Critical moments in the production of `rigorous' and `relevant' cultural economic geographies

Abstract

While many commentators have recently argued forcefully for increased `rigour' and `relevance' within cultural economic geography, they have offered relatively less guidance on how we might achieve that in practice, according to criteria that are methodologically and epistemologically appropriate to the cultural turn. Within this context, I outline a series of feasible concrete strategies that researchers (especially those with limited resources of finance, status and power) might employ in the pursuit of these twin research ideals across five commonly experienced moments in the research process, namely: (i) development of research questions; (ii) research design and case study selection; (iii) data collection; (iv) empirical analysis and theory-building; and (v) write-up and communication.