Geocaching: Playful Navigation in Everyday Spaces

If you knew that there were secret worlds within our everyday, mundane surroundings, would you search for them?

Aided by a smartphone or other GPS-enabled device, this is essentially what geocaching asks you to do. In an outdoor treasure-hunting game played across the world, over 2.8 million containers are waiting to be found, the coordinates to their whereabouts posted online alongside hints and other information.

Inside these containers called ‘caches’ – whose size varies from ‘nanocaches’ less than a centimetre long to large boxes – you’ll find a logbook to record your visit, alongside any items left by previous geocachers, which you can trade for an item of your own. Inscribed with the traces of past visitors, the physical logbooks correspond to virtual logbooks at geocaching.com, where people tell the personal stories that accompany their successful or unsuccessful attempts to find the caches.

As these stories attest, the most valuable thing about geocaching isn’t even finding the ‘treasure’ – it is the journey you take to get there. Geocaching is a different way of navigating space. Through the format of a treasure-hunting game, and the use of mediating technology, it ultimately makes us care more about our surroundings. Both learning about places and actively creating new memories there, you become both witness to and participant within the drama of everyday life.

This post will share some of my thoughts and experiences when undertaking geocaching over the past two months.

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Re-programming the landscape

From the moment you load up the geocaching app or website, and see the waypoints of geocaches appear on the digital map of your local area, you enter into a new form of navigation. In the search for hidden treasure, the game takes you not only to places you wouldn’t go normally, but crucially enables you to see places you do visit regularly in a new light.

It’s surprising how rarely we wander off a small set of ‘usual’ routes in our daily lives. For me, this tends to be the walk to the train station, the walk through town to the public library, the train route I take up to London for university, the walk from the tube station to campus. But even deviating the slightest amount from these paths can lead you to vastly different experiences than those you would have on an average day. In some cases, these deviations can radically alter your perception of place.

Canterbury is a place I am very familiar with, having lived in the area my whole life, gone to school there, and now as a place I travel to nearly every day. Yet several times in the last couple of months, when geocaching away from my usual routes, I’ve encountered places I never even knew existed. The best example I can think of is my discovery of the world’s smallest chapel (according to the Guinness Book of Records) in the Hales Place area of the city. How had I never come across this before?

My perception of Canterbury changed perhaps most significantly, though, when on the trail of a cache in the Westgate Gardens. It’s a place I’ve walked through plenty of times before. But when I moved slightly off the beaten path, I came across a sign that marked the very spot where the London Gate – one of the old Roman gates that dotted the old city wall – used to stand. Through this gate ran Watling Street, the Roman road linking Dover and London that passed through Canterbury. All that remains now are two stones that mark either side of the old gate. The rest is up to your imagination – to try to visualise a road running through what is now a grassy, walled garden bisected by the River Stour. By seeking the geocache in a spot previously unknown to me, I’d become newly aware of the geography of Roman Canterbury, and how it corresponds to the present city.

However, not all of the geocaches I’ve found are in previously unvisited locations. Many have been in spots I walk past fairly regularly, which means I’ve had to abandon my usual, uncritical way of moving through these places and adopt the ‘geo-sense’ needed to find the caches. This typically involves being more sensitive to the details of your surroundings, including looking closer at objects in the vicinity; feeling around in places that aren’t exposed to the eye; or thinking carefully about the ‘hint’ given in the geocache description, and how it might relate to the place you’re searching.

For example, the cache pictured below is quite exposed as it juts out of a hole in a tree. But because the hole is just above eye level, and the cache is camouflaged, it took about 20 minutes of thorough searching to find.

Here are some more caches that required heightened awareness to find.

A microcache hidden on the back of a lamppost:

A cache hidden in a drawer built into a footbridge:

A magnetic cache hidden on the back of a railing:

All of these caches were in places I knew well. It was only through geocaching’s playful form of navigation that these ‘ordinary’ places became extraordinary, and my perception of these places was transformed. This is partly why Maja Klausen writes in her fantastic article that geocaching ‘re-enchants’ the city.

Of course, as you might expect when using digital technology, navigating in geocaching isn’t without its problems. The one I’ve encountered most often is poor mobile data signal, which prevents you from opening cache descriptions on the geocaching app. There is nothing more frustrating than wasting time pacing around to find a spot with good enough signal.

The GPS can also be troublesome due to its lack of precision at times. In the hunt for a ‘multi-cache’ at St. Martin’s Church in Canterbury, I had to gather numerical information from multiple gravestones in the graveyard, using it to complete the coordinates of the final cache location. However, because the gravestones were so close together, it became difficult to pinpoint exactly where I should be looking when using the app’s GPS compass. This made the search much more time-consuming than I expected.

The final technological issue was the life of my phone battery. I usually make sure it’s fully charged if I know I’m going to be geocaching for a long time. But because of the combination of using the app, mobile data, location settings and higher screen brightness when outside, geocaching can be a particularly sapping activity for batteries as well as legs.

So, when I say that geocaching ‘re-programmes’ the landscape, I mean to say that the new perspective it affords is dependent on a nexus of technologies that aren’t always reliable. Nonetheless, the playful navigation that this technology facilitates is one that can redraw your mental maps and reorganise the perception of your surroundings, transforming the environment into a game – something fun, challenging, and contingent – but ultimately more meaningful.

 

The secret society

While this game is now enjoyed by over 10 million players worldwide, geocaching is still an unknown quantity for the vast majority of people. When they walk outside, they almost certainly won’t be thinking that there are hidden objects in their surroundings. They’ll be occupied by the more mundane tasks of everyday life. As such – rather appropriately, in my view – geocachers call non-players ‘muggles’, after the term for non-magical beings in the Harry Potter universe.

However, even though muggles are unaware of the game, they still have a stake in it. If a muggle unknowingly discovers a cache – which can and does happen – there is a risk that it will be misplaced, damaged or stolen (‘muggled’). It’s also possible that the abnormal behaviour of players, both in hiding containers and searching for them in public spaces, will arouse suspicion and lead to security alerts and/or legal issues. This creates an additional challenge for players to negotiate, which requires care during both stages of the game: hiding and seeking.

During the hiding stage, geocachers must try to ensure that the cache can only found by those looking for it. This is especially the case in urban areas, where larger numbers of passersby make it difficult to be discreet. As a result, many geocachers have turned to increasingly elaborate ways of hiding caches, which have the additional benefit of providing a more interesting and fun play experience.

Although I’ve found many caches that are cleverly hidden (some of which you’ve already seen), my favourite example of an elaborate cache is one I found in Canterbury in April. After about 20 minutes of searching, I finally found a camouflaged flask which I thought was the cache. As it turned out, this was only half of it. Inside the flask was a set of keys, with instructions to press an electronic buzzer that was also included in the flask. When I pressed the buzzer, I heard a birdcall sound that led me to a fake birdbox attached to a tree. Using the keys to unlock the birdbox, the bottom opened out to reveal the final logbook for me to sign.

