In the last few years, there has been an exciting growth of interest in questions about what we do as human geographers and how we do it. Reflecting the general shift within the social sciences towards a reflexive notion of knowledge, geographers have begun to question the constitution of the discipline – what we know, how we know it and what difference this makes both to the type of research we do and who participates in it with us either as colleagues or research subjects An intrinsic part of these debates has been a greater self-consciousness about research methods. (McDowell, 1992a: 399–400).
