the research process. As a researcher on campus, I enjoyed both outsider and insider status. Although I was a stranger, a visitor, my educational and professional background meant I could anticipate and recognise generic features of the campus template: library, lecture theatres, Students’ Union. As a university graduate and employee in the sector, I brought my own

understanding of ‘the game’ played by students – and staff. I was already an insider, a Bourdieusian fish in water, my habitus in alignment with the campus environment. I was both in and of it, ‘the locus of class reproduction … and the embodied construction of sociospatial order’ (Bridge 2004, p.63). Therefore, I required methodological strategies which took account of this dual status and enabled me to gain distance from the taken-for- granted:

In situations strongly familiar to us, strangeness is not a given but something researchers can only achieve by finding the proper strategies to uncover what is not-so-normal … in that sense researchers are like fish trying to discover the water that surrounds them.

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Throughout the early stages of the fieldwork, I developed three methodological strategies to subvert the seemingly ‘normal’ spaces of case study institutions: activity space, campus dérive and the exercise Mapping Belonging. Each strategy played a distinctive role in the methodological framework; together they exemplified an active approach to thinking about space (Massey, 2005).

Activity space

Viewing the four case study sites through Massey’s device of activity space meant that each HEI could be considered within the context of the HE sector as a whole, without detracting from an idiographic emphasis on the particularity of each institution. Activity space, ‘the spatial network of links and activities, of spatial connections and of locations, within which a particular agent operates’ (2005, p.55), was a means of interrogating the range of spatial scales within which all HEIs must operate; and in practice this required considering each one from three spatial perspectives.

Firstly, I considered each institution within the context of the extended networks of the HE sector, as well as within the local, community and regional economy. This emphasised the porosity of institutional borders, the way the policy ‘centre’ of the sector reaches in to the workings of the institution, the growing financial significance of retention, international students and the impact of higher tuition fees on part-time student numbers.

Secondly, I focused more closely on the institution as a single entity, identifying its

‘institutional stories’, corporate identity, populations, organisational structure and strategic messages. These elements are representative of an institutional habitus which

communicates ‘who belongs’. I was particularly interested in how this was reflected – or contradicted – in retention strategy and campus spaces. I paid attention to the positioning of part-time students, strategically and physically, in the activity space of each institution. Where were they visible - and invisible? What spaces did they occupy? I focused on the production, consumption and use of retention strategy documents within each case study institution; how retention strategy was positioned and how it functioned. Document analysis and staff interviews offered methods of tracking strategy pathways through institutional structures and uncovering geographies of power operating within the HEI.

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The third ‘view’ of the activity space was at ‘ground level’ in relation to the estate and spatial arrangements of the campus: ‘the specific spaces … produced and stabilised by … the dominant groups who occupy them’ (Valentine 2008, p.18), and in relation to psychosocial dimensions of that environment. The methodological strategies of campus dérive and Mapping Belonging were essential contributors to this third level view.

Campus dérive

I developed the research method of campus dérive following completion of the pilot study, and alongside my evolving interest in thinking spatially, theoretically and methodologically. Campus dérive emerged from the literature and practices of psychogeography, a term which first appeared in print in connection with a Parisian avant garde group, the

Situationist International (1957-1972), led by Guy Debord. Situationists were particularly concerned with a loss of emotional engagement with urban surroundings:

‘psychogeography becomes for Debord the point where psychology and geography collide. … The emotional and behavioural impact of urban space upon individual consciousness’ (Coverley 2010). Debord’s psychogeographical map of Paris divides the city into multiple sections randomly rearranged; object and territory for individual interpretation and navigation. Debord is considered a twentieth century heir of Baudelaire’s flâneur, the Parisian ‘urban spectator, an amateur detective and investigator of the city’ (Benjamin 1983) who spectated in a leisurely manner on the accelerating pace of modern life (Crang 1998). Debord considered psychogeography ‘a pure science and like the skilled chemist the psychogeographer is able both to identify and to distil the varied ambiances of the urban environment’ (Coverley 2010).