These kinds of caches are always the best to find, leaving you with a mixture of satisfaction, after the effort needed to find the cache; and admiration, at the effort and creativity of the cache owner to create such a fun experience.

Creativity is also often deployed when seeking geocaches. This is because geocachers have to somehow avoid drawing the attention of muggles, which unsurprisingly can be difficult when you are crawling head-first into a bush, for example (this actually happened). On the whole, using public spaces for anything other than moving from one place to another, or buying/consuming something, tends to come across as somewhat abnormal – hence why it is very easy to spot tourists when they stand still and look up wide-eyed at old buildings. To evade this kind of attention, geocachers therefore have to perform acts of ‘stealth’ as they search for caches.

I was caught in a particularly tricky predicament in April when geocaching by a pub in Canterbury. Because the weather was so nice, there were quite a few onlookers who were sitting at tables outside the pub. I knew that the cache was hidden on the underside of the bench I was sitting on, but I struggled to find a way to look for it without drawing attention to myself.

After briefly considering abandoning my attempt, I managed to devise a tactic where I bent down to pick up a pen I’d ‘accidentally’ dropped beforehand, using the opportunity to swiftly grab the small magnetic box attached underneath. Of course, I also had to be discreet when replacing the cache, after I’d signed the logbook. This time, I used what I call the ‘body-shield’ tactic – putting yourself in between the onlooker and the cache location. I got up from the bench and stood on the other side to block the view of the muggles, and then pretended to be looking for something in my bag as I nonchalantly slipped the cache back into position.

As you might imagine, it certainly feels like you’re playing the role of a ‘secret agent’ at times when geocaching. As part of this ‘secret society’, it is your responsibility to protect its secrets from those who could ruin the magic. This can be challenging, because in an outdoor, real-world environment filled with real people, there is always the potential for unexpected and unpredictable situations to occur. However, it is also this unpredictability that makes geocaching a continually enchanting and enjoyable experience for geocachers, as they improvise and adapt to their surroundings – whether that is by creating a fake ‘CCTV in operation’ sign to hide a cache in a car park, or pretending to tie your shoelaces when searching for a cache at ground-level. As Bradley Garrett writes about urban exploration, it is by becoming a gatekeeper to such “intimate spatial knowledge” that participants experience moments that are “empowering and exciting”.                          

 

A benevolent community

While acts of secrecy and intimacy are essential for creating these powerful experiences, they wouldn’t be possible in the first place without the commitment of the geocaching community to share interesting places, and their stories, with other people.

When geocachers decide on a place to hide a cache, they nearly always think carefully about why their particular spot is worth bringing people to. This could be a site with an interesting history; an area of natural beauty; or even somewhere to which the cache owner has a strong personal attachment. When the cache is approved and published online, this information is then often shared in the cache description alongside coordinates.

Reading these descriptions can give you a whole new level of understanding about the place you’re in. Before finding a cache hidden near the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, I read its description to discover a wealth of history about the theatre and its site that I’d never known about before. It turns out that the location where the current theatre stands used to be an Odeon cinema until 1984, when it was converted into the Marlowe’s second building. Its first building was demolished just before, and is where the current Marlowe Arcade shopping area now lies. Simply by reading this description that the owner made the effort to write – because they took an interest in the site – this interest was passed on to me, and I became newly aware of the history behind multiple areas of my city.

It’s not simply factual knowledge that gets passed on, though. In the description for a cache hidden in the Spring Lane area of Canterbury, the cache owner poignantly revealed that “this is near my old school which sadly closed down”. He was referring to Chaucer Technology School, a secondary school located a stone’s throw away from my own secondary school, whose sounds of lunchtime life I heard in the distance during my search for the cache.

As I walked past the old school, I thought about the stories of everyone who attended it over the decades – how this now abandoned site played such a formative part in the lives of so many people. I also pondered nostalgically about my own time at secondary school, as its sounds continued to echo through the streets. Through the sharing of stories and personal connections, geocaching immerses you in the narrative tissue of neighbourhoods, uncovering the emotional attachments that people form with places.

Alongside the cache descriptions, stories are also shared in the logs that people write after searching for caches. Although the physical logbooks in the cache containers usually only record the dates and names of finders, geocachers also write virtual logs on the online pages for each cache. In these virtual logs, it is customary for geocachers to tell short anecdotes from their time spent seeking the cache. Accounts typically include descriptions of the journey taken to the cache, muggle activity, the length of time spent searching, and ending with a thanks to the cache owner for the experience. Taken altogether, by inscribing your presence in a place through the act of logging, geocachers take part in a process of ‘story-stacking’ that ultimately fosters a shared interest in places amongst the geocaching community.

Logging also enables the geocaching community to sustain itself in a more practical sense, through the monitoring and maintenance of caches. In the event that a geocacher does not find a cache, they can write a different kind of log called a ‘Did Not Find’ (‘DNF’). If a cache owner sees that there are a number of successive DNF logs on their cache, they might suspect that their cache is missing or has been ‘muggled’, and can therefore make the decision to give it a check-up and replace it if necessary.

Occasionally, caches are still in place but need some kind of maintenance. From my experience, this is most commonly due to logbooks being full or damaged – therefore preventing other users from signing it – or damage to the cache container itself. As you can see from the pictures below, in two recent cases the logbooks I found were waterlogged.

For the first example, I wrote a ‘Needs Maintenance’ log on the cache page, including pictures of the saturated logbook. Explaining the situation, I also suggested to the cache owner that logbooks should be kept in a waterproof bag to prevent any moisture from causing damage.

In the second case I was geocaching with my Dad, who happened to have some spare paper in his car. We put the old logbook at the bottom of the container, covered it in a bit of plastic bag, and put the new paper inside a waterproof bag, making sure it was properly fastened.

Both of these kinds of actions are common in geocaching, and illustrate how the community is largely self-sustaining. It is almost totally through the motivation of fellow geocachers to share interesting places and fun experiences with other people that the game can continue. Whether it is through revealing historical facts, telling personal stories or physically maintaining caches, the geocaching community is benevolent because it is bound by a shared concern: encouraging people to care about the places they live in.

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As you can probably tell, the world of geocaching is one in which I’ve thoroughly immersed myself over the past couple of months. But this exciting, secretive realm isn’t a different world – it is our world. It is the one we live in every day. The magic is hidden in the mundane, if you know how to look for it.

Unfortunately, access isn’t equal. I’ve indulged myself with a premium geocaching membership over the last two months, which has cost me £4.63 per month (although it is much less - £2.08/month - if you decide to buy an annual membership). As soon as I upgraded, a multitude of premium-only caches appeared on my geocaching map. As a premium member, I also have access to more services on the geocaching app and website. The free service is great for newcomers who want to try it out, but I’d find it hard to let go of my membership now.

