The promise and practice of spontaneous prose

Abstract

Spontaneous prose can and should be used by non-representational geographers to creatively aid, inform and craft ethnographical analyses. Here, I propose that cultural and social geographers utilise this method, deployed from a genre of literature that characterised and defined the 1950s ‘Beat Generation’ of the United States, to aid in non-representational ethnographic note-taking by discussing the possible synergies between spontaneous prose and non-representational methodology, using an example from ethnographical research in the Norsk Oljemuseum, Stavanger, Norway.