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Meaningful meanderings: using mobile methods to research young people’s everyday lives. Nicola Ross University of Strathclyde Nicola.ross@strath.ac.uk. Content. Overview of the (Extra)ordinary Lives project Mobile methods ‘Guided’ walks Car journey interactions
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Meaningful meanderings: using mobile methods to research young people’s everyday lives Nicola Ross University of Strathclyde Nicola.ross@strath.ac.uk
Content • Overview of the (Extra)ordinary Lives project • Mobile methods • ‘Guided’ walks • Car journey interactions • Sharing intimate narratives: the productivity of motion, commotion and distraction
(Extra)ordinary lives: project overview • Longitudinal, participatory research with 8 young people in care • Using visual and mobile methods • Young people develop own multi-media accounts and representations • Researchers conducting an ethnography of this process
Multi-media project sessions and out-of-session contacts • Working collaboratively with new technologies during project sessions • Between session contacts: ‘guided’ journeys, conversations in a range of settings.
Mobile research methods • Mobilities paradigm in social sciences • Mobile Research Methods: • Embodied, multi-sensory research experiences • Place-making practices and placed encounters: a ‘constitutive coingredience’ of people and places (Casey, 2001) • Shared, experiential journeys generating meaningful understandings of everyday lives • Placed and place-making interactions, rooted in young people’s everyday locales
‘Guided’ walks • Shared, experiential journeys in locales of significance to young people • Conveyed young people’s intimate knowledge of their localities and locally based social relations • Research encounters ‘rooted’ in the everyday, yet opening avenues for memories and imagined futures • Conversations meandered , unhurried sharing of narratives • Rhythm of the walk offered engagements and disengagements, a mass of encounters, diversions and disruptions
Car journey interactions • Regular routine journeys, one-to-one contact time, growing familiarity, strengthening relations between young person and researcher • Young people making audio recordings of in-car interactions capturing journey soundscapes and conversations • Revealed young people’s local geographies as mundane talk of driving/passengering was interspersed with intimate and mundane
Audio extract from car journey interaction taking place as a young person (aged 10) and researcher travel together on one of their regular journeys home from a fieldwork session. Car journey interaction: moving between the mundane and meaningful
Mobile methods and the sharing of intimate narratives • Mobile methods ‘rooted’ in everyday lives, dynamic, open interactions • Space for narratives to be shared was opened up, closed down, diverted, and revisited • Motion, commotion and distraction were productive in the sharing of intimate narratives
Further Information For more information about the (Extra)ordinary Lives research project, see Qualiti, Cardiff School of Social Sciences www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/qualiti