August 1st. That was the day I began working on pulling together my ethnography. I took 6 1/2 months to pull together my fieldwork. By anthropology’s standards, I guess it is not bad but if this was simply a documentary I would have shot myself in the foot.

So, the good news is that this past weekend, two new friends took me to four mysterious abandoned places in Gillingham, Kent. Vanishing Days and Solar Powered we extremely generous, articulate and helpful, driving me back and forth from Napoleonic-era stone forts to World War II gun turrets to an equestrian center abandoned in 1986. It was a surreal day (as it usually is behind the camera) with this added affectation that desolate places tend to have.

I also find, the more that I explore, is that the more intact a place is, and the more recently is was abandoned, the more eerie it is. Perhaps it is easier to connect with the history of those places when you imagine the people who lived their still roaming the earth and reminiscing about the places that you are watching sink into the earth for some future archaeologist to uncover.

This weekend I will be headed to an abandoned asylum with my second group of informants. More to come.

Now back to editing these three hours of derelict beauty!

Well, I have officially started pulling together my research for my first enthnographic interviews. I am trying to arrange to go film groups of urban explorers and infiltrators in London.

Unfortunately, this has been more difficult than I planned. Turns out that people who are trespassing as a hobby don’t really want to be filmed and/or interviewed. Makes life a little more difficult, but it is all good data on the practicality of doing ethnography and the difficulties of using video for research.

As of now, I am trying to post of 4 different Urban Exploration facebook groups, on a website called UER (where people were incredibly rude/incredulous/suspicious), on urbexforums and on 28 Days Later, all of which require months as a member before you are ‘trusted’ (which I guess means I have to prove I am not ‘the man’).

So much for jumping right into my research – I guess its back to reading Lefevre.

Just got back from a strange weekend at the 2008 CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) conference. Nothing about the conference was strange – it was brilliantly done actually – but I came down with a stomach virus the day before the conference and missed 2/3 of it.

Rather disappointing missing most of the conference as I have been waiting 2 years to go to one, but prospects for next year look bright.

One of the issues raised at the conference was that the website was not getting a decent google ranking. I came home and tried to verify this and actually could not find an ‘official’ CHAT website. If anyone knows where it lives, can you send me a link?

Hey everyone!

Welcome – allow me to introduce myself!

I am a new Ph.D. student at Royal Holloway, University of London in cultural geography. My academic background in anthropology and archaeology. My current research is on geographies of film and I spend more time shooting film than writing at the moment. I am also writing about cyborg culture and MMORPG’s (i.e. World of Warcraft) so you may find posts on that coming up soon.

On this site, you will find both my written work and my filmic documents. Between the two, I see the blog as an interesting way to chart my progress through this Ph.D. program.

I have been procrastinating on writing a blog forever and the way I finally convinced myself to start was to promise myself I would not become a Blog addict.

So, as for what you can expect here… Weekly updates. Or monthly.

More importantly, this blog will do two important things. One is that it will serve as my storage area for work so that hopefully someone besides my family will see it! The other is that I will post links to the goodies I find during the course of my research which you might find useful.

If you made it here on purpose, congrats on finding it! If you stumbled in, welcome and feel free to take your shoes off.

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