A Transmaterial Approach to Walking Methodologies

Abstract

Bodily methodologies that engage with the affective, rhythmic, and temporal dimensions of movement have altered the landscape of social science and humanities research. Walking is one such methodology by which scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation. Extending this rich field, this article invokes the concept trans to reconceptualize walking research through theories that attend to the vitality and agency of matter, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, the importance of mediation and bodily affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethico-political responsibility. While theoretical and empirical research about embodied, emplaced, and sensorial relations between moving bodies and space are well developed in the field of walking studies, their entanglements become profoundly altered by theories of trans – transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities. Taking up trans theories we experiment in thinking-with a sonic art performance, Walking to the Laundromat, which probes bodily, affective, and gendered labour.

Hierarchical Assemblages of Citizenship and Belonging: The Pedestrian Speech Acts of British Gujarati Indian Walkers

“…Whilst space limitations prevent further discussion of these different approaches here, walking methodologies are valued as they enable researchers to capture a "feeling", at any moment in time, which is connected to being in and of a space (Parry and Johnson, 2007). Yet the privileging of white male (adult, middle-class, heterosexual, and able-bodied) re-readings of different spaces and places are often taken-for-granted (Morris, 2004;Springgay and Truman, 2017;Simonsen, 2004;Warren, 2017). Women walking the city, or further afield, in the wilderness, for example, can raise suspicion because they are seen to be out-of-place and at-risk (Jenks and Neves, 2000;Tew-Thompson, 2017).…”

Situating Indigenous Resilience: Climate Change and Tayal’s “Millet Ark” Action in Taiwan

“…As field investigations and empirical research are pivotal in this study, we use walking as a mode of inquiry beyond the logics of symbolic representation. It is a form of engagement in the tangible, immediate, and evolving perception of local places, through which our scholarship transcends the confines of archival and office space and "seek ways to examine vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities" of places [16] (p. 2). Tim Ingold in his renowned volume, The Life of Lines, analogizes individuals as lines, and as individuals walk along the surface of the ground, "they thread their lines through the world rather than across its outer surface.…”

(Un)settling Methodology: Walking the City of Memphis with Transcorporeality in a More-than-Human World

“…Though embodiment is an important aspect of walking research, Springgay and Truman (2017a) argue that this embodiment "needs to move beyond an individual and sensuous account of the body in space towards a different ethico-political engagement" (p. 4). Decentering human exceptionalism requires attending to the ethico-political practices of transmateriality (Springgay & Truman, 2017a) to interrogate racialized practices and marginalization of minoritized population. An inspiring example of such an ethico-political engagement was Walking to the Laundromat which was created by Rebecca Conroy (n.d.) for Walking Lab.com.…”

“…As I walked the city of Memphis, assemblages of my emplaced body movement, subjectivities, senses, feelings, and interactions with the materiality of the space deconstructed and interrogated the neoliberal normalized narratives of othering and belonging. Situating the walks within transcorporeality (Alaimo, 2012), transmateriality (Springgay & Truman, 2017a), and the spactimematter entanglement (Haraway, 2015), I share how these walks generated three lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari,1987) that transformed my thinking of research methods and opened up spaces for new ways of knowing beyond the linear and the prescribed. The three lines of flight, I discuss in this paper, informed and shaped my thinking of: my research methods with respect to interviewing Muslim American youth, the embodied experience of walking within the entanglement of space time matter in a more-than-human world, and the concept of (dis)placed bodies within the postcolonial thought.…”