Practising Human Geography

Ian Cook et al is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Exeter in the UK. As an undergraduate student at University College London in the 1980s, he stumbled across the tiny tradition of experiential geography in a module taught by Jacqui Burgess and Peter Jackson and went to the University of Kentucky as a master's student to learn how this was done from its main advocate Graham Rowles. Returning to the UK in the early 1990s to undertake a multisited ethnographic "follow the thing" PhD at the University of Bristol, he and fellow PhD student Mike Crang wrote a "how to" "Doing ethnographies" (1995) booklet for the Institute of British Geographers' Concepts and Techniques in Modern Geography (CATMOG) series. Scanned and posted online, a scribbled-on version was read and referred to in a surprising variety of publications as geography took its cultural (and ethnographic) turn. After SAGE bought the CATMOG series in the early 2000s, Mike and Ian were able to finish and publish it as a book in 2007. Professor Joe Painter focuses mainly on the prosaic geographies of the state. Chris Philo is a professor of geography at the University of Glasgow. His specialist interest is the historical geography of "spaces reserved for insanity," meaning people with mental health problems, across many centuries in Britain. He is fascinated by the history and theory of geography, as both academic subject and wider way of engaging with the world. He has undertaken critical-scholarly research on the geographies of "outsider" human groupings, including children and people with learning disabilities, as well as on the geographies of human-animal relations, rural geographies, and a range of health geographies. He has long been concerned with what psychoanalytic and psychological approaches can bring to geographical studies.