Talking on the move: place‐based interviewing with undergraduate students.

Abstract

Recent research has begun to pay attention to the importance of place to the research encounter. This paper makes a contribution to these discussions through an investigation into the lived experiences of higher education students. Although there is a burgeoning literature on what has been termed ‘student geographies’, there has been relatively little attention focused on the methods that we might employ in exploring these geographies. Here we consider ‘walking interviews’ as an approach to helping better comprehend students’ experiences and understandings of University towns and cities. Accompanying students ‘in the field’ allowed us to explore students’ narratives ‘in place’ while seeing first hand how some of the multi-sensual and multi-layered experiences of place might be captured and interpreted. We argue that such place-based interviews allow us to ‘get into the gaps’ of student experiences and understand how students’ dynamic relationships with place shape their conceptions and narrations of their term-time location.