"Keeping Shop, Shaping Place" is the visual field blog for my PhD project underway in the Cultural Geography Department at Royal Holloway. The project's full title is: Keeping Shop, Shaping Place: The Vernacular Curation of London's Ad Hoc Consumption Spaces. It is supervised by Professor Phil Crang and advised by Professor David Gilbert. To put it plainly, I am interested in the organisation of stuff in shops that may lack top-down, over-arching design coherency. These spaces may include corner shops, newsstands and kiosks, pound shops, souvenir shops, and places where multiple businesses share space to sell goods and services. Because these everyday commercial spaces do not employ top-down design strategies, daily practice is evident in the organisation of things.
My work has three foci. (I) It explores the relationship between things and the complex materiality of these spaces. In particular, I focus on the relationship between the organisation of objects and their associated brands, including the London brand and other corporate identities. (II) It considers the relationship between shop-keepers and objects. This includes an exploration of materialities, agency, and flow -- how global bodies and global things interact. (III) It investigates how the curation of these ad hoc spaces moves within larger geographical imaginaries of neighbourhood and nation.
Overall, my research asks: What forces and matters shape the vernacular curatorial process in ad hoc consumption spaces and how does this process, in turn, shape relationships between objects, bodies, and imaginations?
This project draws together my backgrounds in fine and applied art, town planning, and social science. It employs mixed methods, including: ethnographic analysis, semi-structured interviews, material and biographical analyses of objects, an analysis of place-shaping policies, photographic documentation and alteration, cataloguing, mapping, and this visually-oriented field blog.
I hope to use this blog to share my exploration of these places, with the shop-keepers I work with and with the wider public.
This project is generously supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Royal Holloway, and the Department of Geography.
