Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World

WalkingLab

Stephanie Springgay, Sarah E. Truman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367264956
• eBook ISBN: 9781351866484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As a research methodology, walking has a diverse and extensive history in the social sciences and humanities, underscoring its value for conducting research that is situated, relational, and material. Building on the importance of place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and rhythm within walking research, this book offers four new concepts for walking methodologies that are accountable to an ethics and politics of the more-than-human: Land and geos, affect, transmaterial and movement. The book carefully considers the more-than-human dimensions of walking methodologies by engaging with feminist new materialisms, posthumanisms, affect theory, trans and queer theory, Indigenous theories, and critical race and disability scholarship. These more-than-human theories rub frictionally against the history of walking scholarship and offer crucial insights into the potential of walking as a qualitative research methodology in a more-than-human world. Theoretically innovative, the book is grounded in examples of walking research by WalkingLab, an international research network on walking (www.walkinglab.org).

The book is rich in scope, engaging with a wide range of walking methods and forms including: long walks on hiking trails, geological walks, sensory walks, sonic art walks, processions, orienteering races, protest and activist walks, walking tours, dérives, peripatetic mapping, school-based walking projects, and propositional walks. The chapters draw on WalkingLab's research-creation events to examine walking in relation to settler colonialism, affective labour, transspecies, participation, racial geographies and counter-cartographies, youth literacy, environmental education, and collaborative writing. The book outlines how more-than-human theories can influence and shape walking methodologies and provokes a critical mode of walking-with that engenders solidarity, accountability, and response-ability.

This volume will appeal to graduate students, artists, and academics and researchers who are interested in Education, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Affect Studies, Geography, Anthropology, and (Post)Qualitative Research Methods.

1
Walking-with place through geological forces and Land-centred knowledges

Walking where the Chedoke Radial Trail and Bruce Trail merge in Hamilton, Ontario, is a journey along a geological formation that took 30 million years to shape, approximately 450 million years ago. During the Ordovician period, the area now known as the Niagara Escarpment was covered by a tropical sea teaming with coral and invertebrates, including molluscs and arthropods. The escarpment was produced by sediments deposited on top of the sea floor that over millions of years became the sedimentary rock, shale, sandstone, and dolostone we see today. During the last ice age, layers of shale continued to erode and cut into the harder dolostone layers on top, which caused them to break off and create the long, steep slope of the escarpment. Many of the layers are comprised of visible fossils of coral, sea sponges, and brachiopods. Queenston shale – the softer bottom layer – was quarried for brick making in the Hamilton area. And the caprock Dolestone is still extracted for building-stone, crushed-stone, and lime products. In the section of the escarpment where the Bruce Trail and Radial Trail merge, layers of rock are exposed due to the former Brantford and Hamilton electric railway that cut through the rocks. This is the traditional territory shared between the Haudenosaunee confederacy and the Anishinaabe nations.

This chapter is activated by a WalkingLab research-creation event Stone Walks on the Bruce Trail: Queering the Trail that convened on the Chedoke to Iroquoia Heights loop trail, a 9-kilometer section of the Radial Trail and Bruce Trails in Ontario, Canada. Seventy people participated in the four-hour group walk, which was stimulated by ‘pop-up’ lectures by geologists, community activists, Indigenous scholars, and artistic interventions by queer artist and activist Mary Tremonte, and a Hamilton arts collective TH&B.¹

The sections of the trails where we walked, because of their proximity to the city of Hamilton, are predominantly used for fitness, dog-walking, and leisure. The WalkingLab research-creation event sought ways to disrupt the typical uses of the trails in order to think about walking-with place through geologic forces and animacies, and in relation to Indigenous Land-centred knowledges. As White settlers, we write about place informed by our conversations and readings-with Indigenous scholars and artists.

Place is a central concept in walking research – from considerations of the textures of gravel and pavement that shape how one walks (Vergunst, 2008; Edensor, 2008) – to the ways that everyday pedestrianism structure and produce place (Middleton, 2010). Walking research has also significantly contributed to theories of place, shifting the logic of place as something fixed and known, to understandings of place as an event, in process, and relationally produced (Massey, 2005). However, Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie (2015) argue that place-based learning and research is entrenched in settler colonial histories and ongoing practices and have not sufficiently attended to Indigenous understandings of Land.

