At most of the pop-up places I visited I conducted interviews with organisers of the events or with other stakeholders in the sites, as detailed in the table in the previous section. Most of these interviews were recorded on camera with the exception of my interview with Anna, from The Culinary Anthropologist supper club, and with one the site mangers employed by the developers Lend Lease at The Artworks, neither of whom wanted to be filmed and which I recorded by taking notes instead. The interviews were used in two ways. Firstly, I played each one back to myself (or read back my notes) and took detailed notes that informed the key themes to explored in the thesis. Secondly, I edited sections of the interviews to produce clips that are included in the i-Doc.
All the interviews were semi-structured. I prepared themes for discussion and some questions in advance but aimed for open questions that would allow participants to answer in an informal and exploratory style (Longhurst, 2016). While trying to cover all my intended topics, I also allowed conversation to evolve and followed up on avenues of interest that emerged during the interviews. Dowling et al. argue that interviews remain a ‘mainstay of qualitative methods’ but are often now used as supplementary or complementary to other methods deployed alongside them (Dowling, et al., 2016). This was the case for my use of interviews which supplemented my participant observation at pop-up sites and my use of video to explore and produce versions of the sites in the i-Doc.
Some of my interviews were conducted during the same site visits at which I conducted participant observation and involved informal conversations with event organisers and other people I encountered there. For other interviews, I returned on a separate occasion to interview a particular person who might have been too busy on the day. This was especially true for event based pop-ups such as the pop-up cinemas where members of staff didn’t have time to be interviewed during the event.
The same day interviews allowed me to ask people in more depth about what I had observed them doing or what was happening at their event or site that day, whereas
the interviews conducted at later dates enabled me to interogate themes and ideas emerging during my ongonig analysis of the data. The questions I asked in the interviews were predominently around why the participants had chosen to set up or work in a pop-up business, what they had done previously, what their aims for the future were, how and why they had organised their pop-up sites, how they found working and living according to pop-up space-times and their feelings about pop-up as a phenomenon.The interviews were crucial in allowing me to understand the discourses used by people in the pop-up scene. They showed how participants identified with and invested in pop-up’s imaginaries (for example many participants described their sites as flexible or their practices as immersive) but also how thesse imaginaries were differently valued and experienced through the varied lifeworlds of the participants.
For the on site interviews a show and tell about the space was often included, aligning the interviews with a tradition of tour/walking tour based interviews (Dowling, et al., 2016, Pink, 2007) that has been argued to enable insight into the materiality and meaning of spaces for their inhabitants and/or visitors as well for the researcher. Sarah Pink, for example, explores how conducting a walking video interview in a community garden drew attention to the key features ‘determining how the garden would be sensed’ (Pink, 2007, 243) such as the path down the middle, as interviewees gravitated towards such features. This style of interview helped me to analyse the aesthetics and materialities of pop-up spaces by allowing interviewees to foreground the important parts of their pop-up sites as well as to explain their limitations and aspirations regarding the sites.
A key difference between my video recordings of interviews and the tour based video interviews conducted by scholars including Dowling et al. and Pink, is that while their concerns are primarily with how a camera helps to understand a person’s experience of site during the interview, I knew that the footage would be important for me after the interview too, as I would edit it into clips to be incorporated into the i-Doc. My focus was thereby on two things at once. On the one hand I was asking questions
that enabled me to create an indepth knowledge of the pop-up sites and business, and to produce a thorough understanding of the pop-up scene. On the other hand I had one eye on what would look and sound interesting in the i-Doc clips and would sometimes note down timecodes for particularly illuminating sound bites. A potential conflict of interest here was apparent to me, especially because of the film training I had undertaken before commencing my video work. The film training was geared towards documentary production and the leaders of the course approached us (the students) as potential documentary makers rather than researchers (which most of us were, given the AHRC were funding places on the course). The way they talked about on camera interviews was, consequentially, a little uncomfortable when applied to research. They would refere to hypothetical interviewees as ‘characters’ and stress that it was good if you could get the ‘characters’ to express heightened
emotions on camera, including, if possible or relevant, crying or becoming angry. This instruction shows the potential discrepencey between filming interviews for inclusion in documentary and filming interviews as part of a research methodology, where an ethics evaluation is unlikely to encourage eliciting tears or heightened emotions from participants.
