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The assumption that people should be surrounded by air that has been cooled to meet their presumed needs encourages an undifferentiated and disengaged relationship between local climate and everyday life. It is also leading to huge, and growing, levels of energy consumption. One important research challenge is therefore to identify how existing variation in climate adaptation cultures might be harnessed in fighting the further spread of this assumption. Examining how different groups see their relationship with air-conditioning could be part of this and Doha, the capital of Qatar, provides an excellent place in which to explore the potential of such a strategy. Air-conditioning was eagerly adopted by Qataris after the nationalisation of their oil and gas reserves soon made them some of the wealthiest people in the world. In recent years, however, local officials have started to consider the social and environmental benefits of other ways of living with the desert heat. This paper reports on a project that sought to produce an engaging body of evidence by comparing how older Qatari nationals, expatriate professionals, and younger Qatari nationals spoke of their ongoing relationship with air-conditioning. In so doing, it reflects on different ways of defining the purpose of empirical research in human geography to highlight the continued value of being curious about the hitherto unknown subjectivities that await us in the field. In this case, this was despite the popularity of conceptually informed analysis in cultural studies of air-conditioning and the critical commentator position in relevant accounts of urban change in the region.

In two previous reviews, we examined how human geographers currently report on projects involving their preferred qualitative methods – interviews and ethnographic observation. This final review steps back from specific techniques to evaluate some of the broader presentational conventions that typify this work. What can be inferred from where these geographers discuss data collection in their papers? Why do they develop new methods and what do they say about fieldwork failures? How often do they reflect on the provisional status of their findings? And what are the implications of how they define their purpose in working with qualitative material?

This review examines how ethnographic methods currently feature in the work of human geographers. The ethnographic approach continues to be a popular choice amongst those hoping to learn from how social life unfolds in particular places and settings. But what visions of ethnography do geographers draw on to attain authorial authority? What are the implications of how they present their field experiences? How, linking back to our last review, is their ethnographic work connected to the interview? And what are some of the downsides to how the term is deployed in the discipline?

This is the first in a series of three reviews that scrutinise the conventions of doing and describing qualitative research that currently predominate in human geography. Since we find that interviews are the most widely used method in this field, we begin with an examination of how they feature in the work of today’s human geographers. How many people do geographers speak with and what do they say about their interviewing procedures? What do they imagine their interviews to be in terms of the social occasion? And how do they present the empirical material that is thereby generated?

There is a growing body of research that, under the banner of ‘green exercise’ considers the additional physical and psychological benefits that may be accrued by those who exercise in ‘natural’ environments. This essay considers the implications of how this research has been conducted to date and argues that it may be usefully enriched by a fuller examination of how exercise and environment come together in less controlled conditions. After outlining some ideas and approaches commonly found in this field, we contend that there are two problems here: firstly, the focus on ‘green’ – in so far as this defines the experience in certain visual terms – and, secondly, the focus on ‘exercise’ – in so far as this downplays diversity in physical experiences. In response, we argue that studies centred on how various environments are inhabited by various groups of exerciser could provide fresh ideas about how best to promote the benefits of green exercise. We make this argument because the implied vision of positive landscape design currently associated with this field is typified by flat surfaces that allow exercisers to visually consume vegetation without other stimulation. With reference to qualitative work on recreational running, we contend that this is not always the way to go.

Summer music festivals that involve a few days of camping have often been linked to sustainability agendas. Yet relevant studies have so far overlooked how these events can themselves serve as experiments in less resource consumptive living. Building on a wider interest in the cultural evolution of cleanliness norms, this paper explores how attendees come to use water in personal washing at two UK festivals. Through survey, observation and interview research, it examines how current festival goers respond to the disruption of their usual washing regimes, paying particular attention to how a combination of social and infrastructural cues serves to encourage the emergence of a temporary new cleanliness culture. Doing so highlights the value of seeing human resource consumption as a matter of dynamic collective convention more than fixed personal preference since these respondents were seen to embrace a new relationship with washing that was otherwise deemed unthinkable. This leads to a broader discussion of how visitor needs and the social world are most usefully studied by both future festival organisers and the wider field of sustainable tourism research.

