Animating geographies of making: Embodied slow scholarship for participant-researchers of maker cultures and material work

Abstract

Accounts of making as a social and economic practice, and as a process of material transformation, are accumulating both within and beyond geography. In this article, we turn our attention to how geographers have engaged viscerally with the labour process of making, by putting their own bodies to work, as makers themselves, or alongside those of research participants. Such embodied interventions extend academic understandings of the everyday, embodied accumulation of skill and tacit knowledge, as well as offering an alternative, methodologically transparent approach to nonrepresentational modes of writing. We review how geographers interested in making have found ways in which to deeply engage the field, often building on longstanding personal interests and auto-ethnographic methods, in the face of pragmatic concerns for safety and security in the workplace, as well as the time constraints of the neoliberal academy. We conclude that the flourishing slow scholarship on geographies of making has opened up a productive portal through which to re-connect work and the body. Deeper insights arise from implicating our labouring selves in both the making, as well as writing about making.