Attentive Observation: Walking, Listening, Staying Put

Abstract

In this article I suggest that a renewed emphasis on “attentive observation,” as both a form of radical empiricism and a source of imaginative insight, might contribute towards building a more nuanced conception of fieldwork that is better attuned to the multisensory and multispecies textures of material geographies. I focus on interactions with nature, landscape, and nonhuman others in an urban context but my argument has wider connotations for concerns with embodied methodologies, critical phenomenology, and slower forms of research.