Moving stories: using mobile methods to explore the everyday lives of young people in public care

Casey conflates his term ‘place-world’ with Soja’s (1996) term ‘thirdspace’ to emphasize the importance of ‘a world that is not only perceived or conceived but also actively lived and receptively experienced’, enacted through the body by processes of ‘outgoing’ (bodily encountering places) and ‘incoming’ (traces of place being inscribed on the body) over time shaping the meaning of places and significances of them for people (Casey, 2001: 687–8, original emphasis). This is a per- formative process, through the practice of our fieldwork we (researchers and participants) mutually construct the field, not a fixed field but rather ‘the field as event’, transformed over time through our continued practice, always in a state of becoming (Coleman and Collins, 2006: 12). Many of the recent studies that utilise mobile research methods are also informed by de Certeau’s (1984) work emphasizing the immediacy and nowness of walking, and as Thrift (2004) discusses, of driving and ‘passengering’, as multi-sensory, place-making practices. Mundane practices and everyday experiences are subject to scrutiny, turning attention to the embodied experiences of different travel modes, constructing journeys as ‘dwelling- in-motion’ and focusing on the multitudes of activities they comprise (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 214).

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Nicola J. Ross, Emma Renold, Sally Holland and Alexandra Hillman

Qualitative Research 2009 9: 605