Geography

Profile

Tara graduated from Royal Holloway (University of London) in 2003 with a BSc (Hons) in Geography. She then went on to complete an MA in Cultural Geography Research (Royal Holloway, 2004) before taking time out of academic study to work in the area of Special Educational Needs in secondary education. Tara then returned to Royal Holloway to complete a PhD in Human Geography (2009) and Postgraduate Certificate in Skills of Teaching to Inspire Learning (2006). Following completion of her PhD, Tara joined the Department of Geography at the University of Exeter in 2009 as a Teaching Fellow. In 2011, she was awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she completed at Exeter alongside a period as Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Children and Children Studies at Rutgers (Camden) in the US. Following completion of her postdoctoral studies, Tara joined Geography at the University of Portsmouth as a lecturer. 

Tara is a member of the International Toy Research Association and Play England, and an Associate of the Higher Education Academy.

Research interests

Geographies of Material Sensibilities

In relation to a commitment to embodied practice and non-human agency, my research examines how material geographies and sensuous geographies can inform each other in productive ways around questions of tactility, affect and relational agency. Through my ethnographic work, I actively craft animated geographies of material relations which are punctuated with an array of provocations to action and feeling. As a geographer, it is not only the material relations between people and things that are of concern to me, but also the imaginative spaces that can be configured through these relations. I am particularly interested in conceptual and empirical distances and folds between such spaces and spaces of the ‘real’. Or to put this another way, how imaginative spaces are enacted in and of the everyday. To date, my research has engaged with magical, miniature and virtual spaces configured through playful practices with toys.

Ludic (or playful) Geographies

My interest in play extends to it role across the lifecourse, and coalesces around three key themes: the relation of play to the everyday, a reconfiguration of the politics of play toward an inwardly oriented vitality, and the ways in which play exceeds representation. I am particularly interested in exploring how play’s potential for reconfiguring the self and time-space marks it as a geographical concern, its critical potential in terms of a form of coming to consciousness and a way to become other, and its role in cultivating ethical generosity. For me, the term ludic geographies is useful for denoting both the study of being playful beyond the preserve of children and a playful way of working as geographers. 

Affirmative Modes of Critique

Inspired by the affection, passion and vitality I witnessed during my ethnographic research on children’s embodied relations with toys, I am interested in the critical and ethical potential of playful ways of being and doing. Recently, I have been exploring this potential in relation to commodity activism. This has involved examining how play, humour and enchantment might be used to provoke ambivalent relations with commodities, providing the spark of energy needed to act on social injustices and mitigating against feelings of impotence in the face of the repressive power of capitalist relations. This work forms part of a broader concern with affirmative modes of critique. Shifting away from objective moralistic judgment, affirmative critique is concerned with ways of opening up new possibilities and potentialities for the future through the cultivation of affective attachment.

Creative Methodologies

Influenced by my concern with material and sensuous geographies, I am interested in exploring ways of investigating non-cognitive and profoundly practical knowledges. To date, this has involved experimentations with ethnographic and ethnomethodological approaches and video technologies (see Woodyer 2008), but I am also currently exploring the possibilities of new media. Beyond a purely practical level, I am interested in the ethical implications/opportunities presented by such methodologies. In particular, challenging the privileged position cognitive and linguistic competences hold in the fashioning of the ethical subject, cultivating ethical sensibilities that are responsive to the affective dimensions of everyday encounters, and reconfiguring the politics of knowledge production.

Supervision opportunities

Students wishing to pursue PhD research within any of the above areas are encouraged to email Tara directly.

Publications

Woodyer, T. (2013) Play, in Gallacher, L. (ed) Children's Cultural Worlds, Bristol: The Policy Press

Woodyer, T. & Geoghegan, H. (2013) (Re)enchanting geography? The nature of being critical and the character of critique in human geography, Progress in Human Geography

Woodyer, T. (2012) Ludic geographies: not merely child's play, Geography Compass, 6 (6), 313-326

Cook, I. & Woodyer, T. (2012) The Lives of Things, in Barnes, T., Peck, J. & Sheppard, E. (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell

Woodyer, T. (2011) Toys, in Southerton, D. (ed) Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, London: Sage

Woodyer, T. (2008) The body as research tool: embodied practice and children's geographies, Children's Geographies, 6 (4), 349-362