Representational describes the ways that words, images, or other media ‘capture’ the characteristics of things existing or occurring outside these media. However, M. Shapiro (1988) argues that representations do not ‘imitate’ reality but are the practices—visual, aural, oral, quantitative, or qualitative—through which things take on meaning and value. To put this simply, ‘nature’ is not a real, material actor but a socially constructed object. This means that academics have to move beyond mere representation. M. Doel (1999) provides a helpful parallel. The task of a painter, he says, is not to paint an object, or even to represent it—but to be that object’s effects. This does not mean that descriptions are no longer admissible. ‘Close descriptions can still be offered of particular encounters, attending in the process to the situated, embodied sense-making work being (unavoidably) undertaken by the peoples involved, [the work] that makes those encounters what they are’ (Laurier and Philo (2006) Area 38, 4).

Non-representational theorists argue, that ‘representation’ generates an unwavering, deadened picture of the world. They emphasize knowing through connection and participation; the spotlight is on the process, rather than the outcome—‘it ain’t what you get but the way that you got it’.

That this theory has been taken up by human geographers owes a very great deal to the work of Nigel Thrift, whose major work on the topic was published in 2007. This ‘folded mix of the witnessed and witnessing world’ (Dewsbury (2003) Env. & Plan. A 35, 11) chimes with the concept of hybrid geographies. Lorimer (2008) PHG 32 waxes lyrical about non-representational theory, but geographies based on this concept are painfully few. Thrift’s use of the term ‘non-representational theory’ has been seen as problematic, and Lorimer (2005) PHG 29, 1 offers the term ‘more-than-representational’. Try Colls (2012) TIBG 37, 3, 430 on feminism and non-representational geography.