Drinking Geographies: Space, Place and Society

Alcohol amplifies or focuses our experience of particular spaces (Jayne et al., 2006)




We hope you all enjoyed our presentation/learning activity. For those of you who missed us the other week we set out to:

1. Explore the pub as a 3rd space
2. Examine some of the social issues surrounding alcohol consumption.
   

Whilst other academic disciplines have realised the importance of the linkages between place, society and alcohol consumption, we felt that geographers have barely scratched the surface. This formed the rationale for our topic and we chose to examine the public house and 'drinking space' in an alternative way; whilst looking at some other avenues of thought that we came across during our research, namely:

• The power of branding.
• The social relations of drinking and emotional geographies.
• Drinking as an exclusionary activity... Public house: Public space?
• How alcohol not only affects our own comportment, but can change our perceptions of place.
  

We then transformed the lecture theatre into a public house, asking you to reflect on your own experiences with alcohol and how it may have changed your own perceptions of space in the past. The primary purpose of the exercise was to create a relaxed, informal setting, not necessarily to highlight the contrasts to a formal environment (i.e. the original lecture theatre), but simply to show how our comportment is adjusted within these ‘third spaces’. Ideally we would have brought enough drink for everyone but didn't think a lecture theatre full of students drinking at 9am would go down very well.

We've had lots of feedback, and many of you have shown interest in the 'Diverger' learning method we used in our activity, so hopefully we'll see some more people using this method in their other studies (see Healy et al., 2005).

We've included some other useful references for those who have a 'thirst for knowledge' for the topic area, if anyone wants a copy of the notes/slides you can find us in the Friendship Inn most nights of the week.

Craig, Rob, Tom and Grant xxx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mP8-zYsUK0

References:

Chatterton, P. and Hollands, R. (2003) Urban Nightscapes: Youth Cultures, Pleasure Spaces and Corporate Power. Routledge: London.

Davidson, J. and Bondi, L. (2004) 'Spatialising Affect; Affecting Space: An Introduction', Gender, Place and Culture,11 (3), 373-374

Healey, M., Kneale, P., Bradbeer, J. (2005) ‘Learning Styles Among Geography Undergraduates: An International Comparison’, Area 37 (1), 30–42.

Jayne, M., Holloway, S. and Valentine, G. (2006) ‘Drunk and Disorderly: Alcohol, Urban Life and Public Space’, Progress in Human Geography, 2006; 30: 451-468