Walking Through Social Research

Charlotte Bates, Alex Rhys-Taylor, Charlotte Bates, Alex Rhys-Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317201663
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

As an ethnographic method walking has a long history, but it has only recently begun to attract focused attention. By walking alongside participants, researchers have been able to observe, experience, and make sense of a broad range of everyday practices. At the same time, the idea of talking and walking with participants has enabled research to be informed by the landscapes in which it takes place. By sharing conversations in place, and at the participants' pace, sociologists are beginning to develop both a feel for, and a theoretical understanding of, the transient, embodied and multisensual aspects of walking. The result, as this collection demonstrates, is an understanding of the social world evermore congruent with people's lived experiences of it.

This interdisciplinary collection comprises a unique journey through a variety of walking methodologies. The collection highlights a range of possibilities for enfolding sound, smell, emotion, movement and memory into our accounts, illustrating the sensuousness, skill, pitfalls and rewards of walking as a research practice. Each chapter draws on original empirical research to present ways of walking and to discuss the conceptual, practical and technical issues that walking entails. Alongside feet on the ground, the devices and technologies that make up hybrid research mobilities are brought to attention. The collection is bookended by two short pedestrian essays that take the reader on illustrative urban walks, suggesting routes through the city, as well as ways in which the reader might make their own path through walking methods.

An innovative title, Walking Through Social Research will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics who are interested in Sociology, Geography, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies and Qualitative Research Methods.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Finding Our Feet
• Railway Lands
• 1 Marchers and Steppers: Memory, City Life and Walking
• 2 Seeing the Need: Urban Outreach as Sensory Walking
• 3 Desire Lines: Walking in Woolwich
• 4 Keep Walking: Notes on How to Research Urban Pasts and Futures
• 5 Walking Together: Understanding Young People’s Experiences of Living in Neighbourhoods in Transition
• 6 Westfield Stratford City: A Walk Through Millennial Urbanism
• 7 Walking, Falling, Telling: The Anecdote and the Mis-Step as a ‘Research Event’
• 8 Air Walk: Monitoring Pollution and Experimenting with Speculative Forms of Participation
• 9 Listening Walks: A Method of Multiplicity
• 10 Wild Walking: A Twofold Critique of the Walk-Along Method
• Walking W8 in Manolos
• Index