This article draws on a serial interview study of later life leisure travel in the UK to question how a wider trend towards holidaying further afield has come to feature in the lives of three cohorts of older Britons. Drawing on theories of social practice that see notions of desirable activity as produced through the interplay of opportunities to engage in relevant activities, collective apprehensions of what doing these activities should involve, and the physical capacities necessarily required to undertake them, we examine their leisure travel in two regards. Firstly, we consider how evolving social and infrastructural arrangements are effectively demanding greater distance travel in the sense that they shape what socially desirable leisure travel is taken to entail at certain points in time. Secondly, we examine how distance travel may be physically demanding in the sense that older bodies may be particularly likely to face certain challenges when they travel. This strategy allows us to examine how broader social expectations regarding distance travel have become part of the lives of older Britons and the manner in which they are currently reconciling them with both the anticipation and the experience of bodily ageing. We end with the implications of our findings for the future of later life leisure travel as a potential hotspot of growing societal energy demand and the further application of social practice theory in view of the evidently variable capacities of human bodies.

Qualitative research focused on how people experience the social and material environments in which they exercise has the potential to inform public health agendas in all sorts of ways. This commentary takes up the claim made by Stephanie Coen that such research should begin with an ‘equity lens’ and place a greater emphasis on ‘critique’ than we did in the ‘Exercise and Environment’ special issue to which she responds. At its best qualitative research reveals new ways of thinking about the social and material contexts at hand. As such, it has the potential to highlight important dimensions of the lived experience of popular fitness practices that may have hitherto been relatively overlooked. Always starting with the overt aim of applying an ‘equity lens’ truncates the possibility of discovering such dimensions. Furthermore, being too wedded to an overtly critical stance may end up hindering, rather than encouraging, the most positive dialogue between those studying the cotemporary exercise experience and those involved in public health.

Starting with a series of perspectives on why and where humans run, this paper considers how running comes to happen in some environments instead of others and how it is experienced thereafter. More specifically, we are interested in the processes by which contemporary recreational running has come to take place either indoors on treadmills or outside on pavements and paths. Running has been recently positioned as an obvious target for those hoping to encourage public health amongst increasingly time pressured populations and running outdoors can often lead to additional benefits. Yet how it is that runners and environments come to coalesce has yet to be examined in any great detail. This paper responds by drawing on theories of how embodied practices spread through society to further an emergent geographical interest in the speech patterns of everyday life. With reference to a project involving accompanied runs and interviews with groups of both indoor and outdoor recreational runners in London, we ask what the subtleties of their running talk tells us about how exercisers become attached to the environments they currently occupy and how they might feasibly be encouraged elsewhere.

Taking four assumptions in turn, this review article considers some of the lenses through which researchers might look at later-life leisure travel and the implications of adopting each of them. First, we consider the ‘active ageing’ agenda and what this means for how leisure travel may be thought about in academia and beyond. Second, we turn to studies underpinned by worries about the appetite for significant consumption thought to typify the ‘baby-boomer’ generation and question whether these studies could inadvertently be promoting the very future they hope to avoid. Third, we explore how research on the benefits of everyday ‘mobility’ in later life may have morphed into a more general belief about the value of travel in older age. Finally, we reflect on how relevant studies of tourism are often underpinned by an argument about the financial rewards that now await those ready to target the older traveller. Our overall contention is that, though for different reasons, all four could be serving to encourage more later-life travel. Whilst for some this prospect is not at all troubling, the spectre of adverse energy demand consequences leads us to explore a more critical view.