Clearly, geocaching isn’t an unproblematic activity. The technology can be inaccurate and poor network coverage can be a hindrance. Muggles can be difficult to avoid, especially in cities. Walking around can be tiring (but good exercise). The weather can be terrible. And some caches can be extremely hard to find.

Yet it is this contingency that keeps you wanting to explore, because every single experience is different. Geocaching takes the diversity, unpredictability and uniqueness of the places we live in and turns it into a game – something we want to participate in, learn about, and enjoy.

Course Update #2

Having reached the end of the second term of my Masters at Queen Mary, I’m confronted with a mixture of scary and exciting thoughts.

- All of my seminars have now finished.
- My dissertation idea is now well-developed, and the fieldwork will begin soon.
- No more twice-a-week commutes up to London.
- I need to work on two big pieces of coursework due at the beginning of May.
- I am already two thirds of the way through my course after only 6 months.

This Masters has really flown by, and yet I feel like I’ve managed to squeeze so many activities into the last 6 months, especially since the new year. This post will attempt to do justice to the superb experiences I’ve had this past term, both directly within my Masters course and through extracurricular opportunities.

Artistic adventures

This term has seen me take the last of my optional modules, ‘Art Performance and the City’. By exploring a wide range of works by artists and cultural practitioners taking place in cities – especially in London – the module engages with the ways that urban spaces are imagined, contested and performed.

Between the 10 seminars, assessments and associated excursions (see the next section of this post), we covered a breadth of thought-provoking and interconnected topics, including:

- Socially engaged (and site-specific) art
- Urban exploration and play
- Walking in the city
- Spirituality and ghosts
- Psychogeography
- Social housing
- Material transformations in the city

We would approach each topic not only by considering their wider theoretical background, but by focusing on particular examples of real-life artworks, interventions and performances. To help with this, we were fortunate enough to have visits from practitioners who have actively created such engagements, and thus were ‘experts’ in their particular fields.  These visitors were:

- Richard Wentworth: A well-known artist who works with sculpture and photography to explore the everyday materials and encounters that shape urban life. Richard talked candidly about his vision of cities (and London in particular) when he walks through them, and what seeing the city as an ‘archive’ can teach us about how urban life operates.
- Matt Adams: Co-founder of Blast Theory, an artist collective that uses to technology to create interactive performances and games in cities. He gave us some fantastic insights into the process and rationale behind Blast Theory’s urban interventions, and what the group ultimately aims to achieve through their work.
- David Roberts, whose performance art has taken place in social housing estates, with the purpose of creatively re-enacting their histories and building collective knowledge and experiences within the community through collaboration. In the same vein as his work, his presentation mixed together poetry, images and personal testimonies to explore the connections between people and the places they live, and raise questions about the politics of housing in London.

Aside from these visits, there were provocative activities in every single seminar, including visiting Queen Mary’s St Benet’s chapel; watching a video taken during the exploration of a hospital ruin; as well as various lively discussions and presentations about the artistic practices we were studying.

We’ve been given the chance to explore the topics that we ourselves find most interesting during the assessments. For the first assessment, we were asked to write 1,500 words about a particular cultural practice or practitioner of our choice, discussing how they might foster a critical understanding of art and urban spaces. I chose ‘psychogeography’ as my topic, wandering through its vague and meandering tradition and ultimately arguing that it is the contingency of the practice that continues its significance today, as artists, academics and others apply its concepts to both explore and creatively change urban landscapes.

The second assessment is due at the beginning of May, and involves our active participation in an artistic project of our choice to discuss in 3,500 words ‘how the geographies of cities are imagined, represented, performed and contested’ through particular cultural practices. For my essay I’m going to be looking at geocaching, which is a sort of worldwide hide-and-seek game where people hide containers with logbooks (and sometimes tradable items) in publicly accessible places, where people can find them using GPS coordinates alongside clues given by the creator. After doing a day’s fieldwork in Canterbury, I’m going to talk about geocaching in relation to psychogeography, in particular the themes of re-enchanting mundane environments and channelling the memories and emotions embedded in particular places.

In this fantastic range of activities the Art, Performance and the City module provided, I feel incredibly privileged that I’ve had the opportunity to study and experience so many works that interest and inspire me.

East End excursions

Both as part of my new module and outside my Masters course, I’ve been lucky enough this term to do a number of exciting activities around London, particularly in the East End.

In February I spent a cold, rain-soaked Saturday attending a protest outside City Hall against the privatisation of public spaces. The event was organised by Dr. Bradley Garrett –  a geographer known for his work on urban exploration – alongside a host of other speakers and figures such as Will Self, Mark Thomas, Anna Minton and Sian Berry. Despite the weather it was a great success, as we cleverly flouted the rules of this particular privately-owned public space by gathering in a group of more than 100, taking commercial photography and protesting under the guise of a ‘walking tour’.

Less than a week later I found myself staying late after my seminar at Queen Mary to go to another extracurricular event. This was a theatrical performance called ‘Re: Home’ in a small, makeshift venue in Hackney Wick, which revisited the lives of residents of the former Beaumont social housing estate in Leyton, who were interviewed for a theatre project called ‘Home’ 10 years ago.

I was offered a free ticket thanks to the generosity of a friend’s flatmate who was ill, and I’m so glad I took the opportunity to go. The script ingeniously weaved together the stories of individual residents, while the four performers gave uncanny re-enactments of the body language and testimonies of the multitude of residents that the performance covered. Shifting swiftly between contrasting personalities, whilst bouncing around the pine and corrugated steel of the former warehouse into which the theatre was crafted, it felt as though the Beaumont residents themselves were inhabiting the room with their stories. Using clever lighting and stage design, projections then imprinted these stories on the space, gradually assembling to create a sort of community mural at the end that proclaimed like an anthem to all that Beaumont represented for the people who called the estate their home.

While the protest and the performance certainly related to multiple topics within my course, twice this term I’ve found myself exploring the East End as part of the Art, Performance and the City module. The first was based in the area around Queen Mary’s Mile End campus, in which we were asked in groups to play the role of archaeologists from the future, gathering found objects in locations marked on a map we were given beforehand. The goal here was to create an ‘archive’ of the city, thinking about what material ‘things’ would best characterise the urban spaces we live in today. As well as being a fantastic opportunity to spend time in areas around campus I hadn’t thoroughly explored before, we also found a few interesting objects, including a ‘g’ page from a very old dictionary, and half of a cannabis grinder. We then discussed what we’d found in a seminar a few days later alongside Richard Wentworth, talking about how the design of the future archaeologist task itself is a clever way to get people to think about their city differently.

The old dictionary page





An area we walked through, near where we found the dictionary page.



