You understand?’ is a visual exercise that aims to provoke the ethnographer’s thinking and practice that combines digital and visual data.
I shot the images with my smartphone to capture the ‘moment’ on the move during a visit in the Old City of Jerusalem, in late May 2023. Looking back to this research experience from a time-space distance, I see it as a synthesis of encounters and discussions that constitute a ‘moment’. I choose ‘moment’ rather than ‘trajectory’ even though my ‘moment’ embraces the elements of a trajectory, the movement, the visual and sensorial aspects, and the different emplacements of the researcher on the move (Gomez-Cruz, 2016). This is, however, an exercise for training the geo-ethnographic gaze and creating a basis for geo-ethnographic imagination and thinking. Geo-ethnographic methods allow positioning encounters in time and place on demand and, thus, offer one way to deal with possible memory gaps and other sources of bias.
Geo-ethnography is nothing but new. Surprisingly, it has been a tool for historical research since the Classical times when Herodotus applied geo-ethnographic methods to get to know the ‘facts on the ground’ and separate myths from reality (Masalha, 2021). The smartphone has in-built technology that makes possible the convergence of image creation and locative metadata and, thus, becomes geo-ethnography’s good friend (Vivitsou & Janhonen-Abruquah, 2024).
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