Despite continuing work within feminist research on issues of political commitment and critical forms of engagement, and an increasing desire within geography to effect social change through our privileged positions as academics, active collaboration with groups involved in social action continues to be fraught with ambiguity and anxiety. /n this paper, I consider the potential role of the 'researcher as activist' through documentation of my interaction and repositioning of identities while becoming involved in credit union development in Kingston upon Hull. I hope to illustrate how the maintenance of a critical, multi-positioned (and repositioned) identity can be seen as a beneficial, reflexive learning experience for researchers operating within ethnography, and for the research itself.

and in the wake of the invitation to write a series of reports documenting the recent 'rise' of public geographies, I decided it would be interesting (if not potentially fruitful!) to consult a 'public' about their perceptions and understandings of 'public geographies'. So I sent email messages out into the ether asking for 'geographers' views upon, and any examples of, apparently 'public'-ly orientated work. 1 This request was fairly open and non-directive in that I genuinely wanted to see how members of lists such as the Critical Geography Forum, LeftGeog, and so on would respond -what they thought 'public geographies' were. The only real hint towards where I thought any discussion might go concerned the suggestion for respondents to think 'beyond (but including) journals, beyond the RAE, beyond the academy, beyond the UK/USA ...'. 2 Responses suggested that 'public geographies' are multi-faceted, multiple, plural, engaged, engaging, amorphous, unbounded, and uncertain. That much is certain. Many argued that 'public geographies' are part of the geographical furniture, a 'fi eld' maybe, but not just a 'fi eld', a tradition, what we all do, from 'where we are at' (of course). Many

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Duncan: I was invited to contribute to a two-day seminar on the theme of co-authorship and public geographies held on the 6 and 7 April 2006. When advertised, the call for participation noted how, "In the wake ofand alongside-Michael Burawoy's championing of a new public sociology, a variety of geographies are now emerging which call themselves 'public'". For example, Derek Gregory and Michael Dear have embarked on a very public geographies project, whose aim is to inject geographers' views on important debates into public debate; Noel Castree (2006) has been admiring the recent "public intellectual" writing of geographers David Harvey, Michael Watts and Neil Smith; and Kevin Ward (2005) has been asking what geographers can learn from debates about public sociology. A new field of "public geography" is, we believe, beginning to take shape. So, for this symposium, we have given a diverse group of speakers a simple brief: to talk on the theme of "my public geographies, our public geographies". I was asked to speak alongside Don

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