For a different Art, Performance and the City seminar, we were asked to explore a little further from home – in the area of Leyton and Leytonstone in East London. Armed with maps, receivers and headphones, we embarked on an audiowalk called LINKED, which leads participants through the communities torn apart by the construction of the M11 link road (the A12) in the mid-1990s. Dotted around the area are radio transmitters mounted on street furniture, which the receivers automatically tune into when they are within a close enough range. What can then be heard is an evocative mixture of personal testimonies, music and sound effects that tell the stories of people whose lives were directly affected by the road’s construction, as houses were demolished, police undertook forceful evictions, and vociferous protests ensuedby residents and environmentalists. Despite doing the walk on a very cold (but sunny) February afternoon, everyone in my group thoroughly enjoyed the walk. There was a certain thrill when the sounds and echoes of the transmissions started to filter through, and listening to the stories in the locations where they took place only a couple of decades before was a very powerful experience. It allowed you to imagine the how the landscape was before – through descriptions of the buildings, the people, the events – and think about the hidden histories that lie just beneath the surface of the environments in which we live our everyday lives.

The last London-based excursion I undertook this term wasn’t part of my course, but was advertised by my course convenor and touched on one of my course’s key themes, public space. After helping out at the Masters reception evening in Queen Mary’s School of Geography, I met my friend Rosa and we headed to Bethnal Green for a talk and discussion about public space, hosted by the London Anarchist Federation. As well as contributing my own knowledge on the subject from Geography, I was intrigued to hear what an ‘anarchist’ perspective on public space might entail. As a group who opposes both the forces of capitalism and the state, the main speakers predominantly evoked the idea of the ‘commons’ – essentially the ideal of public spaces that are owned collectively and accessible to everyone. They then pointed towards the numerous examples of privatisation of public spaces in the city, and why opposing these trends is crucial for social movements such as anarchism to make their mark.  After the two talks, we then chatted in small groups about our own understandings and experiences of public spaces, before thinking more collectively about what action can be taken to establish the kinds of public spaces we want. While I can’t say that my viewpoint aligned exactly with many of the group, there was definitely plenty of fruitful crossover, and the talk definitely gave me plenty to think about.

Although it’s sad that I’m no longer going to have the fantastic adventures that my course modules have given me, I’m still hoping to have a lot of fun, exciting and interesting experiences in London and beyond in the coming months – not least through my dissertation fieldwork.

Dissertation decisions

At the beginning of this term, I was still torn between two very appealing ideas on which I could base a dissertation.

The first idea was to extend my research from my undergraduate degree on the regulation of busking, but this time looking at how it’s being regulated nationwide through Public Space Protection Orders, rather than focusing on one particular licensing scheme.

This was enticing as I’d already done a ton of relevant reading on the topic, which would have saved me a lot of time and energy. Moreover, my supervisor has some very in-depth and relevant knowledge on the regulation of urban space, and it’s a topic I knew that I loved researching.

Despite all this I opted for my second idea – something I’d been itching to research and write about for a long time, yet hadn’t had the opportunity: looking at video game environments, and how they are designed and inscribed with stories that the player can experience through (psychogeographical) exploration. Not only was this a fresh and exciting topic for me, but also for geography as a discipline too. It asks thought-provoking and current questions – on the relationship between the virtual and the embodied, what agency players can have in heavily designed and coded environments, and on how places (both virtual and corporeal) can tell stories.

A pile of books in my room that encompasses my dissertation topic pretty well!



I’ve now done a fair amount of reading and planning around this topic, which culminated in presenting my dissertation idea to staff and peers at the Masters Dissertation Conference. It was well-received, and I was happy to see so many people enthusiastic about the topic and sharing their thoughts.

Throughout April I’ll be working on my full research proposal to hand in as a piece of coursework in May, and after that it’ll be time to start my fieldwork. This will consist mostly of autoethnography, where I’ll be playing walking simulator games myself and recording my thoughts, feelings and experiences as I traverse the game environments. However, I’m excited to say that I’ll say be doing interviews with game designers too, which will help me to understand their outlook when crafting virtual worlds for the player.

Having already made several contacts in the industry during a couple of game events that I went to last week, alongside people I know through friends, I’m really looking forward to getting started.

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As you can see, this term has been an exciting and busy one for me. I’m actually quite sad that it’s over now, especially because now that my seminars have finished I won’t be spending as much time with the lovely, interesting and generally brilliant people I’ve met during my Masters course. Sharing seminars, lunchtimes and field trips has been such a pleasure that I’ve become accustomed to over the last two terms, which I’ll miss a great deal.

I’ll also generally miss learning about such captivating topics, and the teaching itself which has been excellent.

Onwards and upwards though, and I’ll be sure to do another update in the near future as I grapple with this next more independent phase of my Masters course.

MA Cities and Cultures class, 2015-16



Gender and Video Games: A Short Discussion

My friend and I were sitting on the train back to Canterbury from London, talking. As tends to happen with me, the conversation shifted to the subject of video games. We were taking about some of the recent trends in gaming, and I mentioned how I thought it was good that there are now more games with female protagonists.

At this point, a member of the public decided to intervene in our chat. At first I assumed he was going to tell us to talk quieter, so I was a bit taken aback when he blurted ‘Excuse me, but why do you care?’

He did elaborate, making a series of arguments in a discussion that lasted the remainder of the hour-long journey. These were his main points:

• That there was nothing stopping women playing video games before, so why should video games and the video game community change to accommodate them?
• That, as relatively privileged males, we only cared about the issue of women’s representation in video games in a ‘fake liberal’ way. He couldn’t believe that we really cared about the issue, continually saying ‘Do you seriously wake up in the morning thinking about how women are represented in video games?’

Let me explain how my friend and I responded to these arguments, and why I do genuinely care about this issue.

Firstly, if there were truly ‘nothing stopping women playing video games’ in previous years, then why is it widely accepted that male participation used to be much higher than female participation? Clearly there was some kind of obstacle for women, otherwise the ratio would have been nearer 50:50.

The answer is that the social norms of video gaming were gendered such that this activity was coded as an activity predominantly for young males. In the marketing tactics for video games, and in the characters and types of gameplay that these video games involved, we saw (and to some extent still see) the same stereotypes of masculinity that we see in other cultural products. For example, popular games involving themes of violence and warfare - such as Call of Duty - having exclusively male protagonists, and being aimed at young men through advertising. And as more young men than women continued to buy and play these types of video games, the norms of masculinity have become internalised, repeated and reinforced.

Of course, the scene in gaming has evolved a lot in the last few years. But as the recent Gamergate saga illustrates, these norms certainly haven’t disappeared, and are still actively asserted by some members of the gaming community. So much so that my friend Rosa, whose forays into game design are an endless source of inspiration and excitement for me, told me that Gamergate made her think twice about entering the game industry as a designer. And indeed, although the gender balance of video game players may be more equal now, this is still not the case for game creators (designers, programmers, etc.).

