This paper explores how understandings of the knowledge and lives of individuals can be gained through making geographical context more explicit within qualitative research methods. The paper will focus on 'conversations in place'. More particularly, it will suggest that conversations held whilst walking through a place have the potential to generate a collage of collaborative knowledge. Drawing on the work of Casey, the paper builds upon the notion of the 'constitutive co-ingredience' of place and human identity, and, through using documentary and empirical examples, will argue that 'talking whilst walking' can harness place as an active trigger to prompt knowledge recollection and production.

Taking the lead from social science moves to frame places as “open-ended, mobile, networked, and actor-centred geographic becoming[s]” (M Jones, 2009, “Phase space” Progress in Human Geography 33, page 5), this paper introduces how the ‘surfed wave’ can be understood as a relational place. Drawing on commentaries from surfers on the practice of wave riding, the paper will show that the surfed wave can be usefully understood in two ways: as an ‘assemblage’ (see Delanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity 2006, Continuum Books, London 2006), and as a ‘convergence’ (see J Anderson, 2009, “Transient convergence and relational sensibility” Emotion, Space and Society 2 120–127). Whilst the notion of assemblage suggests that surfers, boards, and waves are ‘connected’ together to form one coherent unit for the lifetime of the ride the notion of convergence suggests that the surfed wave becomes a place whose constituent parts are not simply connected together; rather, their thresholds are blurred into a converged entity/process. Theorising from the sea in this way is an important move. It demonstrates how the relational turn can encourage us not only to consider traditional places in new ways but also to consider new (watery) ‘coming togethers’ as ‘places’. I argue that these theorisations from the sea offer new perspectives on more traditional (terrestrial) places and human relationships with them.

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A B S T R A C T This article focuses on the difference that place makes to methodological practice. It argues, following Sin, that the spatial contexts in which methods are carried out remain 'largely excluded from any theorization of the social construction of knowledge ' (2003: 306). Through viewing 'place' as both a social and a geographical entity (following Cresswell, 1996), this article argues that although the importance of social relationships in methodology is widely accepted (through, for example, processes of researcher reflexivity), the influence of the 'where of method' has received less attention. The article addresses this issue by arguing for the explicit consideration of the geographical dimension of place in methodology. It does so by introducing the notion of a polylogic approach to method. The polylogic approach moves away from the conventional configuration of method as a dialogue (e.g. between researcher and researched) and towards method explicitly including researcher, researched, and the geographic place of methodology.K E Y W O R D S : geography, methodology, place, polylogue, research A R T I C L E 589Positioning place: polylogic approaches to research methodology

Geography emphasises the spatial influence on human identity; however, this influence is often seen as exclusively terrestrial in nature. This paper focuses on a group of individuals for whom geographical identity is both terrestrial and littoral in constitution. It introduces how surfers' identities are not only defined by the terrestrial coingredience of the shores that support their surfing activity, but also by the littoral space of the surf zone itself. However, due to advances in transport, communication and surf forecasting, surfers are increasingly global in their search for waves. The paper goes on to demonstrate the effect of this mobility on surfer identity. It outlines how mobility dislocates surfer identity from its 'surf-shore' moorings and produces in its place a routed but rootless 'trans-local' surf identity. The paper examines the tensions and contradictions that arise between these spatially divided surfing practices before commenting on how surfers' shared affiliation to the littoral zone may offer the potential to reconcile them.