Targets for energy performance in operation have been advocated as a solution to the well-documented mismatch between the expected and actual energy use of buildings. Although construction industry actors will be crucial in realising these targets, their response to them is currently under-explored. Augmenting research on how middle actors shape energy consumption, this paper examines how everyday talk in the construction industry sustains this mismatch, drawing on a study of a hospital construction project with targets for energy in use. It applies Gilbert and Mulkay's approach to discourse analysis, particularly their interest in “accounting for error”, to data drawn from interviews with actors across the construction project, observation of daily life on site, and an examination of written interactions. Findings show how actors make a discursive division between the “theory” and “reality” of energy use. Expressing scepticism about “theory”, in particular, allows them to rationalise problems with future operational energy consumption and thereby mitigate their professional liability. This division therefore perpetuates, rather than overcomes, the separation between energy in design and operation, displacing a more collaborative discussion of performance expectations. This challenges the assumption that targets for energy in use can be effective without accompanying changes in industry incentives and ways of working. This paper argues for more attention to the patterns of talk that are found in the construction industry, in order to uncover how this crucial set of actors will respond to new energy policy incentives.

This paper examines how interviews with outdoor recreational runners can help us understand how urban air pollution insinuates itself into the consciousness of those who may be breathing more polluted air than most. It begins by making the case for why studies of air pollution perception might turn to the subjectivities associated with taking part in relevant social practices. Then, with reference to debate about the extent to which groups of exercisers are thinking about certain aspects of what is physically happening during their exercise, we examine how outdoor recreational runners in London talk about the air that they breathe when running. We might imagine that this group would be particularly alive to urban air pollution in view of a presumed interest in physical performance and a personal history of running through various bodies of city air. However, through close scrutiny of their running talk, this paper documents how and why the suggestion of breathing polluted air is often placed beyond the realm of conscious thought for them during their runs. These findings point to particular strategies for encouraging healthy urban lifestyles and illustrate the potential of further studies on how social practices shape pollution perceptions.

This chapter explores the evolving demand for energy-intensive long distance leisure travel in retirement, a phenomenon which is widely predicted to be on the increase due to demographic change, rising retirement incomes and the retirement of the baby boomer generation, often labelled as the first consumer generation. We undertook serial interviews with three cohorts of people in London and Birmingham, UK, who were respectively approaching retirement, recently retired and longer retired. Drawing on interview material we discuss the different ways in which the time of retirement is imagined, experienced and consumed, and argue that understanding these different and sometimes competing temporal aspects of later life leads to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of demand for retirement leisure travel and its potential trajectories.

This paper argues that those hoping to influence domestic heat management might engage more directly with the perceived cultural geography of seasonal adaptation. It draws on a study from a coastal city in southeast Australia where winters are mild and summers increasingly hot. We begin with recent qualitative studies of how households around the world live with winter cold and what they tell us about the varied cultural features standing in the way of any attempts at encouraging alternative approaches. Then we turn to our own mixed method study involving interviews, domestic warmth diaries and ambient temperature monitoring within respondent homes. Analysis starts with a common respondent belief about how those living in the locality would downplay the discomforts of winter cold because the cultural focus there was squarely on summer. Then the three homes with the most extreme internal temperature regimes are detailed to show how a diversity of domestic warming strategies were rationalised in relation to perceived norms of local winter indifference. This leads to a broader argument about harnessing narratives of apparently local adaptation.

The health benefits of physical activity are many and well known. Those hoping to promote public health are therefore understandably keen on encouraging physical exercise. This commentary considers the role of qualitative research in this undertaking, given a context in which medical researchers have more commonly taken a quantitative approach to the motivations that are thought to underpin exercise. Our core argument is that studies concerned with how particular environments are inhabited by particular groups of exercisers could play a more central part in public health promotion. In making this case, and by way of an introduction to this Health and Place special issue, we present a series of statements that we think could usefully guide the further development of this work. Specifically, we argue for further attention to: the ways in which different material settings play into the exercise experience; how many of the exercise practices that we may hope to understand sit rather uneasily with the idea of sport; the subtleties of how sociality features in contemporary exercise practices; the physical pleasures that come from exercise; and how exercise practices are both acquired by individuals and evolve as a whole. In so doing, the aim is to encourage relevant researchers to engage more directly in conversation with health promoters instead of either being indifferent to, or critical of, them.