There are of course wider concerns here about women’s representation and participation in society, of which video games are just one part of the dialogue. Projects like Feminist Frequency, who actively document instances where video games (and other cultural products) use demeaning and sexualising images/representations of women, have parallels with campaigns such as No More Page 3. The overriding aim of these projects is to both illuminate and work to reduce cases in our culture where women – and in particular their bodies – are represented solely as passive objects of sexual desire.

Yet this work is repeatedly under attack by those decrying ‘femenazism’, and in the case of Feminist Frequency, gamers continuing to assert the masculinity of the practice of gaming. This repeated drawing of cultural boundaries has permeated our society, where even today a much lower proportion of women who play video games define themselves as ‘gamers’ compared to men. From the standpoint of an ideal of gender equality, which is something I wholeheartedly advocate, there is still a long way to go. Again, although progress has been made, the norms haven’t disappeared.

Another norm that I have been silently reinforcing so far in this post by talking about ‘women’, ‘men’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ as defined groups is the idea that gender is binary. Of course, as soon as I even mentioned the notion that gender is non-binary in our discussion on the train, the man we were talking to tutted, sighed and ridiculed. This is a crucial point though, because true gender equality necessitates a non-binary understanding of gender. When I say that I believe in gender equality, I actually mean to say that all points in which people identify on the spectrum of gender should be equally valorised and respected. I believe that this would benefit everyone – self-defined men included, who would be freed from constraining and dangerous norms of masculinity.

And this is the crux of why I care about the issue of gender equality – in games, other cultural products and society as a whole. We would all benefit as a result of true gender equality.

My friend and I tried to make this point to the man, explaining how having more games with female protagonists doesn’t mean that there have to be fewer games with male protagonists, or fewer games revolving around themes typically seen as ‘masculine’. In an expanding industry now worth £91.5 billion and increasing at 9.4% per year, video game culture isn’t a zero-sum game where making more of a certain kind of game will mean there is inevitably less of another. More than ever, there is room for video games that cater for a diversity of tastes, interests, and types of player.

Games have remarkable potential. They can immerse people in unfamiliar environments with exceptional detail. They allow you to play with your identity, taking on a virtual persona within these environments. They can foster communication and collaboration, friendship and creativity between people, even those who have never met in real life. They can make even seemingly mundane activities fun and exciting. They can present you with interesting problems, and ask you to find innovative answers.

In my mind, better representation and participation by all types of people in games can only be a good thing, because it will give more people access to this potential. Alongside the excellent work that the games industry currently produces, better access to the industry for a wider range of people will allow for new offshoots of creativity, ultimately leading to richer, more extraordinary, and more imaginative experiences that can be enjoyed by greater numbers of people.

 

Extra reading

For those generally interested in the topic, there's a fantastically comprehensive Wikipedia article covering the main issues, which can also point you towards further publications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games

Response to Camden Council's Latest Attack on Busking



Fredy Beats performing (https://www.facebook.com/fredybeats/?fref=ts)

Written alongside Jonny Walker, founder and director of the Keep Streets Live Campaign.

The latest episode in Camden Council’s ongoing crusade against busking, which is seeing two young performers facing a court hearing and charges of at least £675, is perhaps the clearest example yet of the profoundly undemocratic way that this council operates.

Camden is a Labour-run council in one of London’s most diverse boroughs, where over 140 languages are spoken and 12 million day visits are made each year for a taste of Camden’s vibrant street culture. You might therefore expect a more tolerant approach towards individual artists hoping to make a living through their craft. Instead, it is apparent that some elements of Camden’s diversity are favoured over others.

This current case is largely based on the complaints of a couple who live near Britannia Junction, the famous hotspot for busking beside the HSBC and Camden Town tube station. They are well-known for their opposition to busking, as their consistent complaints played a significant part in Camden’s decision to licence busking in November 2013.

However, when I spoke to them as part of my research into Camden’s regulations in 2014, it was clear that they had a problem with more than just ‘noise’. In fact, they have a dislike for any busking they deem ‘professional’ (which effectively means any busker with an amplifier) because they see buskers as people who are rolling in money yet don’t pay any tax on what they earn. The same complaints were made in this latest case, along with a spurious claim that busking causes pickpocketing.

And yet, as my research showed, they have a considerable amount of influence within the council. They are on first-name terms with all of the relevant council officers, and as articulate, wealthy, tax-paying residents with a large community network, councillors have always been keen to keep them on side. Based purely on their complaints and ‘evidence’ which consisted of a few photographs, council officers tracked one of the performers in the current case, Fredy Garcia, on CCTV multiple times and continually hounded him with emails telling him to go through the licensing process.

Fredy had good reasons for not applying for a licence. Costing a non-refundable fee of £47 for 12 months – and knowing other musicians who have been rejected and not refunded – Fredy couldn’t take the financial risk. Clearly, not many people earning a living through busking could afford to risk losing £47 in one go, or sit around for weeks waiting for their application to be processed.

And why should they have to? Because if you look at all of the photographic evidence being brought against Fredy, nearly every image shows him bringing smiles to the faces of everyone in the large crowds that he attracts.

So my questions are the following:

• How is it at all fair or democratic that a small group of wealthy, articulate residents have such a strong influence on those in power, while those on the receiving end of the council’s punishments do not?


• Why are people who are clearly making Camden a happier and more vibrant place being treated like criminals? 

Camden Council is an institution that is supposed to help, protect and serve all of the wonderfully diverse people that live and work in their borough. It’s time they started acting like it. 

A good start would be to not pursue unnecessary and draconian criminal charges against aspiring young artists, which cast such dark shadows over their future prospects.

Reflections on Cambridge

At the end of January I returned to my old secondary school, Barton Court in Canterbury, to run a session on applying to Oxbridge (Oxford or Cambridge universities) for year 12s. The plan for the session was to talk not only about the details of the application process, but also to discuss what life is like at these universities, and why people even decide to apply to Oxbridge in the first place.

The last time I gave a talk on Oxbridge at Barton Court I was in the first year of my undergraduate degree, and brimming with enthusiasm about my new step into academic life at Cambridge. This isn’t to say that all of this positivity has simply evaporated since then. But 3 years on, having finished at Cambridge and taken a step further to a new institution for my masters, I was certainly more reflective about my ‘Cambridge experience’.

So from the very beginning of my talk, I was keen not to simply imply that Oxbridge is self-evidently the best option when it comes to deciding which universities to apply to. I wanted to make the session interactive, listening to the kinds of impressions the students had about Oxbridge and how these initial thoughts made them feel – and then using my experiences as a lens through which the students could get a more rounded picture of what living and studying at Oxbridge gives you.

