One day I followed Stephen around school as he rushed to get his teachers to sign a permission form for a field trip to a nearby college. As we hustled from classroom to classroom, he started to narrate his actions:

As he recalled his high school experiences through the different places, spaces and objects around him and, as his actions shifted in relation to the geography around him, I realised that my current methods of gathering young peoples’ life histories were missing these embodied experiences of place. I was capturing participants’ key experiences in everyday places but not how their everyday places ‘took on significance’ and drove their beliefs and actions. I needed to rethink how to capture participants’ formative experiences as well as their formative geographies. As a result, I started to explore methodologies that would enable me to move from collecting life histories to exploring life geohistories. By focusing on life geohistories, I shift attention to how place and space exert influence over the lifecourse. The affordances and constraints people encounter in and through their daily life spaces can impact their ability to find employment and pursue careers, marry and sustain families, and access the resources and opportunities that support their development through different life stages and transitions. Changes in life direction, status or identity such as leaving home, becoming a parent, going back to school or retiring are often constituted in and through new life spaces, and entail negotiating the social and spatial circumstance of shifting daily geographies.