5.2 Being-in-the-world back to the things themselves
5.2.2 Talking, walking, and video-recording
97 | P a g e assumes a point of view from which, in the resultant perception field, the people labelled ‘street kids’ come into view and are experienced (Bannan, 1967: 111; Cohen and Omery, 1994). These
‘street kids’ also experience the presence of the street vendor – under the banner of whatever label the ‘kids’ individually give him or her – in the same manner of possible view point brought into view and experience.
The foregoing arguments of phenomenology do work rather well into the aims of this research undertaking. This should be especially evident when recalling the preamble of this chapter. I have already made mention that I look to understand how students experience their emplacement within their respective tertiary education institutions through walking. At its most rudimentary explanation this research undertaking is a look at how immersion within scenes of images feeds into the experience of the emplaced individual. This is to document and interpret how it is that individuals, as contextualised individuals, walk into and out of the constituent parts/scenes of their lifeworld as qualities that are either consequential or inconsequential to the overall quality of experience of site and situation. Within this broad phenomenological approach, in this thesis I am interested in particular in what it means existentially to be a walker of a tertiary education institution.
98 | P a g e This is to say that within phenomenological studies the interview is basically that interaction between researcher and participant which is utilised to gain the essence of experience as it turns data into information (see Seidman, 1998; Fontana and Frey, 2000; Glesne, 2011; Cresswell and Poth, 2017). In my interviews I had an extended talk with each participant about their experience of emplacement. Participants communicated to me their rich information about their experience(s) (Rubin and Rubin, 2005:13).
In order to keep close to the ‘spirits’ working my dissertation I conducted my interviewing as I walked alongside the participant (see Lee and Ingold, 2006; Ross et al., 2009; Brown and Durrheim, 2009). Mobile interviewing is a form of ‘talking’ which is engaged in as both participant and researcher are in motion. In other words, I was talking to each participant as we moved upon site and situation. This should not be surprising as the aim was to extensively reflect upon site and situation with the participant. It was only fitting that the site and situation was actually walked upon during this process.
Picture 2: Pictures of participants walking around Rhodes University. All the pictures are in point-of- view style as the walk is often an experience that depends largely on the roving eye. In the first two pictures the participants have noticed parts of their bodies within the picture taken. In the last picture the participant is highlighting how the point-of-view style of taking videos can lead to certain things being obscured – the individual behind the tree being a case in point.
99 | P a g e There are numerous advantages to this style of interviewing – especially when applied to studies of emplacement and its experience. According to Garcia et al. (2012:1395):
In a go-along interview, the researcher is able to move one step further, exploring the context with the participant in real time, with the participant in the role of expert guide explaining the meaning of the environment. A go-along interview entails embarking on a participant-guided tour of the real or virtual space within which the participant conducts his or her life.
This is to say that not only does the interview process firmly place the participant in their lived world, lifeworld, and place world, but it also goes further and makes them the expert guide through this world of differing significances. Such a dynamic of the interview process empowers the participant tremendously as yet another important phase of the interview (in this case the backdrop) is completely left to their discretion as the most fitting way to ‘unfold’ the site and situation of experience (see Anderson, 2004; Hall et al., 2008; Ingold and Vergunst, 2008;Brown and Durrheim, 2009:917). Ultimately, talking while walking will ensure that as much data as possible will be captured as the participants try their best to ‘unfold’ their lifeworld as one laid out in real-time for them for just this very unfolding (see Wylie, 2005, 2006).
For the interviews I used a video recorder with photograph-taking capabilities as my data collector/recorder (see Pink, 2007; Brown et al., 2008). This decision was also in line with keeping true to the aim of the project. The research undertaking was fundamentally one obsessed with walking as a way in which site and situation is unfolded. Walking is linked to viewing in a great many ways. The thought of an ‘unfolding’ is one of bit-by-bit coming to the realisation of (often connected) ‘points’ – whatever these are – being revealed as a ‘thing’
which is viewable. For instance, when one unfolds an origami bird one ends up with a piece of paper with creases that remain as evidence that one’s hands had indeed unfolded something that was once folded. The experience of emplacement is unfolded in this very way in this research undertaking. It is the essential creases and pockets of experienced folding and unfolding that I look to gain from my participants. The video and photographs act as a visual of the folding and unfolding endeavour.
100 | P a g e For the unfolding – already done in real-time and at the concerned site and situation – to make possible rendering a thick description in terms of capturing the essence of the experience, I talked to the participants extensively about their habitual walk and its dynamics (see Wylie, 2006; Richards and Morse, 2007; Ingold and Vergunst, 2008; Pink, 2008). The conversations started off simply with the rather general question of where on campus does the participant walk to; and ended off with the more individualised and complicated topic of how the walk most consequentially affects the individual’s experience of emplacement as one of the more pressing ways in which site and situation is taken in as a place of meaning and subjectivity.
The line of questioning is such that all aspects of habitual walking which may be thought of as contributing to some part of unfolding a place are engaged accordingly.