Baudelaire has successors in London too. Iain Sinclair (1997, 2003, 2009) records his way ‘of thinking and dealing with how the city emerges’ (Self and Sinclair 2008) in a style simultaneously political, gothic and lyrical. Sinclair continues an English literary tradition of urban exploration exemplified by Defoe, Black and de Quincey; the ‘visionary tradition that takes London as its centre’ (Coverley 2010, p.111). He is part of a contemporary British revival of London-themed psychogeography (Ackroyd 2000, 2002, 2007, 2011; Self 2007; Papdimitriou 2013). Self extended psychogeography’s popular appeal through radio broadcasts and a regular column Psychogeography, in the Independent magazine. Sinclair’s film collaboration with Andrew Kötting, Swandown (2011) was a protest against the 2012 London Olympics, a narrative of a month-long river trip in a swan-shaped pedalo along the

64 Lea Valley to the Olympic site.

The foundation stone of psychogeographical practice, the activity that connects urban wandering, flâneury, gothic form and ‘local history with attitude’ (Self 2007, p.12), is the Situationist practice of dérive (to drift). Dérive is ‘a particular way of walking for the purpose of exploring the impact of urbanisation … intended to disrupt the habitual ways in which individuals normally experience environments’ (Bridger 2013, p.3). Dérive requires the walker to abandon conventional motives for movement, e.g. travelling to or from work, and to allow themselves to be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find in the city. In the canon of psychogeography there are almost as many ‘brands’ of dérive as renowned psychogeographers, including Sinclair’s ‘dogged, shamanic attempts to storm … concrete bastions … laying siege with the trebuchet of his prose-poetry’ (Self 2007, p.25) and Solnit’s atlases ‘of the imagination’ (2010, 2013) in which she ‘roams political terrain … invites us to search out the layers … expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced’ (Solnit 2015).

For Self, walking itself is ‘the act of narrative’ (Self and Sinclair 2008) and, in common with dérive’s disruptive quality, an act of subversion: ‘walking in urban environments is a destructive ability to destroy the way we are meant to live in cities and the way we’re meant to perceive them and the way they’re meant to be for us’ (ibid). Sinclair is passionately interested in unreported and ‘empty places’ as well as the liminal spaces of urban development; for example, hidden London in Lights Out for the Territory (1997) and the outer reaches of the M25 in London Orbital (2002). Despite its multiple stylistic and political manifestations, the acknowledged canon of psychogeography is almost exclusively urban (London, Paris) and its celebrated authors, past and present, are almost exclusively male: ‘dispiritingly we are a fraternity of middle-aged men in Gore-Tex, armed with notebooks and cameras, stamping our boots on suburban station platforms’ (Self 2007, p.12). Bridger is a notable exception to the literature’s largely uncritical male gaze:

the gendered body is a vehicle through which a person experiences and makes sense of their relation both to others and place. … A feminist critique of space should … involve a reflection of one’s role in the research and what sort of knowledge can be produced … taking on the role of both participant and researcher.

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Celebrated female psychogeographers are rare. In all the definitions of a flâneur ‘one thing remains constant: the image of an observant and solitary man strolling about Paris’ (Solnit 2001, p.199). Having the leisure and security to stroll or wander alone in an urban

environment has been and still is a social and gendered privilege which translates into the dominant gaze; ‘white, bourgeois, heterosexual masculinity has structured the way in which geography as a discipline claims to know space, place and landscape’ (Rose 1993, p.137). Solnit (2013, 2011, 2006, 2001), Maitland (2012) and Jamie (2012, 2005, 2002), among others, disrupt the male gaze of the psychogeographical canon by extending psychogeographical practice beyond the urban hothouses of London and Paris. Solnit (2007) interprets ‘place’ in the widest sense, writing political readings of geography, land and environment as diverse as Silicon Valley, rural New Mexico and the site of an anti- capitalist protest in Miami. Maitland (2012) conducts twelve walks in twelve British forests, one a month over the course of a year, drawing on and rewriting fairy tales ‘as a way of understanding the mysterious space forests occupy within our psyches’ (Laing 2012). Jamie records a year in her life engaging with the conservation efforts of the endangered

corncrake in her native Scotland (2005), and scrutinises northern land and seascapes in ‘a conversation with the natural world’ (2012).

Solnit (2006) disrupts the genre further, moving psychogeography onto a profoundly intimate level, exploring issues of wandering, getting lost and the unknown in a narration of the experiences and relationships of her own life. ‘Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing … in order to make discoveries, we must get lost, go into terra incognita’(Ch. 1). The act of making discoveries resonates with the research process, but it is a willingness to get lost, to walk in terra incognita, which most clearly characterises a female psychogeographic gaze. Solnit, Maitland and Jamie do not claim to ‘know’ their territories, nor to encapsulate final versions of them in their texts. The emphasis is on the nature of their engagement in enquiry; on the tenor, texture and variability of their relationship to landscape, place, space. ‘To be lost is to be fully present and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty’ (ibid).