_________

Cambridge was extremely hard work in a very pressurised environment. The way memory works, though, means that the experiences you tend to remember most vividly aren’t the hours and hours spent in the library and writing essays, but those unique moments of Cambridge magic that make you realise how lucky you are. So when I’m asked to talk about what studying at Cambridge was like, it isn’t easy for me to explain to people the level of discipline I put myself through.                 

When I tried to give the students in my session a taste of this, the teacher who organised the session supposed that there’s lots of mental health support though, right?

When one student then described how a former Barton Court student who went to Oxford had to take a year out of their studies because of mental health issues, the room fell silent.

Although I said that I knew there were plenty of mental health services working with the universities, I couldn’t honestly vouch for their quality because I’d never used them. That’s not to say that I never felt depressed, or wished that I was somewhere/someone else. But when I did start to feel like that, I was working so hard that I couldn’t even allow myself the time to think it through. I couldn’t let myself go through the motions of wanting to stay in bed all day, or stare at walls and overthink things for hours on end. Because even if I caved in for one day, the towering mass of essays and deadlines meant that my problems would multiply, so I couldn’t stop. It felt incredibly unnatural – like not being allowed to grieve.

_________

The way Oxbridge works is that your workload and your course material is organised centrally in departments - in my case, Cambridge’s Department of Geography – while pastoral support and social life generally tends to take place within individual colleges, which are your home while studying in Cambridge. Although this sounds like a reasonable system, it has one fundamental problem - which is that the people responsible for your workload aren’t the same people who are responsible for your wellbeing.

If you’re having problems with your studies you’re encouraged to see your college tutor, who is purposely not a member of your department. While tutors on the whole can be fantastic when students go through major bouts of illness, personal trauma or other issues, they are pretty powerless when it comes to how work is set, collected and marked. And yet these things were the main source of difficulty I faced as a Cambridge student.

Put bluntly, I felt as though my department as a whole simply wasn’t invested in student wellbeing. There were individual staff members who were sympathetic, and would do their utmost to put you in the best possible position to tackle coursework and exams. And I certainly didn’t doubt their expertise as academics. However, there were so many relatively easy things the department could have done to make life easier for the students - but they just didn’t.

We got effectively zero feedback after exams. We would work ourselves down to the bone, go through the process of writing three essays in three hours for each exam, and then simply be expected to receive our final grade and suck it up. When I wanted to get some feedback on my final year dissertation, which I had poured my heart and soul into for over a year, and to which I felt a responsibility to my research participants who had generously given hours of their time to talk to me, the department was extremely reluctant to do so. My director of studies had to jump through so many hoops to be allowed to see comments by the two examiners, and even then I couldn’t read the comments myself, only being allowed to have them read to me in paraphrase.

An argument I heard was that we got all our feedback during termtime, when we handed in essays that didn’t even count towards the final grade. Although this feedback was useful for checking our understanding of the topic and general essay writing skills, writing one essay an hour under exam conditions is completely different to having a week to write an essay of given length, with all your notes around you.

This point was made clearest to me when I heard the story that someone in my year had been writing bibliographies at the end of their exam essays. Because this person didn’t get any feedback from their first year exams, they didn’t realise until halfway into second year that this wasn’t expected of us. If they hadn’t happened to have mentioned it in a supervision, they would have continued to do this in later exams, taking further toll on their grades. How on earth can this be allowed to happen in an institution renowned for its world-class education?

It was the same for coursework submitted during termtime. We would only get the results after final exams – again, without feedback – meaning that if you’d been doing anything wrong in your first piece, the same mistakes could be repeated for all submissions and you wouldn’t know any different, or generally how you could improve. Just to make the system even more user-friendly, for each piece of coursework we had to hand in a paper copy and an electronic copy on a CD – in person. For many, this meant frantic cycle rides from college to the department on deadline dates, and long queues for the printer and the undergraduate office where we would hand the coursework to the administrator.                                

Compare this to the system in place at Queen Mary, where I’m currently doing my masters. All we have to do is log in to the university’s virtual learning environment, QMPlus, and submit our coursework electronically in a dropbox where it is automatically uploaded to the plagiarism service Turnitin. From there we can check our scores for originality and get an electronic receipt to confirm that our submission has gone through correctly. You don’t even have to leave home. And then, within three or four weeks, we receive detailed feedback on our work with good suggestions for improvements. It is completely transparent, incredibly easy to use, and works efficiently for both students and staff.

From my very first induction session at QM, I could sense how committed the department was to making sure things worked well for the students. It was small things that just made life easier for everyone. Coursework deadlines are very well spread out. We’re given plenty of opportunity for supervision for our dissertations. Staff office hours are well-communicated and we’ve been encouraged to drop in whenever there’s anything related to our work that we want to discuss. Events within the department are well communicated, and through social media and the virtual learning environment, there’s a strong sense of community. Staff and students are in close contact.                 

Some positives are probably more to do with the fact that I’m now a masters student, as opposed to being at a different university – such as how we’ve been treated with equal respect as part of the department’s research community, and given equal access to spaces such as a kitchen and common room.

Maybe because Oxbridge places will always be so sought after, and their position at the top of the league tables is so cemented, these universities are less concerned about student satisfaction. At Cambridge I often got the impression that their outlook towards students was one of ‘tough love’ – that by offering less support, students would simply be motivated to ‘work harder’ to improve – without appreciating how this might affect students’ mental health, in a competitive environment that is away from the networks of support you have at home.

And yet, when you’re spending £9,000 a year on course fees and studying an arts subject with minimal contact hours (typically 5 hours a week for me, except for exam term when it was more like 1), it does make you wonder where your money is going if it isn’t being used to offer better services and support, helping students to improve and get the most out of their Cambridge education.

_________   

Of course the content of my talk at Barton Court was nowhere near as negative about Cambridge. My experience was of one particular department, so I couldn’t comment on how well other departments operated. But also, aside from the particular grievances I had, I did enjoy being at Cambridge. I learnt an incredible amount, and I am still grateful for having the opportunity to study there. I feel that my education there has benefitted me massively on the whole. I’m also extremely grateful to the generous individuals and organisations whose donations helped to fund the Cambridge Bursary I received every year I studied there, which was an enormous financial help. And for the year 12 students in my session, who clearly had some interest in applying to Oxbridge, I didn’t want to seem off-putting at a time when they are likely to be very apprehensive about the idea of applying to any university, let alone institutions such as Oxford or Cambridge.

The point I really wanted to get across to them was that no-one should feel put off from applying to Oxbridge, if going to these universities is something they want to do, and they are capable of getting the necessary grades. In the context of my talk, Barton Court is a grammar school, and the students I was talking to were all gifted and talented, so grades certainly weren’t a problem. But sadly some gifted students often still think factors such as not attending a public school, or not coming from a rich family, hinder their chances of being accepted.

