ABSTRACT
‘Researching in the borderlands is worth the challenging methodological considerations that venturing into the new territory raises’, writes L. Abes, for whom doing so led ‘to rich new research results and possibilities’, ‘personal changes and heightened awareness.’ Having initiated a theoretical dialogue between themes of space, power and belonging, one sensitised to ‘the social as inexorably also spatial’. Case study offers a broad and flexible canvas on which to practise thinking spatially. As a method, it reflects the common characteristics of qualitative research: the significance of context and context-specific knowledge, the use of wide range of research methods in data collection and the positioning of the researcher as actively interpretive, seeking an understanding of subjective experience. The device of activity space enables a multiscalar analysis of each case study university without detracting from an idiographic emphasis on the particularity of each institution.