Jamie travels through both the wildest parts of this country and the most genteel, from Scottish glens to the streets of Edinburgh, and treats all of them as human landscapes. Nothing exists in isolation … as an observer, she never allows herself to forget her own place in the landscape.

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My own enquiry adapted the practice of dérive to disrupt the spaces and places of the campus, utilising psychogeography as a strategy for making the familiar strange and for pursuing psychosocial dimensions of space and place. I created a bespoke

psychogeographical practice which I called ‘campus dérive’, one which owes less to the randomised transit of the Situationists and more to what Bridger describes as ‘site-specific studies of particular places’ (2015). Campus dérive considers campus rather than urban or rural geography; acknowledges campus boundaries but is not bounded by them; and considers liminal spaces between campus boundaries and their host towns or cities, attempting to imagine universities and their campuses as extroverted places and diaspora spaces. It maintains the significance of context while simultaneously foregrounding my connection as a researcher and a subject with spatial questions of power, belonging and peripherality on the university campus.

In campus dérive I used the act of walking to establish connection with each case study institution. Through walking, I mapped not only the physical spaces of the case study institutions, the sights and sounds of them, but also the psychosocial dimensions of those spaces, the sense I made of them. I noticed who was present in campus spaces, who or what was on display, how places were labelled and named. I noted my responses to this occupation of space, and wondered how others might respond. I took an interest in the spatial relationships of the campus, the spaces between and beyond, and what was not there. I listened, too, to language, to regional accents, to ‘opportunistic conversations which take on a life of their own’ (Holliday 2004, p.278). In these ways, campus dérive rendered generic elements of each site temporarily ‘strange’. I served my time on

suburban rail platforms, and I, too, carried a notebook. While I walked, I allowed myself to experience a spontaneous and unedited flow of impressions, observations and thoughts. When I had completed the campus dérive, I transcribed this experience of landscape in my notebook, and these notes become a Research Journal.

‘The freedom to move, to write, to map is a situated freedom’ (hooks 1992, p.343). My ability to utilise dérive was facilitated by certain kinds of privilege. ‘There are three pre- requisites to taking a walk – that is, to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints’ (Solnit, 2001, p.234). That I was able to ‘drift’ freely around a university campus without ID, without being stopped,

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public space but was also dependent on geographies of ethnicity, gender, age and dis- ability. Who is it normal to see in the campus environment? Was I seen as a student or a member of staff? Was I, a middle-aged, White woman, ‘seen’ at all? How might I have experienced campus derive as a young Black man, a Muslim woman in full hijab, a wheelchair user or visually-impaired person in the corridors, halls, cafés and green spaces of the campus? For James Baldwin, the Black gay writer: ‘Manhattan was not a deliciously liberatory place where he could lose himself … it threatened instead never to let him forget himself’ (2001, p.242).

During my fieldwork, I visited eight campus sites in total, some several times, over a period of approximately nine months. On each visit, I practiced dérive alongside a developing relationship with the emerging themes of the enquiry and my role as observer and interpreter. I made notes in my Research Journal. The following (unedited) excerpts demonstrate my perceptions and engagements with the physical spaces of the campus.

Travelled from the station on a grey drizzly morning. A large urban campus, edged by busy road and arteries into the city centre and out into beyond. Of the city but not in the city.

On the train journey here, three stations have ‘International’ after the place name. Sense of entering an [sic] liminal, outward-facing zone with global connection. On arrival, I encounter trilingual street signs and flocks of international students. Proximity to the river means this is historically a centre of naval history and trade, people and things on the move, going in, coming out, a port for immigration and migration. A place of tensions possibly? You can just about make out the ‘old’ town in the grand architecture swamped by the clatter of contemporary life.

Campus dérive provided an opportunity to consider the nature and significance of spatial relationships:

The campus is sleek, landscaped - and deserted. Where are the students?

The campus is close to the city walls. I enter through an ancient stone arch leading on to a leafy path. The buildings are low rise, a series of interconnecting courtyards and small enclosed green spaces. Cloistered, contained.

Repetition of the practice on the same site at different times offered potential insights into the experience of new students while highlighting my positioning as a researcher:

First visit – all is strange, finding my way around is challenging. Second visit, familiarity