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that are ethnographic. As new understandings of scale as socially constructed rather
than fi xed have emerged (Smith, 1993), however, the local scale has become more
than a recipient of impacts, it has also become the 'ground of globalisation' (Katz,
2001) and the site where processes operating at a variety of scales are manifest 'in
location' (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997). As a result of this recasting of scale, it becomes
clear that ethnography can offer insight into and give meaning to a range of processes
once thought inaccessible via methods limited to assessments of only 'the local'.
Using ethnographic methods, environmental geographers are breaking new
ground and producing nuanced and grounded understandings of global (or local/
global) processes. For example, environmental geographers have addressed the
varying impacts of global climate change on places and people possessing different
economic power and differing in terms of gender and race (Leichenko and O'Brian,
2006), explored the differential impacts of hazards, both natural and technological
(Steinberg and Shields, 2007), documented the varying environmental outcomes of
economic globalisation as well as resistance to it (Wolford, 2006), and, building
upon political ecology traditions, compellingly revealed the diverse consequences
of the global move towards neoliberal forms of natural resource management
(Robertson, 2004).
Ethnography's Practices
Much of the above assumes a 'new' ethnography. How that new ethnography might
be actually practiced relative to environmental geography will be discussed below.
We focus on an ethnography transformed by critical social theory. We discuss the
implications of such an approach to the politics of research and as a dynamic
method that mixes and merges with other geographic methodologies (e.g., GIS) and
approaches to knowledge production.
Politics and participation
In environmental geography, being effective demanded a rigorous collection and
rational analysis of environmental and social data as a way to achieve better
resource management practices. Today, environmental geographers are more acutely
aware of the non-instrumental and, perhaps, unplanned or unseen effects of their
research and knowledge production (Castree, 2003). This is especially true as they
strive to integrate more local social and cultural processes into their research and
are encountering the well-known problematics of representation. For example, the
very identities of research subjects and of researchers, the motivations and expected
behaviours of resource dependent communities, etc. are constituted '
in
the action
of knowledge production, not
before
the action starts' (Haraway, 1997, p. 29,
emphasis in original, quoted in Sundberg, 2004, p. 46). How identities are consti-
tuted is complicated and made political by the unequal power relations between
researchers and their subjects.
The positionality of researchers relative to the researched has been widely debated
and addressed in the literature (see Crang, 2003 for a recent overview) and ethno-
graphic research, perhaps, most clearly illustrates the power dynamics of research
due to its history of representing others as well as its overt embodied nature. Geog-
raphers have also attempted to address the problematic of unequal power between
researcher and subject. They have, for example, volunteered skills to assist in com-
