ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the possibilities for participant observation of an event which the researcher is unable to attend. In this case, a ‘performance walk’ – for which I provided a score of tactics – in London, from Dolphin Square to the MI6 building; spaces associated with recent ‘establishment’ sexual abuse scandals. The chapter describes what is revealed for the researcher in the space left by ‘not turning up’; how absence can be a usefully transparent companion to the reading of a site through the close engagement of a researcher’s present body.