Geographers often stress the importance of reflecting on power and positionality when conducting interviews and encourage taking measures to make participants feel at ease, for example by selecting appropriate sites for the interview (Elwood & Martin, 2000). While this is also a skill in documentary film making the aim of such a skill for documentary, according to my training at least, is to create a situation where participants will readily express emotion on camera, rather than primarily an ethical concern with their comfort and wellbeing.
Embedded in my dual use of video are two problems related to the tension described above. Firstly, there was a conflict between wanting to hold conversations that allowed me to understand pop-up and between wanting to record participants saying things that would effectively communicate pop-up when included in short (on average 2 or 3 minute) clips. Potentially, having one eye on what would work well in
the clips precluded my full attention being on the conversation and thus limited my understanding of what participants were saying, foregrounding instead the comments that reinforced my pre-existing ideas about pop-up. Secondly, my dual use of video raises a concern that the research could have been exploitative if I was ‘using’ interviews to generate ‘good’ footage for the i-Doc I was creating. The exploitative nature of research is something that other Geographers have argued is pervasively problematic (not limited to interviews that are filmed or intended for documentary purposes). Cloke, for example, has argued that it is problematic for researchers to ‘flip’ in and out of the lives of participants ‘staying just long enough to collect juicy stories’ (Cloke, et al., 2004; 166). This problem is arguably heightened when filming interviews with the aim of creating an i-Doc, where the mindfulness of a potential audience for the footage accentuates the desire for footage to be ‘juicy’.
Using interviews as part of the i-Doc production therefore required me to put in place strategies to mitigate these methodological and ethical problems. In attempting to mitigate the problem of focusing on what would make a good clip, rather than on the nuances of what participants were saying I learnt to set up a camera position that wouldn’t require me to zoom in and out. In the early interviews I had often tried to zoom in for what I thought might be significant statements that would warrant greater emphasis in the clips, but this led me to be watching for these ‘significant’ moments, detracting from my engagement in the interview. In later interviews I therefore set the camera up in a position somewhere between a medium shot and a close up so that the interviews would feel intimate in the footage but also the camera wouldn’t
need adjusting. Budget allowing, I could also have mitigated this problem by hiring a camera person to film for me, but this was not possible as part of this research. I also watched the footage back carefully several times, before and during editing it, and this allowed me to find and consider information I might have overlooked during the interview itself. In addressing the ethical issue of exploiting participants, I decided to offer to share footage, write ups and edits with my participants and encourage them to comment on these if they wished (none of them took me up on this, although a couple requested my footage for their own purposes). I also decided to put the i-Doc
behind a password to assure them that its primary purpose was as part of my academic methodology, not as a piece of entertainment that would be accessed by the general public.
As well as posing problems, filming the interviews had methodological advantages too. It allowed me to look back over interviews and to pick up on subtle gestures, intonations and suggestions I may have missed at the time (Garrett, 2011). There were also actually advantages to the tension between the dual role of the interviews, to understand experiences of participants and to generate i-Doc material. Filming the interviews with a view to making an i-Doc also meant that during the interview I was attentive to potential links between what different participants were saying. I knew that the i-Doc would be structured, in part, by links between different clips so, while conductng the interviews I was mindful of identifiying thematic trends that would mean particular clips should be linked together. This gave me a relational mode of attention through which I was particuarlly concerned with the conflicts and parallels between the experiences and discourses of different participants.