So I was looking to use my experiences as an example to counter some of these alienating stereotypes. Coming from a low-income, single-parent family and having gone to Barton Court myself, I didn’t exactly match the image that these students had of an Oxbridge student. But I now know of many people at these universities who contend with much more significant disadvantages in their daily lives: such as people who grew up in care, and those with serious physical and mental disabilities. There is also more broadly a great diversity within the student population in terms of race, nationality, gender and sexuality. These facts should be a source of encouragement for those who are worried that their backgrounds will be a hindrance during the application process.

Given the myths and anxieties surrounding the process of applying to Oxbridge, the students I talked to were keen to hear real and tangible stories from someone like them. In particular, the interview is always a source of worry that is only made worse by the weird and wonderful accounts floating around online and through word of mouth.

In the 4 years or so since my own interview experience, my perspective has stretched and blurred somewhat. I actually had a really positive interview experience, parts of which I remember quite vividly. It was one of those cool, crisp and clear December days, and I had two late morning/early afternoon interviews at Girton College. For the first I had to read an article about rainforest beforehand, and then talk about it during the interview. Although I remember that this first one went well, the questions they asked and my responses are a complete blank in my memory. For my second interview, I very nearly didn’t get to the interview on time because I got lost trying to find the room (Girton College can be a maze at the best of times). I was expecting this interview to be the ‘nasty’ interview to counterbalance the good one I’d already had. But it turned out to be even better than the first. In this one, I was asked about my personal statement, my experiences doing the International Baccalaureate as opposed to A-Levels, and a few questions related to human geography involving population maps. Filled with relief, my Mum and I then enjoyed a completely free lunch from the college cafeteria. They always put on good food for the interview candidates, and we had some great fish and chips.

However, since talking to others at Cambridge, I know that not all interview experiences are this positive. Like with my first interview, though, most people can’t remember much about what was asked and what they said. In the end, the fact that these people were offered places shows that interviewers are looking for more than just perfect responses and 100% correct answers.

As I’ve found out, this is because interviews are effectively mock supervisions (called ‘tutorials’ at Oxford), which are the small group teaching methods unique to these universities. Although their focus and format will vary between subjects, you’re typically not expected to attend a supervision already knowing everything about the topic. The supervisor is usually more interested in how you approach the topic, and where they can possibly fill gaps in your knowledge to refine your understanding.

So for my year 12 group, the best advice I could give them was to not panic if they are unsure about how to respond to a question. I told them to stay calm and ‘think out loud’, talking the interviewers through their thought processes and explaining parts of the topic that they do understand, so the interviewers can see that their approach is rational. As a pre-university student, your knowledge of the subject is likely to be minimal anyway. What they want to see is potential, not the finished object.

Hopefully this is good advice.  Unfortunately schools like Barton Court - which don’t have such a big culture of people going to Oxbridge compared to public schools or even other grammar schools – can lack adequate knowledge of how Oxbridge interviews work, which puts their students at a disadvantage. If I can use my experiences to help with this shortfall, then I only see that as being a good thing.

_________

The other event that spurred my recent reflections on Cambridge was a dinner I attended in the city itself a few weekends ago. Hosted by my old college, Girton, the dinner was for all former alumni at the college who studied Geography.

After getting over the initial surreal feeling of being back in Cambridge for the first time since my sunny graduation in June, when I first walked back into Girton I was struck by how it felt as though I’d never left. I mean, 7 months isn’t a particularly long time to have been away from somewhere, but strangely I felt just as at home walking around as I did when I was an undergraduate.

After an evening of catching up with old friends, hearing about current students’ dissertations, and eating fantastic college food, I realised how much I missed the camaraderie of college life - the sense that ‘we all don’t really know what’s going on, but we’re all in the same boat’. Although I most certainly did not miss the workload and the intensity of studying in Cambridge, at least living together in college gave you the opportunity to complain about it and escape from it with each other, as well as sharing those moments of Cambridge magic that wouldn’t seem too out of place in a Harry Potter book.

Seeing new freshers at the dinner was also comforting – even though it made me a feel a little old – as a reminder of how I was in the same position once, when university life was all new to me. The cycle keeps on repeating.

I didn’t want the reflections in this post to come across as a scathing critique of Cambridge life. While I do agree with this article by a former Cambridge student talking about how the excesses of Cambridge traditions such as May Balls normalise a sense of entitlement, my fond memories derive from the people and the place rather than the lavish traditions per se. The alumni dinner itself cost £50 (certainly expensive for me, alongside train tickets) but I wasn’t attending it to revel in my privileged Cambridge status. I just wanted to feel part of my college community again.

_________

Ironically, if I could change one thing about my ‘Cambridge experience’, I would likely choose to have been more involved in college and university social life. In a place where the concentration of interesting people and events is maximal, I could have profited from this if I’d been more confident and seen the bigger picture. I probably don’t strike people as a terribly unconfident person. But even looking back on fresher’s week, I feel like I lacked the confidence to mix well with other people due to a combination of being a non-drinker, and the headspace I was in at the time. This almost certainly cut off social opportunities I otherwise would have had, and it was an issue that continued throughout my first couple of years before the stresses of final year took away any prospect of a thriving social life.

I’m glad to say that things are much better for me now in this regard. At Queen Mary I always try to be the instigator of get-togethers, and I love talking and spending time with the diverse and interesting people that I study with. I’ve also been doing quite a few activities outside of academic work, both in London and Canterbury, such as talks, artistic events, theatre, and generally meeting up with people. I think I find it easier now because I’m only at QM two days a week and I’m a master’s student, so everything feels much less pressured than when you’re living in the same college and city day in day out, amongst other undergraduates. It's sometimes annoying that I can’t do everything I want to because I don’t live in London – where there is inevitably great stuff happening all the time – but I really value spending lots of time in Canterbury too.

Overall, as I talked about in an earlier post, I couldn’t really be happier with my university situation now.

In both direct and roundabout ways Cambridge brought me to this point, even if the journey wasn’t smooth. So my overriding outlook now is one of accomplishment, looking tentatively ahead from a jagged summit of circumstance.

Exhibition Proposal

Over the winter break I had the challenge of completing two big pieces of coursework for my Masters. As well as a 4,000-word essay on public space, in which I investigated the implications of Public Space Protection Orders, I had a task that was somewhat less familiar.

This was a 3,500-word exhibition proposal, for which I had to set out my plans for a medium-sized, six-week exhibition on a geographical theme of my choice. Structured according to how proposals are typically written for museums and galleries in real life, I had to think about not only the overall concept of the exhibition, but also more practical considerations. This included the exhibition’s layout, its contents, educational and outreach components, the design of the panels, and the audience.

As such, it was quite different to the conventional academic pieces that I’m used to writing. Rather than repackaging other people’s ideas, I had to come up with clear ideas of my own, and a vision of how these could be practically presented to the public.

