Conceptual journeys : Using qualitative processes in an inter-cultural exploration of place

Creating spaces of awareness which enable understanding about the ways people respond to place in an intercultural context is a rich and rewarding process. The knowledge-discovery journey can involve different modes of transport and multiple and various routes. The qualitative vehicle, although soft in its steering and often circular in direction, provides opportunities to explore landscapes that one rarely sees in single trajectory intellectual travel. This paper, using hermeneutics and phenomenology with a particular focus on metaphors and tropes, will describe a number of conceptual journeys related to the experience of migration. It will explore the difficult state of being ‘between place’ and how this becomes manifest in real places. The journeys show that only by traveling circuitously can one arrive at a multi-facetted form of awareness.