As part of a larger interdisciplinary arts-based research course, we engaged in walking as a material and relational inquiry in order to disrupt privileged and normalized understandings of class, race, settler colonization, and narratives of othering (Springgay & Truman, 2018). Borrowing Jasbir Puar’s (2012) frictional analysis, that brings together intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage, each of the walks sought to “foreground the mutually co-constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender, and nation” (Puar, 2012, p. 49). As we walked Memphis’ historic neighborhoods, we experienced varying states of wonder as intersecting identities shifted with each step in and out of centers and margins or what Min-Ha (1991) terms as “horizontal vertigos” (p. 15). In this paper, we share two of our “horizontal vertigos” that shaped our experiences walking Memphis neighborhoods and that informed our understandings of the frictional movements in the assemblage and the event-ness of identities.
Based on an interdisciplinary research course for graduate students, this paper describes a project that combines arts-based research, walking methodology, and posthuman theories to design a research-creation. The purpose of this assemblage of photographs, archived newsletters, online information, maps, and other materials is to aid in the suspension of linear thinking and offer a unique contribution to the discussion of what gaining “historic” status can do in a particular place/time. This paper describes how the neighborhood association, formed 50 years ago, had the primary mission to lobby for historic status in order to protect property values and prevent multi-dwelling homes and businesses from moving in. By embarking on a multisensory inquiry employing walking methodology, I demonstrate how this insular, exclusive, historic neighborhood continues to be entangled within the surrounding geographic areas, as well as within the socio-politico-and economic dimensions of the city.
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