This paper is concerned with ambient climate control as an increasingly common means of managing the degree to which local weather conditions and seasonal temperature changes are allowed to complicate human activities. Our focus is on summertime shopping and sport spectatorship in the UK as activities that, though often still imaginatively associated with the outdoors, may increasingly take place in comparatively controlled indoor environments. We begin by arguing for an examination of these activities according to the many ways in which those involved might relate to climate control when the experience of air-conditioning has often been studied in terms of thermal comfort. Then we present the findings of two interview projects that developed this argument. The first involved shoppers on the Oxford High Street in view of how retail air-conditioning entails a growing amount of energy use in this country. The second focused on spectators at the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament in view of how one court there now boasts a retractable roof that renders match conditions newly controllable. We find that these respondents connect climate control to ideas of societal progress and effective scheduling more readily than to any desires for greater personal comfort. We end with the implications for those hoping to encourage less energy hungry societies and for researchers interested in how best to study the relationship between climate control and everyday life.

That urban green space can provide opportunities for psychological restoration which could prove valuable in promoting public health now seems relatively well established. What is less clear is whether many of us will continue to avail ourselves of these opportunities. Perhaps the question to pose is less one of whether green space experience can be good for people and more one of how best to tempt them there. This essay draws on a serial interview study with a sample of city professionals who ventured relatively infrequently into the various parks and gardens scattered around their offices. The aim is to stage a broader discussion about ways of researching those who seem happy to go without green space experience and the role of qualitative methods in questioning the most effective means of engaging with them.

Recreational running is increasingly widespread and could therefore be seen as the obvious target for those hoping to encourage greater public health through exercise. Existing qualitative research on this topic has, however, tended to focus on groups of highly committed runners. It is accordingly unclear whether their findings can be extrapolated to the much larger population of comparatively casual runners. This existing work has also tended to emphasise the social nature of the activity in particular ways. Whilst much recreational running happens alone, most commonly these studies have centred on the establishment of shared identities and group subcultures. Drawing on a study involving accompanied runs and interviews with recreational runners who do not belong to running clubs in London, this paper presents an alternative account. These respondents were relatively uninterested in the idea of proper running technique, ambivalent about the presence of others when running, and reticent about being pulled into a more committed collective practice. In view of how these more casual runners may be of particular interest to public health promoters, this finding suggests future campaigns might do well not to focus too greatly on the potential enjoyments of running community membership and start instead with a different set of social dynamics.

Our understanding of how and why young people consume, and thus how easy it might be to encourage more sustainable modes of consumption amongst this group, is currently patchy and somewhat hampered by the preoccupations of those who have concerned themselves with this subject so far. This paper substantiates this claim by presenting two caricatures of how youth consumption has previously been framed. We suggest geographical studies are well placed to establish the degree to which each holds true in specific spatial and material contexts and thereby demonstrate how such studies could usefully contribute to wider scholarship on this topic.

This paper considers the value of using interviews to research routine practices. Interviewing could easily be framed as inappropriate for this task, either because such practices are too difficult for respondents to talk about as a result of having sedimented down into unthinking forms of embodied disposition or because this method is out of step with a current enthusiasm for research styles that do not focus unduly on the representational. The discussion starts with how some key proponents of social practice theory have characterised the possibility of talking with people about these matters before turning to my own experience with two interview projects that attempted to do so inside city offices and older person households. I conclude that people can often talk in quite revealing ways about actions they may usually take as a matter of course and offer suggestions about how to encourage them.

There is good reason to be interested in how older people in ageing societies organise their winter warmth. Winter mortality rates are highest amongst this group. Several initiatives have accordingly sought to alleviate the fuel poverty some older people experience at this time. Yet many older people are also wealthier than ever. This leads to alternative anxieties about how their potentially extravagant home heating could exacerbate wider climate change. This paper pursues the contention that future policies relating to both issues stand to benefit from a fuller appreciation of how current older person households relate to the private winter warmth practices of their generational peers. Building on studies that explore the dynamics of domestic thermal convention and consider how to engender new sustainable energy norms at home, it presents findings from a serial interview project with a diverse sample of older people in the UK. We consider whether these respondents connected their actions to the idea of a wider generational mode of managing domestic winter warmth and the reasons why they seldom did. We end with the implications of this situation for further research on domestic energy norms and interventions aimed at the winter practices of this growing sector.

