An Anthropocene journey

Walking as Embodied Research: Coloniality, Climate Change, and the ‘Arts of Noticing’

“…We favour hybrid collaborations involving, for example, an architect, a philosopher and a choreographer in thinking about the micro-politics of collecting water from a particular city spring. We also favour a model of quick publication, whereby work is produced in multiple formats inside and outside the formal academic apparatus (Shepherd et al, 2018).…”

“…The first point of departure for the idea of the walking seminars is an irritation with the ‘white cube’ of the typical seminar room and an awareness of all that it excludes. The discourse of the seminar room imposes a stringent set of rules: we sit in chairs around desks; we meet as a disembodied intelligence, eyes that see, mouths that speak; we speak one of the imperial (‘global’) languages; we talk about ‘theory’; we cite from approved canons; we mention the five of six currently trending keywords (Shepherd, 2018a). Apart from a few important exceptions—discussions in Queer Theory, certain strands of Feminist Theory, forms of decolonial thinking and practice—we agree to leave at the door, as it were, many aspects of what defines us as embodied beings in the world: memory, experience, desire, imagination, fear, delight and the small details of daily life that saturate our affective selves.…”

“…In the average seminar situation, students were required to discuss abstract knowledge in an imperial language, parking at the door, as it were, the things that condition their daily experience: being black, being a woman, being worried about personal safety, being worried about money, having to negotiate the long journey to and from the university each day, being denied the forms of discourse through which to have a meaningful discussion about any of these things. In other words, their relationship to knowledge begins by excluding the very thing that so profoundly conditions their experience under and after apartheid: embodied being in the world (Shepherd, 2018a).…”

“…As raced and gendered bodies, subjected to local histories of colonial modernity, our relationship to these landscapes will be very different and run the spectrum from hedonism to bare life. Table Mountain, one of the most heaviest touristed sites in Africa and a recently proclaimed ‘natural wonder of the world’, was historically a site of refuge for escaped slaves from the Cape Colony and is currently a refuge for migrants fleeing conflict and economic hardship on other parts of the continent (Shepherd et al, 2018).…”

“…The site of Peers Cave on the northern edge of the Fish Hoek valley has archaeological deposits that attest to half-a-million years of hominin occupation (Shepherd, 2015b). Further south, the ruins of Red Hill Village and the dystopian dormitory town of ‘Ocean View’ speak of apartheid-era forced removals and the racial cleansing of urban spaces (Shepherd et al, 2018). What would it mean to push these sites into the same frame, or to read them together as part of a story of human dwelling and being in this space?…”