Performing ethnography: Irish traditional music sessions and new methodological spaces

Abstract

This paper attends to recent developments concerned with researching social practice, through an examination of the performance of Irish traditional music in sessions. The aim is to illustrate how to get at the spaces which are made through the practice of performance, and which are often neglected in conventional research methods. I claim that non-representational theory, as a supplementary, rather than prescriptive, approach to methodology, accommodates the reworking of several conventional methods, such as ethnography. After elaborating on the advantages of a ‘performance ethnography’, I claim that this type of research opens up two methodological spaces of access and knowledge/communication that should not be ignored within geography, because they draw attention to different ways of knowing and getting at space than conventional research methods allow.