ABSTRACT
Reflection On a spring, Thursday afternoon I left my campus offi ce, descended the horseshoe staircase and made my way to the car. I walked under giant trees that outpaced my age by decades, passed memorials to the American Civil War, and settled in for a quick trip across town. From campus, I made my way across railroad tracks and into a parking space across the street from a sawmill, directly in front of an old, windowless bar. On other days, I kept driving, barely noticing the landmarks as I traversed the familiar pathway home. On Thursdays I elected to stop, leave my car and enter an atmosphere lit by the neon lights of beer signs and pinball machines. In this space I was greeted with wary suspicion – not coming often enough to be a regular, my accent and mannerisms revealing my geographical misplacement. I stopped at the bar to break up routinized movement in comfortable spaces, to become attuned to the feeling of being out of place. The act of inquiry requires sensitivity to space, an ongoing refl ective process that informs and extends beyond the analysis of data, that make ‘facile gestures diffi cult’ (Foucault,1988: 134).