Concerns over the welfare of older people in winter have led to interventions and advice campaigns meant to improve their ability to keep warm, but older people themselves are not always willing to follow these recommendations. In this paper we draw on an in-depth study that followed twenty one older person households in the UK over a cold winter and examined various aspects of their routine warmth-related practices at home and the rationales underpinning them. We find that although certain aspects of ageing did lead participants to feel they had changing warmth needs, their practices were also shaped by the problematic task of negotiating identities in the context of a wider stigmatisation of older age and an evident resistance to ageist discourses. After outlining the various ways in which this was manifest in our study, we conclude by drawing out the implications for future policy and research.

This article reviews work from across various disciplines that illuminates the changing ways in which people around the world manage their experience of local climate with particular reference to temperature. This topic is important because it has implications for issues that range from the rising energy demands associated with the spread of air-conditioning to the idea that future societies may eventually forget about the climates outside the buildings into which they have retreated. My purpose is neither to critique the various ways of conceptualizing the relation between human comfort and thermal environment nor to champion any particular argument about the mechanism that guides its development over time. Rather the aim is to integrate a diverse set of studies into an evaluative account that foregrounds the cultural differences and geographical dynamics now characterizing the ways in which people relate to outdoor temperature. Many of us now spend a great deal of our time surrounded by controlled bodies of ambient air which may superficially seem appropriately civilized. Yet this same situation could easily end up making us less willing to experience our local climates and more reliant on some quite resource hungry technologies. Changing practices of coping with outdoor temperature should be examined further. WIREs Clim Change 2011 2 170–184 DOI: 10.1002/wcc.106 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website

This paper considers the possibility of overt political disagreement between human geographers and their students. Recent literature suggests that geographers should encourage their students to become more politically engaged through innovative teaching methods that could include frank discussion of the various positions taken by lecturers and students alike. Yet this same strategy could easily run against established pedagogical arguments about how teacher neutrality gives students the space to develop their views in whatever direction they choose. This paper investigates the practical management of this tension by drawing on qualitative interviews with a sample of current practitioners that centred on the occasions when personal politics have previously featured in their undergraduate teaching. It describes why overt political discussion is often squeezed out of these encounters, the careful ways in which these academics manage their political views during the times when such discussion occurs along wit...

Though many people around the world now spend much of their time surrounded by bodies of controlled ambient air indoors, we still know relatively little about the subjectivities involved. Some have deployed the idea of air-conditioning addiction. Others emphasise the enjoyable sensations associated with temporary escape. The research described in this paper sought to add some empirical depth to these discussions by combining theories of social practice with a programme of serial interviews to examine how a sample of city professionals felt about the long periods they spent inside air-conditioned offices. The rationale was that, through these means, it should be possible to identify ways of disrupting otherwise habitual indoor existences and thereby discourage people from becoming increasingly reliant upon ambient conditions that are environmentally costly to supply. Describing their passage through a typical working day, this paper focuses on the moments when it might have occurred to them to spend time outside and how certain mental and material elements combined to impede the arrival of this decision. This exercise is used to draw out suggestions about how a better relationship between professional office workers and the everyday outdoors could be encouraged. The broader conclusion is that contextual studies which examine how places and practices produce decisions, instead of assuming individual people merely make them, have their part to play in fostering positive social futures.

