Cooking Up Mixed Methods Research for Just Futures in Human-Environmental Worlds

It is over a decade since the coining of Critical Physical Geography (CPG hereafter) as a subdiscipline, during which there has been quite an explosion in its popularity. I first came across CPG through the tree ring scientist Dr. Maegen Rochner and her review of the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography edited by Lave, Biermann, and Lane from 2018. The Handbook provided for me, as a former graduate student and now post-doctoral researcher, an opportunity to see how I could explore CPG as part of my research into tree ring sciences, climate pedagogies, and environmental geography; but there is a limit to what one book can accomplish for an entire ecosystem of geographers asking questions that require environmental research to be situated alongside and blended with issues such as social inequity, environmental injustices, and beyond.

The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research (hereafter Field Guide) that Lave and Lane have set forth and accomplished in putting together is quite an impressive achievement and thorough text that I wish I had for my graduate studies but look forward to seeing how early career and student scholars engage and mobilize the scholarship. The book provides a cookbook-style setup for thinking, designing, and carrying out a CPG-inspired project. While the Field Guide can be used by any level of scholar, I find that the text is especially useful for early career researchers such upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers as I find the writing to be more accessible that some other forms of critical human geography scholarship as well as the intentionality in selecting a wide variety of environmental projects exhibiting the diversity of approaches students can be inspired and engage with. Further, the book is completely open access supporting in making environmental research more accessible for financially precarious scholars and graduate students.

While the Field Guide can seem unwieldy given its length, the authors have strategically split the book into three broad sections that scaffold onto each other with the central premise that “mixing methods in environmental research is a means of escaping the confines of particular frames and discipline” (Lane and Lave 2025). Following the introduction, the Field Guide uses the analogy of research-as-cooking, a move I find deeply enriching as this falls in line with critical geographers (kitchen table reflexivity, Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015), Black feminists (Wilkinson, 2024), trans and Indigenous educational scholars (Tachine and Nicolazzo, 2023), and one of my most beloved communities: radical community artists and organizers (Justseeds Artist Cooperative, 2024, a recipe book to fuel revolution).

The first section begins with setting up a “research kitchen” through ethical (Meadow, Wilmer, and Ferguson—Chapter 5), pedagogical (Salmond and Brierly—Chapter 6), and tension provoking (Biermann and Gibbes—Chapter 4) considerations that scholars must confront when mixing environmental and social methods. Miesen and Gevers’ (Chapter 9) “Inclusive practices in fieldwork” lays out the groundwork for, simply put, doing fieldwork better. From personal experiences as well as being in disciplines where fieldwork practices have been deeply exclusionary and harassment-saturated, this chapter is a must-read for academics who actively lead fieldwork experiences for early career students and scholars.

Building upon the first section, the second section is packed full of stories from a wide range of researchers who have tried figuring out how to implement CPG, who have written and tried cooking their own research recipes. What I find most impressive is the breadth of disciplines and methods that the authors have been able to bring together in conversation, ranging from

participatory arts-based research (Chapter 17) and sociopolitical hydrological modeling (Chapter 14) to urban community gardens (Chapter 16) and Antarctic valleys (Chapter 18). The book ends with a third section that is a “grocery list” of many of the “ingredients” (methods) that scholars can implement to ask CPG-related questions. While the short chapters are not exhaustive of the methods researchers could use, the authors have quite a cornucopia of over twenty “ingredients” including more physical geography-oriented approaches like soil toxicological analysis and hydrologic modeling to very social approaches like focus groups and oral histories.

While there are certainly endless questions to be asked that cannot be covered in the field guide, the digital publishing pathway has allowed for future editions and updates to be made without extra cost to early career scholars and many other scholars lacking the institutional funds to continually purchase the new book editions. I lack criticisms for the Field Guide, but I do hope for the authors to lean further into the concept of “cooking” in future editions as there are endless ways to think with critical and feminist approaches such as spice-level (or how much your research might productively upset cishetero patriarchy, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism); family recipes (or the ways in which specific institutions or labs have carefully passed down methods over time); place-based, culturally significant, and racially specific recipes (where the research questions we can cook up are attuned to the cultural and racialized places we carry out our work); and, what I find the most fruitful, what ingredients are the most expensive and which ones can we forage (what methods require large amounts of expertise or capital, which methods can we leverage given our institutional positioning, and which methods are most applicable to the place we work).

Overall, I deeply look forward to seeing yet another decade of CPG and how the Field Guide will change and adapt, akin to the riverine ecosystems and sociocultural worlds in which the book seeks to understand in all their beautiful complexities.