An emergent walking arts approach is presented as an opening towards social repair. Drawing on an intra-disciplinary project, ‘sense-ing’ legacies of slave-ownership in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath (UK), an iteration of walking-with is discussed in the context of ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Walkers on the Sweet Waters project, hosted by the author, participated in a research-creation process agitating thought and extending resonances through mark making and social media trails. The article explores strategies of curated juxtaposition and dissonance as provocations to involuntary thought and empathic response. A participatory, performative walking is outlined accessing embodied ways of knowing and the agencies of walkers and heritage. Walkers become story carriers and ‘affect aliens’, unsettling heritage accounts, breaking silences and revealing the disappeared. Reflecting on a creative-critical intervention on ‘authorized’ heritage the article presents a somatic approach to learning, heritage and social justice through walking arts.
Walking the Names was a cycle of walks in a 'reluctant' site of memory in Bath (UK), 2019-21. Walkers read out the names of those who died of poverty in the C19th Workhouse and were buried on the site. As the project progressed, the Covid death toll mounted. A walking arts process is presented as slow activism, offering a participatory, corporeal, sensory engagement with landscape, power and memory.Bath is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site. A National Lottery funded Landscape Partnership, Bathscape, seeks to articulate a vision for the city as a Landscape City. The paper explores Walking the Names as part of an emergence of uneasy memories, silenced voices and care in the contested spaces of Bath's memory landscape. Drawing on the vision of the Landscape City, reflecting on the city as 'wounded', the paper articulates a process for co-creative critical rememorialisation, reclaiming absences and silenced memories.
In 2016–17 and in 2018–19, undergraduate students and faculty at Huron University College in London, Canada, and at Bath Spa University in the UK collaborated on an innovative community-based research project: Phantoms of the Past: Slavery and Resistance, History and Memory in the Atlantic World. Our paper outlines the structure of the project, highlights student research, and argues that the Phantoms undergraduate student researchers helped to create an innovative and important body of work on transatlantic Public History and local commemorative practice.
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