From the start I knew I was quite keen to diverge from conventional exhibition formats, where artworks and objects are put alongside panels that describe or give additional detail about them. How could I make the exhibition design more engaging, powerful and relevant?

My answer shaped the design of the whole exhibition: turn it into a game.

Rather than simply guiding visitors around the exhibition in a linear fashion, I wanted to challenge visitors to discover the story of the exhibition by themselves, giving them as little direction as possible. The visitors instead would be ‘detectives’ presented with a mystery, and the fun and intrigue of the installation would be in the task of solving it. For those familiar with the concept of psychogeography, this approach to the exhibition replicates how psychogeographers have explored and interpreted the city. This is also a technique that has been used in exploration or 'walking simulator' video games such as Gone Home and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, which were a big inspiration for my own game-like design.

Perhaps unusually, I came up with this idea for the format before I even knew exactly what the topic of my exhibition would be. Fortunately, the internet provided me with two fantastic sources of inspiration that directed my thoughts towards my eventual subject matter: the lives that people who migrate leave behind.

The first source of inspiration was a TED Talk by Anders Fjellberg, a journalist who told the story of the Wetsuitman. When two unidentified skeletons in wetsuits washed up on the coasts of Norway and the Netherlands last year, Anders and his colleague set about finding out about their lives, retracing their journeys from homes far away to their ultimate end in the North Sea. Their painstaking work spanning several countries revealed life stories that we aren’t used to hearing – those of two Syrian refugees who left livelihoods and loving families behind. Their aim? To show that behind every human body, every statistic, every newspaper representation, is a person with a story.

The second source of inspiration came as a result of the recent gun attack by a couple in San Bernadino in the US. After the attack, the couple’s apartment was opened up to journalists, leading to numerous images appearing in the media alongside speculation about what their household objects meant. In an effort to oppose the generalising assumptions that people were making, however, #MuslimApartment began trending on social media. People posted photographs of innocent, everyday objects in their own apartments, alongside sarcastic captions suggesting what underlying terrorist motives they revealed.

In how this trend reclaimed the humanity of Muslim immigrants through everyday home objects, it made me consider how a similar detective exercise in a ‘normal’ household environment could be a powerful method of telling the less spectacular, but nonetheless significant, stories of those who migrate that we rarely see documented.

Joining together these various trains of thought, I designed an exploration experience in which visitors would investigate replicas of rooms from the former homes of migrants. These would be built and arranged according to the migrants' own stories, recorded during participatory workshops with migrant communities.

Entitled ‘Another Life: Exploring the untold stories of migrant lives’, the opening panel of my exhibition gives an overview of this idea:

When people leave home to migrate, they often leave behind stories of a life and a livelihood that rarely get told in their new setting. Instead, we are used to hearing about ‘migrants’ in the context of statistics and government policy. While these wider concerns are important, they don’t teach us much about the people who migrate: fellow human beings with family lives, hobbies, possessions, ambitions, and memories. By learning about these details, we can begin to understand their experiences better and shed new light on issues around migration today, whilst also recognising both the diversity of our cultures and our common humanity.

In this exhibition, we are giving you the opportunity to play detective. By exploring the former homes of real people who have migrated, we want you to find out about their lives. What were their jobs? What did their home town used to be like? Why did they leave? These are just some of the questions you can consider as you investigate.

There are three homes to explore, each representing a different migrant community.  Inside the rooms, you will find all sorts of everyday objects, placed as they would have been in the original homes. You are welcome to touch, pick up, open and use objects in the rooms, but when you are finished please leave everything in the rooms as you found it. We also encourage you to use the tables and chairs provided to talk with others about what you discover.

We hope that your investigations give you insight into the intriguing hidden stories of people who live around us today in our villages, towns, and cities, yet have left another life behind.

 

So in total there would be three replica rooms, each representing a different migrant community participating in the workshops. For each of these communities, one person’s life story would be chosen as the main narrative, while all participants would be involved in decorating the rooms in a culturally-sensitive way, according to their own experiences. The individual life stories would be communicated through objects that contain a more explicit sense of narrative. This could be letters, electronic communications, diary extracts, and notes. As the rooms are replicas, however, all the materials would be created or bought during the production stage – unless participants would be willing to use relevant personal items that are still in their possession.

This image indicates what the rough size of the replica rooms would be, and the type of contents they would contain:

Source: http://norecipes.com/foodbuzz-24-24-24-no-menus-an-underground-restaurant-affair

                                                                      

For the purposes of this exercise, we were given unlimited access to resources for the exhibition, and freedom to choose where the exhibition would be held – providing that it was roughly ‘medium-sized’.

I decided that my exhibition would be held in the Contemporary Gallery of the Geffrye Museum of the Home in London. Not only would this location provide ample space and accessibility for all of the exhibition’s activities, but the subject of ‘home’ – and all of the material and emotional connotations that this word has – is central to the exhibition’s theme.

Here is my floor plan for the exhibition:

As you can see, my exhibition also has an area with tables and chairs provided for discussion between visitors. The idea here is that people can discuss any issues raised by the installation’s subject matter in a space free from the biases and generalisations of the media, instead being informed by the migrants' experiences themselves.

Additionally there are rooms where educational activities for younger visitors could take place. Outreach is an important component of the exhibition, and what better way for young people to learn about other cultures and migrant experiences than by immersing themselves in the everyday environments of these people.

Although it wouldn’t be part of the physical exhibition, another important component of outreach would be a parallel website, where anyone who has experienced migration anywhere in the world could tell their story through text, images, video and sound. Ideally, these stories could be accessed via an interactive map, so that navigating to certain locations on the map would bring up the stories of people who have migrated both from and to the area. This idea arose mainly from my surprise that there is no real substantial online ‘archive’ where migrant experiences are documented, with most stories simply being told through individual media outputs. By creating a website dedicated to preserving these stories, it would help build a legacy for my exhibition project, extending its impact both beyond the timespan of the exhibition run and also beyond the location of the exhibition in London, for those who cannot visit it in person.

_______________________________________________________________________

Another Life is an ambitious project, going well beyond the conventions and expectations of most exhibitions. It would therefore be difficult to organise if this were a real proposal, with a limited budget and other institutional and practical hurdles to negotiate. However, as my lecturer told my classmates and I, it’s a shame that there isn’t the opportunity for all of our exhibitions to be made. Between us there were some truly exciting and thought-provoking designs.

This is still an idea that I would love to pursue, though, and if the right opportunity arose it would be interesting to consider how I could develop this concept in a real-life context.

Regardless, designing an exhibition was a really worthwhile experience, and a fantastic chance to combine my geographical interests with my more creative impulses.

A Poem for New Year

Destruction is creation

So tell yourself

You've made a plan

You've got a structure

And as things unfold

Let life take hold