‘Never mind the bullocks’: animating the go-along interview through creative nonfiction

Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing enthusiasm for the use of go-along interviews to attend to the fleeting, more-than-human relational encounters that co-constitute people’s everyday experiences of health and wellbeing. Go-alongs are an approach to qualitative fieldwork in which research participants literally walk (or drive, swim, wheel, kayak and so forth) the researcher through their place experiences. While such approaches have wideranging advantages, there are growing calls to better animate the go-along encounter; to capture and convey go-alongs that are more vivid, sensuous and entangled with the dynamic meanings and materialities that shape everyday life. This methodological paper presents a creative non-fiction, produced as a tentative response to these calls, and designed to invite further reflection on some of the key challenges and opportunities of using such emplaced mobile methods within the social sciences. Situated at the under-researched intersection of critical disability and mobilities research, it draws on the findings of a two-year study that examined how people with sight impairment in the UK negotiate and experience a sense of wellbeing (or otherwise) with and through diverse types of everyday nature.