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worked well to contradict structural assumptions and to reinsert people's lives into
geography but it was not clearly linked to either a social theoretic or policy agenda
in geography. Ethnographic methods remained marginal within human geography
until at least a decade later when, aligned with feminist and post-structural critical
social theory, they re-emerged as not only explanatory but, potentially, as ways to
create knowledge that would inform change. As in anthropology, ethnography
became relevant to critical explorations of urban, economic, political, and environ-
mental processes across a variety of sites.
The adoption of a transformed (and transformative) ethnography is clearly seen
within feminist geographic scholarship generally (e.g., Katz 1992) and feminist
environmental geography in particular (e.g., Rocheleau 1995). As opposed to
humanists who argued for the inclusion and better representation of people using
ethnographic methods, feminists question the very possibility of any unbiased sci-
entifi c representation within a discipline founded upon masculinist practices and
ways of knowing. Traditional geographic fi eldwork, after all, presumes a heroic
(male) geographer traveling to observe other natural and social worlds while main-
taining an objective distance from the subjects observed (Rose 1993). To transform
the masculinist character of geographic fi eldwork (cf. Sundberg 2003), feminist
scholars argue for ethnographic methods as a way of co-producing knowledge with
subjects and enacting progressive change relative to both the researcher and the
researched.
Following Donna Haraway's (1991) concept of situated knowledge, feminist
scholars reconceptualise practices of knowledge production as neither objective nor
neutral but, using Cindi Katz's (1992) precise term, as 'oozing with power' (p. 496).
Feminist scholars call for research that is self-refl ective and conscious of its effects
on the people it studies and represents. In addition, they insist upon a research
practice aligned with a politics of emancipation and social change. A transformed
and broadly defi ned ethnography, often in combination with other methods, facili-
tates both as is clear in the case of much environmental research that not only
explicates environmental injustices but works to facilitate social change (e.g.,
Routledge, 2002; Sundberg, 2004; Wolford, 2006).
Much contemporary work in human geography is inspired by critical social
theories such as feminism and is, increasingly, informed by ethnographic methods.
Such research continues to engage a range of important and challenging issues that
are likely to be of interest to environmental geographers. These include, for
example, the meaning of 'the fi eld' and its masculinist character (Rose, 1993;
Hyndman, 2001; Sundberg, 2003); the gendered politics of fi eldwork (Katz, 1994;
Staeheli and Lawson, 1994), the ethical concerns and unequal modalities of power
between academics and research subjects (England, 1994); the politics of team
research (Hanson and Pratt, 1995); and the relationship of ethnographic methods
to traditional (quantitative) research methods (Lawson, 1995) or to new techniques
such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (Pavlovskaya and St. Martin,
2007).
That many of the above examples are from environmental geography indicates
that they address issues increasingly important to the latter as it too begins to rely
more on feminist and post-structural understandings amenable to and informed by
ethnographic research methods (e.g., Schroeder, 1999; St. Martin, 2001; Robbins,
2003; Wolford, 2006). Environmental geography, with its pragmatic focus on envi-