Likewise, place in walking studies has rarely taken into account how human bodies and geologic bodies are co-composed. Interrogating a geosocial understanding of human and nonhuman world-making, Kathryn Yusoff (2013) argues that we are all geologically composed and that the geologic is a “defining strata of contemporary subjectivity” (p. 780). The Anthropocene thesis, Yusoff (2013) asserts, marks the human as “a being that not just affects geology, but is an intemperate force within it” (p. 779). Geosociality, the enmeshment of bios and geos expands notions of agency, vitality, politics, and ethics.

This chapter takes place as a starting point and extends investigations into walking-with place through more-than-human theories of the geologic that disrupt taxonomies of what is lively and what is inert (Ellsworth & Kruse, 2012; Povinelli, 2016; Yusoff, 2013), Indigenous knowledges that centre Land (Styres, Haig-Brown, & Blimkie, 2013; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015; Watts, 2013), and a posthuman critique of landscape urbanism (Foster, 2010).

The chapter unfolds via a brief look at theories of place and how place appears in walking research. Following this overview, the chapter describes in more detail the WalkingLab research-creation event Stone Walks on the Bruce Trail: Queering the Trail. This event sought to unsettle settler logics of place by thinking-with i) geo-theories; ii) Indigenous theories of Land; and iii) posthuman critiques of landscape urbanism. This is not to suggest that such theoretical orientations are analogous, rather we frictionally rub them together to think a different ethics-of-place.

When walking does attend to landscape, it is typically connected to issues of environmentalism, sustainability, and conservation. Dominant sustainability discourses assume that knowledge of, and preservation through, technological fixes will control the ecological crises. Nature hikes, long walks, and ecotourism rely on human impact, control, and subsequent care. Public parklands that foster trail systems, including those created as a form of landscape urbanism that restore de-industrialized places, are embedded within dominant sustainability discourses and practices where landscape is enjoyed and consumed while maintaining the separation between nature and culture. Nature is something we visit for a period of time. Yet, as Alaimo (2016) contends, “the epistemological stance of sustainability, as it is linked to systems management and technological fixes, presents rather a comforting, conventional sense that the problem is out there, distinct from oneself” (p. 173). In this regard, walkers become spectators and are external to wider transcorporeal relations including an entanglement with the geosocial and Indigenous Land. Our research-creation event, Stone Walks on the Bruce Trail: Queering the Trail aimed to queer and rupture walking-with place.

Theories of place

Conventional usages of the term place mean a specific location, such as the city of Mumbai, Tiananmen Square, Yorkdale Shopping Mall, or the corner of Haight and Ashbury. In these instances, place refers to a specific, fixed, and concrete location, while the term space refers to something that is abstract and a void. For example, Phil Jones and James Evans (2012) write that “humans layer their own understandings onto abstract space in order to create subjective places” (p. 2319). Place scholar Tim Cresswell (2004) counters this understanding, suggesting that “most places are the products of everyday practices. Places are never finished but produced through the reiteration of practices – the repetition of seemingly mundane practices on a daily basis” (p. 82). Place, as such, is conceived of as a process. The idea of place and space as separate distinctions for Tim Ingold (2000) is fraught with problems. People, he argues, do not live in a place, but move through, around, and between them, such that places are more akin to knots “and the threads from which they are tied are lines of wayfaring” (p. 33). Wayfaring is less a path from point A to B, and more of a meshwork of lines and movement, “a trail along which life is lived” (Ingold, 2011, p. 69). Feminist geographer Doreen Massey (2005) has been a highly influential scholar in re-conceptualizing space and place as socially constructed, relational processes. Space, writes Massey (2005), is contingent and in flux, “the product of interrelations,” and is “always under construction” (p. 9). If space is open and place cannot be assigned a prior location, then we need different ways to articulate place-making. Massey (2005) calls this the “event of place,” where it is movement that constructs place. In the event of place there is “the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing. This place as open as internally multiple” (p. 141). For Massey, reconceptualising place as event demands different political questions. In the event of place there can be no assumption about location or identity, rather the constellation processes require negotiation. She writes: “In sharp contrast to the view of place as settled and pre-given, with a coherence to be disturbed by ‘external’ forces, places … necessitate intervention” (p. 141). Walking researchers from different disciplines draw on these varied theories of place and space.

Walking research and place

Place, much like embodiment, figures in almost all walking research regardless of the discipline and is a fundamental part of walking research. In this section, we discuss how place is understood through five threads. This by no means suggests that place is limited to these five threads. However, in our review of the field these threads occurred frequently. In each thread we offer a few examples, recognizing that there are far more cases than it is possible to capture. The intent of this section is not to perform an exhaustive literature review of walking and place, but to articulate how place is conceptualized, theorized, materialized, and enacted in walking research. The five threads that we have identified are: 1) the go-along or walking interview; 2) pedestrianism; 3) walking tours and ethnographic research; 4) mapping practices; and 5) landscape and nature.