How might the fact that western people now spend so much of their time indoors impact upon techniques for studying urban greenspace experience? This paper takes this question as its starting point before substantiating one possible answer. It does so by using qualitative methods to examine the everyday practices of city professionals in London and what they tell us about the likelihood that this group will ever venture out into the various parks and gardens found around their offices. Many studies have considered which physical arrangements of city greenspace seem to deliver the greatest amounts of human benefit. Yet this kind of endeavour gives us only one part of the puzzle and contextual studies with those now generally found indoors have something important to add. It is with this in mind that the paper discusses how one sample of office workers quite easily forgot about these spaces, how certain social injunctions both pushed them outside and sealed them indoors, and why it sometimes made good sense for them to avoid any areas of local outdoor vegetation during the day. In so doing it highlights contextual dynamics that seem set to make significant impacts on the future of urban environmental experience and offers some novel suggestions about how best to promote positive greenspace relations in cities today.

Statistical studies indicate that many people across the industrial west are decreasingly inclined to respond to seasons by behaving differently during particular phases of the year and one of the most popular explanations is they are now spending more time than ever within climatically controlled indoor environments. Yet, whilst this trend has clear implications for issues that range from sustainable resource use to wider human wellbeing, little is currently known about the cultural dynamics involved and how they are subjectively experienced. This paper argues that geographers are well placed to address this issue and demonstrates one way of doing so by using concepts of social practice to examine the working lives of professional office workers in London. Superficially this group would seem to be leading the march indoors as they spend long periods cocooned within corporate blocks pumped full of mechanically conditioned air. It was therefore worth examining the degree to which they were already insulated from the experience of seasonal change and the extent to which they ever struggled against this condition. This paper does so by considering how easily they were captured by habits that effectively rendered them oblivious to this gradual environmental process. It ends by reflecting on the wider implications of this situation in terms of usefully disrupting routine behaviour and studying climate change.

This commentary considers the recent Building Research & Information special issue titled ‘Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society’ and what it suggests about how to conduct contextual studies of thermal comfort. Firstly, consideration is given to the places within which comfort is examined and how research might beneficially trespass beyond the borders of the building to explore how lifestyles combine various places with a range of social expectations and techniques for managing personal temperature. Secondly, the suggestion is that whilst it could be worthwhile to examine various lifestyles, contextually sensitive researchers must select the groups they study carefully and acknowledge the limitations associated with this choice. Thirdly, it considers which practical methods are most appropriate for this line of research and how existing approaches could be supplemented by techniques currently uncommon in this field. The overall argument is that qualitative approaches with groups of current users could identif...

There are many factors shaping the relationship between human bodies and their immediate environments and the mechanical control of ambient thermal conditions is playing an increasingly important part. It is with this in mind that this article travels to the tropical island of Singapore where the assumption that the air surrounding people should generally be cooled has quietly become entrenched. Specifically we focus on the young people we find in this country and consider how the presence of air conditioning has become implicated in particular combinations of social practice and sensual expectation amongst this group. The conclusion we draw is that it is only by attending to the contextual interplay of bodies, clothing and immediate climate that we gain the fullest sense of the processes underwriting a much wider retreat into indoor social spaces where these elements could be usefully understood as the material culture of routine human encasement.

Machines that provide people with nearby sources of outdoor warmth have become increasingly popular in the UK as a crop of mushroom-shaped technologies has started to spring up outside many public houses and private homes in this country. Yet this development has also received considerable condemnation from advocates of sustainable consumption, who have seemingly been disgusted by the societal self-indulgence that they see in these devices. Moving away from these more immediate forms of outrage, this paper enriches our understanding of their arrival by considering these heaters in terms of cultural conventions of thermal adaptation and the changing geographies that can be attached to them. Through these means, it is argued that a more nuanced understanding of why these technologies have become prevalent is produced and that an existing disciplinary interest in embodied outdoor experience is taken towards some important new spaces for study.

