Findings, windings and entwinings: Cartographies of collaborative walking and encounter

Abstract

In the continuing ‘Not Ourselves’ practice-based project, we are attempting to unravel the harmonics of the collaborative voice in educational research, in which the singular voice of the ‘author’ also gives voice to multiple others. We approached this project as an enquiry into the process of ‘collaboration in the making’ and as an emergent practice. Each of the authors of the article has a different professional background: one an environmental educator; another an arts educator; and the third a contemporary artist. We explored walking together|apart to yield outcomes that were not tied to traditional notions of collaboration. The maps we created as we walked speak to collaborations that are rutted, insecure and ambiguous through irregular cooperations. This visual essay is structured into three sections where we collectively and individually explore concepts we refer to as ‘findings, windings and entwinings’.

Hawks, Robots, and Chalkings: Unexpected Object Encounters During Walking Interviews on a College Campus

“…For example, Anderson (2004) used the term "bimble" to describe a process of walking or wandering, while Kuntz and Presnall (2012) used "intraview" to describe the enactment of Deleuzian positive difference, intervening in the isolated human subject through a relational and nonhierarchical encounter between the participant and researcher. The idea of "wandering" or "meandering" has been employed in research focused on the encounter of place (Burke et al, 2017;Cutcher, Rousell, & Cutter-McKenzie, 2015;Kuntz & Presnall, 2012), while other research has looked to the concept of the dérive from Debord (2006), where the path is determined by the pull of place and the environment (Burke et al, 2017;Morgan, 2016;Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). However, the dérive has also been critiqued as perpetuating a hegemonic vision of a singular (usually masculine and able-bodied) subject who wanders without regard to inequities, justice, or implications for his meanderings (Springgay & Truman, 2018).…”

“…In addition, research that has incorporated artful methods has employed the terms "soundwalks" or "audiowalks" (Feinberg, 2016;Stevenson & Holloway, 2017) and "artwalks" (O'Neill & Perivolaris, 2014;Triggs, Irwin, & Leggo, 2014) to emphasise the role other modalities play in producing place and encounters. Many of these studies also used the term, "walking interview" synonymously and alongside other terms (Bergeron et al, 2014;Carpiano, 2009;Cutcher et al, 2015;Feinberg, 2016;Jones & Evans, 2012;Kuntz & Presnall, 2012;Myers, 2010), or as the sole descriptor of their research method (Evans & Jones, 2011;Harris, 2016;Jones, Bunce, Evans, Gibbs, & Hein, 2008;Lynch & Mannion, 2016). A common thread through these studies is the focus on walking-as-method and, following this, throughout this paper, I use "walking interview" as an umbrella for these terms.…”

“…Through the embodied act of traversing geographies and landscapes, walking attunes inquiry to the production of place. For example , Cutcher, Rousell, and Cutter-McKenzie's (2015) arts-based inquiry included a performative process of walking together, and separately, creating multimedia cartographies from their encounters to suggest the collaborative and affirmative potential of educational research. Additionally, I (Flint, 2018) explored how a walking encounter, represented through visual transcription, produced different cartographies of campus, connections between race, whiteness, history, and campus monuments.…”

The Flâneur and Education Research

“…Rather than introducing the book as a whole with a brief introduction to each chapter, our flâneurial editorial path shares a collaborative project we pursued as walking artists responding to recent walks in local natural environments. Working collectively, together and apart (Cutcher et al 2015), we engaged with concepts of flânerie through an embodied and living inquiry that explored the materialities of encounter and experience through various mediums. For the particular painting project that informs this editorial path, we began with this proposition (Manning and Massumi 2016;Truman and Springgay 2016): 'respond to our walks by painting with our feet'.…”

The invisible hand: designing curriculum in the afterward

“…These images acknowledge and draw in the matter involved in practice, challenging the usual pretence that a conference presentation occurs in a purely cognitive and discursive domain; they throw us out of the text and back to the embodied materiality of the workshop (Mazzei, 2013), to the place where we will always and never again be. Hence, in our experimentation with transversal approaches to producing research as a collective process of creation, we also aim to contribute to the proliferation of new formats and modalities for research publication, dissemination and engagement with the wider public (see, for example, Rhoades & Brunner, 2010;Otterstad & Waterhouse, 2015;Cutcher, Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie, 2015).…”