Go-along interviews

Walking interviews, Evans and Jones (2011) argue, “produce more spontaneous data as elements of the surrounding environment prompt discussion of place” (p. 856). Evans and Jones (2011) differentiate between mobile methods and sedentary methods in motion, stating that although a person on a train is technically moving, the participant’s “movement is experienced as a visual flow through windows and the primary haptic sensation is merely that of background vibration” (p. 850). Whereas walking through a crowded street or cycling up a mountain would expose both interviewee and interviewer to more “multi-sensory stimulation of the surrounding environment” (p. 850). Walking interviews offer evidence about how people specifically relate to place as a process rather than a “biographical account of their history ‘in place’” (p. 856). Jones and Evans (2012) suggest in walking interviews that “rather than place being bounded, inward-looking and resistant to change, place becomes a dynamic concept, interpenetrated by connections to other social and economic worlds” (p. 2320). As opposed to a point on a map that is circumscribed, place becomes porous and emergent.

Jon Anderson (2004) similarly uses walking interviews to examine the social construction of knowledge and place with environmental activists. The walking interview, he notes, enables him to have a different access to his participants’ knowledge because walking helps overcome the typical power arrangements between researcher and participant. The go-along interview shapes a co-constitutive understanding of people and place. Anderson (2004) writes: “Through talking whilst walking, by conversing and traversing pathways through an environment, we are able to create a world of knowledge (or pathways of knowledge through the world) by taking meanings and understandings into existence” (p. 260). Walking interviews allow a researcher to physically go to a specific place with a participant, in order to re-create that place, rather than recall place via memory out of context.

Sarah Pink (2009/2015) argues that walking interviews are not only an aural account but a “social encounter – an event – that is inevitably both emplaced and productive of place” (p. 82). The ensuing narrative of the interview is affected by the spaces the participants move through and the spaces materialized during the walk. Walking interviews emphasize the dynamic relations of place-making, or as John Wylie (2005) reminds us, “the body and its surroundings should not be considered as one, but rather that the self and the world continually enfold and unfold” (p. 24).

Phillip Vannini and April Vannini (2017) offer an insightful critique of the go-along or walking interview. They argue that conventional forms of the go-along rely on representationalism and are “too methodical, systematic, and pre-determined by a priori research agendas” (p. 179). In conventional uses of the go-along, walking becomes instrumentalized and detached from the relational and embodied process of moving together. Phillip Vannini urges walk-along methods that foreground sensuous and rhythmic interrelations. For him, the use of a wearable camera, which captures not only the interview data, but the sounds and movement of walking, is a key technique for the walk-along method. He writes that cinema offers “sonic impression of places and voices, with their unique texture, pitch, volume, intonation, cadence, grain, and rhythm” (p. 183). We have experimented with camera movements using a digital camera and a pinhole mount (Chapter 5), where the movement of walker and the camera movement of shutter speed intra-act with each other producing a kind of quivering image.

Pedestrianism

Studies of pedestrianism include walking as a means of questioning and examining everyday practices and places (Fuller, Askins, Mowl, Jeffries, Lambert, 2008; Middleton, 2011). ‘Walking the everyday’ is a process by which participants use walking to consider their local environment, particularly in relation to values and attitudes related to place, how walkers use place or identify themselves in relation to place, create stories of place, and navigate changes to place. Cheng Yi’Eng (2014) contends that walking enables ethnographers to become attentive to the mundane and ordinariness of daily life. Focusing on the everydayness through the act of wandering or strolling is important because it enables researchers to experience and collect details about urban life and place-making practices. According to Tim Edensor (2010), “the rhythms of walking allow for a particular experiential flow of successive moments of detachment and attachment, physical immersions and mental wandering, memory, recognition and strangeness” (p. 70). One of the key concepts that emerges in relation to the everydayness of place is rhythm.