Though domestic gardens are often understood as places where the people of Britain are happy to host a variety of living things, it is worth examining the factors that will collectively decide whether this continues to be the case. This paper considers some of these factors by developing a particular argument about practice and using it to scrutinise certain forms of talk associated with the contemporary acquisition of plants. More specifically, it is interested in how current consumer trends may be somewhat inadvertently encouraged by the group of people we understand as garden designers. By attending to how these designers handle particular points during the client consultations they convene, it examines why the notion of an animate garden can sometimes become uncomfortable for them and what this means for the gardens they subsequently supply. Moments such as these often seemed to go unnoticed by the people involved. Yet they are collectively likely to make a considerable impact on what comes after them and my central argument is that we could usefully investigate exactly these points of passing discomfort when they show us how human habits can become gradually more entrenched and why sensible strategies of social interaction could indirectly influence the future form of many gardens in this country.

For some geographers, the world has become imaginatively alive with arrays of new nonhumans. Yet how well these vocabularies actually adhere to personal practice is something which could be better explored. Recent accounts of consumption, meanwhile, are committed to closely observed contextual experience. Yet, physical things can seem somewhat subdued in these accounts. With these ideas in mind, in this paper I align a geographical embrace of material vitality and an in-depth approach to practised consumption. I report on a period of ethnographic work with seven garden centres in London to reconsider the ways in which contemporary urbanites encounter the items on sale there. In the London garden centre there are some different ways of approaching life and some changing cultures of control, as the rumbling agencies that certain products purvey are both openly enjoyed and nervously negated. Exploring the unease associated with this situation and its impact upon personal behaviour and physical format, I reflect, in particular, on the current experience of plants. The conclusion that follows is potentially perverse as, although we can benefit from being with life, it seems that, in certain city spaces at least, we now deal better with that which is more dead.

Material culture, as a concept, is suggestive of control. Yet, when we acknowledge it, it becomes clear that all the physical things we handle have a degree of independence. Indeed, by exploring the ways in which this independence is intimately accommodated, a richer understanding of certain kinds of experience could follow. With this argument in mind, this article travels to some domestic gardens in north London to reconsider the human activities associated with the plants that are found there. In these sites it seems that amicable arrangements of entity only ever become possible through fully embracing the fact that those people involved own only one, amongst many, of the agencies in evidence there. In fact, whilst an idea of a successful gardener can connote an efficient exercise of power, I want to argue that the opposite is actually the case. My contention, therefore, is that, to fully find pleasure from plants, people must become enjoyably expert in understanding that any complete control is always unlikely, and this is a contention with some potentially important implications for current patterns of practice.

This article explores some new theoretical ground to reveal the many intentions at play within the home. Specifically, I am interested in intentions that are not always reducible to the human agency of the people that dwell there. Whilst we may imaginatively think that we are safe and in charge of the things surrounding us at home, all sorts of forces may be at work there, obscured, in part, by both academic and non-academic considerations. This article traces some elements of a science-studies approach to the network of many different jostling actors in the home space. Through reconsidering the natural scientist's approach to agency and the capacity of entities to object to what we say about them, it is possible to enliven a currently prevalent anthropological stance on home material cultures. From this vantage, we can productively expand the notion of home lives and reveal how things in the domestic are always less than fully domesticated.

Explorations of the boundaries between human culture and non-human nature have clear ethical dimensions. Developing both from philosophical arguments about the value of such boundaries and recent empirical work following the traffic across them, we seek to complement these discussions through a consideration of how these boundaries can be enacted by ourselves, as researchers, and the methods we employ. As part of an agenda seeking to reconsider organic agency within geographical narrative, we have been exploring different techniques for documenting the ways in which such agencies are encountered. Specifically, we are interested in plants and the ways in which they might be researched in new ways by human geographers. Based on two particular pieces of research into human-plant dealings, our aim is one of exploring their lively presence as part of a performative environmental ethics enacted, in part, through the very practice of the research encounter. © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Actor network theory has received considerable attention within geography. In this paper I suggest that geographers have looked at these ideas in a particular way and that this can be productively complemented by an excursion into the contemporary private garden. Through exploring the ways in which people and plants live together there, some geographical criticisms of a defined actor network theory no longer seem to necessarily apply to a more diffuse set of actor network ideas. Furthermore, these ideas can also provide a productive means of engaging practically with the material presence of things, insofar as this materiality is important in the constitution of human cultural experience.