Walking Methods

Research on the Move

Maggie O'Neill, Brian Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317295020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This book introduces and critically explores walking as an innovative method for doing social research, showing how its sensate and kinaesthetic attributes facilitate connections with lived experiences, journeys and memories, communities and identities. The book situates walking methods historically, sociologically, and in relation to biographical and arts-based research, as well as new work on mobilities, the digital, spatial, and the sensory.

The book is organised into three sections: theorising; experiencing; and imagining walking as a new method for doing biographical research. There is a key focus upon the Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (WIBM) on the move to usefully explore migration, memory, and urban landscapes, as part of participatory, visual, and ethnographic research with marginalised communities and artists and as re-formative and transgressive. The book concludes with autobiographical walks taken by the authors and a discussion about the future of the walking interview as biographical method.

Walking Methods combines theory with a series of original ethnographic and participatory research examples. Practical exercises and a guide to using walking as a method help to make this a rich resource for social science researchers, students, walking artists, and biographical researchers.

Part I

Theorising/observing/thinking

This Part comprises three chapters and informs Parts II and III by connecting and exploring the work of social and cultural theorists and commentators, and noting the importance of walking and the walking interview to sociology and wider interdisciplinary research, in terms of observing, thinking, and theorising. Chapter 1: Methods on the move discusses issues relating to the definition and practice of the Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (WIBM) and the sensual, relational, situational, and other dimensions of the experience of walking. It describes how the method ‘opens’ the biographical perspectives of others in the act of walking with others – in movement – in an interactive, ‘attuned’ manner. Chapter 2: Theorising walking in the sociological imagination: Walking in context grounds the act of walking, observing, relating to others in the socio-environment in the history of social explorers, commentators, and social scientists from 19th century urban walkers, through the work of the 1920s–30s Chicagoan researchers, social documentary work, and more recent writers and practitioners (e.g. urban explorers) who seek to observe, understand, and ‘connect’ with their surroundings. Chapter 3: Walking, art-making and biographical research takes forward the discussion of observation and understanding in the earlier chapters to examine walking as experienced within contemporary city urban spaces. It examines the work of the mobilities perspective, Benjamin and C. W. Mills, and walking artists in constructing a biographical research practice employing walking as a relational, imaginative, and aesthetic experience, and gives an example of WIBM research.

At the end of each Part, we include an exercise for readers to theorise (Part I), experience (Part II), imagine (Part III) and apply the WIBM (Conclusion).

1

Methods on the move

Moving methods

Introduction

This chapter addresses key questions of definition regarding walking as a ‘method’ (in contrast to ‘mere’ movement or routine experience) – operating with an awareness of everyday action as embodied, cognitive, sensual, relational, visual, communicative dimensions and possibilities. It also situates walking as a method in relation to contemporary work on mobilities, the senses (e.g., the visual), and digital methodologies. We introduce the process of theorising methods ‘on the move’ by connecting the activity and conceptions of walking with art, philosophy, politics, and the psychosocial. It is argued that walking is an excellent method for entering into the biographical routes, mobilities, and experiences of others in a deeply engaged and ‘attuned’ way.

Walking

‘Walking’ is commonly apprehended as a routine activity, which we usually engage in with little thought. But, perhaps due to its ordinariness, we usually do not (or do not have to) consider that it encompasses a range of activities with differing styles, demands, abilities, characteristics, and motivations. ‘Walking’ can also be associated with numerous terms, reflecting its diversity: to promenade, saunter, step, or trudge; as a gait, a march, or stride; or to ‘dally’, dither, ramble, roam, traverse, stalk, and wander. It can be for many purposes: utilitarian (such as commuting for work); as a pleasure in itself; to fulfil domestic and family tasks (shopping, picking up children from school); or to meet some other objective (as a protest, for health, etc. see Chapter 5). Walking, of course, is both an embodied physical and mental experience – involving an awareness of the motion of the body, of its aches and pains, impact on the ground, or in raising the sheer exhilaration of movement. Therefore, the act of walking engages the senses: looking, hearing, the feeling of being touched by air, rain, or other elements of the environmental atmosphere, and contact with changing aromas.

As walking is undertaken under particular conditions, according to the elements, and during the day or night, questions arise as to the possible effects of ‘choice’ of when to walk, in terms of weather (e.g., rain: see Harrison 2016), time, route, and the impact of circumstance on an individual’s mood, outlook, and relation with others (e.g., in conversation). In short, when examining walking activity or undertaking walking research, the physical (and social) conditions may have an influence and should be considered – and may even be an important ‘topic thread’ in the walking dialogue itself. Walking can be metaphoric of life as a biographical journey, a path, and often articulated as linear – ‘walking a (fine) line’ between ‘travails’ along the way, with dangers on each side. We also say we have ‘walked in a circle’ – someone may see their life as ‘circular’, or even as a ‘return’, as ‘up’ (‘life on the up’), ‘down’ (‘life has been downhill’), or some combination of such trajectories, as a ‘life graph’, with an evaluation of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ (see Brockmeier 2002; Gergen and Gergen 1984). To take ‘firm steps’ (in life) is to enact definite plans, whilst to ‘toe the line’ is to conform or follow another’s lead.