Similar problematic and productive tensions arose from my use of participant observation. Participant observation was conducted at all the pop-ups included in my research and, as previously discussed, involved both invovlement with and observation of both those in attendence at pop-up events and those organising or running events or spaces. Participant observation can be part of a long term ethnography or a short term method and my visists were no more than a few hours long as, rather than conducting longditutinal studies of particular pop-up places, my objective was to study a series of pop-ups in order to gain an understanding of pop- up culture as a city wide phenomenon. As Eric Laurier describes, participant observation allows researchers to work out ‘what things are relevant to study’, ‘why those things are significant’ and ‘how those ordinary and extraordinary things are accomplished by the people we are studying’ (Laurier, 2016) by assimilating themselves into a research context in order to produce specific knowledge of its everyday practices. This was true in my research where participant observation was
a key means through which I decided on the important elements of each pop-up site studied and thereby what to shoot and include in the i-Doc. Participant observation allowed me to grasp the different textures of pop-up places and the different meanings of pop-up that were developed and prioritised by their organisers. For example, I helped in the kitchen at both Christabel’s Mad Hatter’s Brunch and at Anna’s Secret Supper Club and whereas at Christabel’s I was aware of an emphasis
on the theatre of the event, for example the glitter added to food and the immersive decoration of the site, at Anna’s event I found the emphasis to be much more on the
quality of the food and its cooking. These differing priorities were reflected in the participation I ended up doing. At Christabel’s I hung out in the kitchen drinking prosecco with the staff and helping to sprinkle glitter, somewhat hapzardly, on scrambled eggs. At Anna’s, however, I was quickly prevented from ‘helping’ with the food when it became clear that I wasn’t capable of arranging canapes with the required level of attention to detail.
Geographers have also argued that participant observation is valuable for being a bodily activitiy. Chris McMorran, for example, has argued that participant observation of flexible labour in inns in Japan allowed him to ‘conduct research through the body’ and thereby ‘take seriously the spatiality and creativeness of embodied work practices’ (McMorran, 2012). The bodily nature of my own participant observation was also productive in understanding the space-times of pop-up that I was studying. For example, being inside the claustrophobic container spaces many of my participants worked in gave an insight into the limitations of those spaces. Likewise, being freezing cold at Alex’s house boat (where The Ship’s Kitchen supper club was hosted), before he turned the heating on for the guests, helped me to understand the process of transformation by which a second-best housing situation (buying a, by nature cold, house-boat rather than a house) is made into a cosy and exciting destination for supper club guests (who commented on how warm the boat was on arrival). The bodily nature of participant obsevation was therefore an important part of grapsing what it means to invest in and (re)produce pop-up’s imaginaries and
allowed an insight into the different experiences of those imaginaries for producers and consumers of pop-up places.
However, the nuanced understanding of pop-ups that participant observation allowed me was complicated by my simultaneous need to film the events. A process that took me ‘out’ of the scene, requiring me to, at intervals, observe rather than participate and to do so, conspicuously, at the distance of a lense. A limitation of filming while participating in pop-ups is that it clearly reminded participants that I was there as a researcher, reducing their ability to relax and thus my ability to observe the goings on ‘naturally’. At many events I was able to succesfully film and assimilate into the event. For example in the footage I have of Latitudinal Cuisine, other guests can be heard talking and joking with me while I am filming, demonstrating that, despite filming the event, I was effectively integrating into its sociable atmosphere. At others, my assimilation was less succesful, for example in one of the clips of The Artworks a woman dancing in the crowd sees me filming her and looks distincitly uncomfortable about it. However, despite causing discomfort in some scenarios, filming also gave me something to do at times when the pop-up staff were too busy to talk to me or to delegate tasks I could do, or when I was attending an event as an audience member/guest rather than helping out, which I usually did alone. Filming, in these contexts, stopped me feeling awkward because I had something to do that wasn’t stand around on my own and therefore eased any potential awkwardness.
Using interviews and participant observation alongside interactive documentary therefore complicated the practice and ethics of these methods but also in some ways enriched these methodologies by making me more comfortable in the research setting or by encouraging me to look out for comparative and pervasive themes between sites. They were invaluable methods both in generating the material needed for the experimental production of an i-Doc but also in giving me the deep understanding of pop-up that I needed to identify pop-up’s imaginaires and begin to think about how to articulate them. The next sections explore the various stages of
making the i-Doc and how each helped me to identify and articulate elements of pop- up’s spatiotemporal imaginaries.