For example, Jo Vergunst’s (2010) research on Union Street in Aberdeen, Scotland, attends to the rhythm and flows of streets, bodies, feet, and the sounds of urban life that create patterns and connections between places. Rhythm is also a means by which researchers think about the relationships of time and space to walking. The patterns and rhythms that emerge in walking ethnographic work “opened up possibilities for understanding everyday activity as a process of place making” (Vergunst, 2011, p. 387). Jennie Middleton (2009) similarly approached ethnographic research from the perspective of everyday rhythms. Participants in her project annotated their daily walking movements, which revealed to her the complex connections people make between walking and time. Rhythm becomes a means to order and frame urban experience and is negotiated through things such as pace, traffic rules, urban planning, and walking conventions. Pedestrianism, Vergunst (2017) writes, requires an analysis of “the political and material processes” that a walker is enmeshed within. Shifting his focus from research in rural Scottish landscapes, Vergunst’s (2017) most recent work takes him along the banks of local urban rivers. Examining human flows, urban planning, and ‘nature’ regeneration, Vergunst describes the ordinary ways that humans transgress their environment through walking. An everyday pedestrian politics, Vergunst argues, presents “an alternative to the highly planned and strategised city” (p. 19).

Walking tours and ethnographies

Place also appears in research that uses walking tours as a method in ethno-graphic fieldwork. For example, using the form of a walking tour to examine the history of sex work in Vancouver, Canada, and Yokahama, Japan, Julia Aoki and Ayaka Yoshimizu (2015) incorporated walking methodologies to bear witness to the erased bodies of women in these sites. They write: “[B]eing part of the process of place production, ethnographic walks also potentially offer sites of intervention and negotiation into prevailing historical narratives and spatial configurations” (p. 277). The walks were as much about absent bodies, place, and memory as they are about the remains of place and the contested, negotiated, and resistant ways that people make sense of such remains in relation to history. WalkingLab partner, Kimberly Powell (2017) uses the form of a walking tour with intergenerational communities in Japantown in San Jose, California. Walking and talking with community members, Powell investigates migration and place. Walking tours are a means of understanding community and individual connections to place (Bendiner-Viani, 2005), and as collective or shared consideration of empathetic witnessing (O’Neill & Hubbard, 2010). Maggie O’Neill’s (2017) research on walking borders uses the form of walking tours to examine place in relation to asylum, migration, and marginalisation. She writes: “Taking a walk with someone is a powerful way of communicating about experiences; one can become ‘attuned’ to another, connect in a lived embodied way with the feelings and corporeality of another. Walking with another opens up a space for dialogue where embodied knowledge, experience and memories can be shared” (np).

WalkingLab resident Elaine Swan’s (2016) research focuses on ethnic food tours in Sydney, Australia. Examining how tour guides and tour participants move through place and negotiate the sights, smells, and sounds of ethnically designated urban spaces such as Chinatown, Swan carefully analyzes the ways in which place-making is mediated by race and gender. Informed by Sara Ahmed’s (2006) work, Swan argues that walking as a process of place-making takes on “different forms for racialized groups, stopping or enabling movements, and impressing and shaping bodies as they take the shapes of the spaces they occupy” (np). Swan’s feminist and critical race studies work is significant within the field of walking studies because she challenges neutralized views of walking, and emphasizes the need for walking studies to attend to race and ethnicity in the production and mediation of place.

The dérive has become one of the most ubiquitous forms of walking in relation to pedagogy and place. The dérive (see Chapter 3) is a ‘drifting’ on foot through urban space. This aimlessness disrupts the habitual methods people typically move from one place to another, and instead directs the walkers’ attention to the sights, sounds, smells and other psychogeographic details of a place. Focusing on the socio-cultural dimensions of place, Marcia McKenzie and Andrew Bieler (2016) incorporated the dérive and other group walking practices such as night walks and trail walks, as part of a larger ethnographic study on student learning in place. Influenced by Ingold’s (2000) wayfaring, the students navigate their way through and alongside streets, trails, and place-marking signs. McKenzie and Bieler note that walking “engages students in embodied and intuitive ways of finding their way through and alongside the nuances of place” (p. 70). Furthermore, urban dérives enable students to examine and understand the “co-production of power and place” (p. 70). Despite the focus on Treaty education and settler colonial legacies, these ethnographies in place suggest that more attention is required o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Endorsements
• Foreword
• Introduction: walking methodologies in a more-than-human world
• 1 Walking-with place through geological forces and Land-centred knowledges
• 2 Sensory inquiry and affective intensities in walking research
• 3 Transmaterial walking methodologies: affective labour and a sonic walk
• 4 An immanent account of movement in walking methodologies: re-thinking participation beyond a logic of inclusion
• 5 On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: speculative middles, (in)tensions, and response-ability in research
• 6 ‘To the landless’: walking as counter-cartographies and anarchiving practices
• 7 Reflective inversions and narrative cartographies: disrupting outcomes based models of walking in schools
• 8 A walking-writing practice: queering the trail
• References
• Index