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
