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.