Methods on the move: The Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (WIBM)

The academic (and popular) interest in walking as a topic and research practice has grown rapidly during the last few years, cutting across a wide range of disciplines and practices – sociology, history, geography, anthropology, education, architecture, traditional and ‘new’ arts (e.g., drawing, performance, video/film), and also in terms of association with cultural environments (museums, schools, urban spaces, rural settings) and in differing and national/regional locations (e.g., Vergunst and Ingold 2008; Bates and Rhys-Taylor 2017). The rise of interest in ‘walking’ is worth examining both in itself and in its intellectual context. Over the last 30 years in social science, a whole range of ideas have gained currency – often defined as instigating a ‘turn’ in theoretical and methodological orientation – ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘culture’, ‘body’, ‘emotion’, ‘senses’, including a ‘biographical turn’. The Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (WIBM) is introduced at a time when new approaches are being described as ‘creative’ or ‘innovative’ in gaining new materials and insights in the furtherance of social science endeavours to examine current rapid social and technological shifts (e.g., migration flows, information/social media developments) (see Wiles et al. 2011).

In considering the WIBM, an initial question arises whether it is ‘unique’ or part of something broader in methodological approach? Initially, it can be placed within ethnography – where an interview may be carried out ‘in the field’ within a wide variety of circumstances – so it can be put (roughly) on a continuum between informal (conversational, unstructured) and formal (with a more organised set of questions) procedures. But, while the walking interview may also vary in the degree of pre-organisation and the ‘set’ format, its central feature is that it is ‘on the move’ – within processual experience (in time and space) – as participants traverse through social settings, or ‘scenes’. The method is based on recognition that we have changing sensual, cognitive, and relational feelings; complex social and environmental relations; and a conviction that social research methods have not always fully taken account of the diversity, depth, and shifting character of social life. So, it takes from ethnography the cultural multiplicity of meanings in the social world and the necessity of understanding how values, interpretations, and attachments can change over time, and vary from social arena to arena. When used in biographical research – the central aspect of this book – methodologically, the walking interview brings an ethnographic orientation to study individuals as socially located, but also as ‘mobile’: individuals as embodied in ‘moving’ in time, space, and in mental life (cf. Simmel 1950).

The concern of the WIBM is not simply that people are in ‘motion’, but rather that they are involved subjectively in ‘passing’ through social and material circumstances (buildings, streets, trees, and gardens, people met and left behind). Also, that a particular perambulation, no matter how many times it has been undertaken (e.g., a repeated walk to or from school, work, shops, etc.) is never exactly the same in its context(s), experience, current mental and physical state, and memory. A locale may have altered to some degree – a new street sign or changed billboard advertisement – various sounds from a building now undergoing renovation or some new aroma from street food may be noticed; different ‘facets’ of light (cf. Wroe 2016), such as due to the weather, or streaming through trees and between housing blocks etc., may affect perception of surroundings, all impinging on the experience of a contemporary walk. A walk takes place within various kinds of time duration; for instance, the particular day or season can have an importance, having resonance in meaning for a participant. It also involves time in regard to the age or ability of the individual; for instance, the depth of memory a person has accumulated or influencing the length of an intended journey due to the physical effort required. Of course, the reason or objective for the walk may be dissimilar and its tempo rather different from other occasions. Walking is often solitary, but even when walking with others, there is a ‘conversation’ with the self – monitoring action, moving in thought and time. The walking interview can be expanded here to include a research interview before and/or after a ‘respondent’s’ lone walk (‘reviewing’ and ‘talking through’ any recording that the respondent has made), or the interviewer and respondent may repeat the actual walk that the individual made.

To engage in a walking interview is to ‘follow’ someone ethnographically – a walk on their ‘daily round’ (a routine activity) or one that they have chosen, perhaps due to some special meaning for them (e.g., similar to a past situation or, say, revisiting a childhood home environ) (see Chapter 10). Researchers, here, relate to others in their ‘natural environment’ – how they live in giving meaning to their lives, in everyday exchanges with others and their surroundings. The research procedure to be employed may be pre-set (e.g., questions and areas to be covered, route to be taken outlined in detail), or emerge more during the walk (e.g., questions/comment as issues, observations, and situations arise), or be (mainly) after the event (e.g., the respondent writing a post-account). Particular methods or procedures can be used within these ‘stages’. A walking interview may use a wide range of ‘additional’ methods – ‘reportage’ drawing or sketching, which can make a participant (and researcher) observe closely; audio, photographic, and visual recording; internet-based resources; and formal maps and map-drawing (see Chapters 3 and 4) – in short, utilising and combining methods from the social sciences and across the arts (and elsewhere).

To walk obviously requires a person to be in movement – in ‘ordinary’ routines, as well as in a research project, a walk may vary in pace, and is likely to have stops where participants ‘dwell’ at a particular site. The WIBM, as with other research, has basic practical decisions – how long, who with, what to ask/talk about, when and where to take place – and for each of these, why? Again, not all of these practicalities will be decided (by researcher, participant, or in collaboration) beforehand. So, in the course of walking: how are the ‘practicalities’ of the walk and issues chosen? There can be participant or researcher choice, or mutual decision, emerging during the walk which could be fairly ‘aimless’ in route taken: the route may be altered or emerge during its course. In setting the length in time of the walking interview, how is the timelength determined, and how do the pace, rhythm, and pau...