Conference Agenda

This Dream Team has been collaboratively developed by members of the Walking as Research Praxis group. We invite you to join us in co-creating an experimental walking praxis of speculative wanderings, temporal rhythms, space-place potentialities and affective intensities for sensing past-present-future bodies, relationalities and sensorialities.

Recently there has been significant interest in walking as a critical qualitative method (Pink, 2008; Evans & Jones, 2011; Lasczik et al., 2021). Scholars have theorized and actualized walking as a mode of accountable and response-able walking-with (Springgay & Truman, 2018); as place-space methodology (Fairchild, 2021, 2026); as relational and processual posthuman methodology (Taylor et al., 2023); as an ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2015); and as inspiration for art-ful academic writing otherwise (Taylor & Fairchild, 2025). Much of this research re-imagines walking as an inventive, experimental, less elitist, more inclusive qualitative methodology; and an attunement to the infrathin - the potentiation of a relational field that includes what can be felt but cannot quite be articulated (Manning, 2017, p. 99).

Conceptualizing walking as a more capacious human/non-human/more-than-human bodily mattering, and located in a feminist materialist posthuman theory/method/praxis that connects bodies/landscapes/time/temporality, our Dream Team resonates with the conference themes of relations between human, non-humans, history, philosophy, culture, mobility, visibility, creativity, more-than-landscapes, and…and…and.

We begin with a brief introduction to walking research. Next we move out of the room into the surrounding environs to engage in a series of Speakers Corners Walkings where we stop at a Corner, a member of the WARP collective gives a brief account of their walking research, and then gives a theory-praxis provocation for us to walk with to the next Speakers Corner. We then return to the conference room for a discussion of the matterings that arose from this research-creation activity, attending to the question: how does walking as research praxis shift qualitative research methodologies?

Speakers Corners Walkings provocations include:

Ways to challenge whiteness, which Ahmed (2007) conceptualizes as “an ongoing, unfinished history” (p. 149) and “institutional habit” that coheres, redirects, and (im)mobilizes what bodies can do. How does whiteness shape the “what” that is “around” (p. 151) and privilege habits that contour spaces that [our] bodies leave behind.

Ancient Chinese culture treats spacetime as a multilayered-crisscrossed flowing river where words, meaning, and mattering (un)entangle in a perpetual movement. How might we consider walking as a mindbodyheart movement, materializing possible entanglements among mindbodyheart calligraphy/words/painting/sculpture/trees, and other nonhuman beings across/with/into a past-present-future flow of meaning/being?

How can we contest walking’s normativities, its assumption that walking is done by an upright, bipedal, boundaried body? We invite you to do/enact walking as errancy, as unwillingness to obey rules–to walk a wavering line–a line that loops, knots, curls, furls and unfurls, that knits other lines into it–so as not to re-produce a straight White line but, instead, produce multiple lines, lineages, and connectivities. Feminist in/discipline (Taylor, 2020) reimagines walking as a path to sensing-feeling-knowing otherwise; as a feminist materialist ethico-onto-epistemological political praxis.

The Angel with One Wing is a nexus point for thinking about walking-with young children’s entanglement with British colonialism, slavery, and plantation ownership. English country estates are indelibly linked to brutal legacies of slavery and colonialism (Vergès, 2019, n.p.). These histories become sanitised to justify colonialism, settler colonialism, and neocolonialism; the pristine house a monument to Western progress narratives…but scratching the surface reveals the blood and bones on which these legacies have been built.

The new mobilities paradigm (Urry, 1999; Sheller, 2017) explores walking as participatory, future-oriented, sensory, experiential, and place-based encounters for reimagining ‘sustainability’ from a social justice perspective. Including more diverse voices enables the emergence of more socially just mobility systems and practices that consider varied experiences (Sheller, 2018). How can we depart from one-size-fits all “expert” planning for sustainable urban mobility and instead work with an innovative speculative co-design methodology embedded in everyday places to produce alternative knowledges?

How might walking-with Athens help us attend to the marks of centuries, of industrialism, capitalism, progress, modernity? How are these marks felt and rendered visible? How do they tremble? What do they generate? Glissant’s (2021) philosophy invites us to experiment with the potential of trembling as a way of being-with, as a way of unfixing certainty. Tremblings are whirlwinds of transhistorical encounterings that immerse us inextricably in the world and its peoples in the everywhens and everywheres, in and beyond Athens.

This Dream Team deploys walking in methodologically playfully ways to disrupt habitual un/noticing, to invite you to wander/wonder (MacLure, 2013); and to collectively co-create new research insights.