Troubling places: Walking the “troubling remnants” of post‐conflict space

Abstract

This paper explores the productive potential of walking methods in post-conflict space, with particular emphasis on Northern Ireland. We argue that walking methods are especially well suited to studying post-conflict spatial arrangements, yet remain underutilised for a variety of reasons. Specifically, we argue that walking methods can "trouble" dominant productions of post-conflict space, revealing its storied depth, multi-temporality, and the alternative narratives of the past that frequently remain hidden in places touched by violence. Critically, employing such place-sensitive approaches challenges "bad scripts" that reify polarised narratives of conflicted places, thereby enabling the writing of new spatial stories that are potentially generative of new research questions and scholarly insights rooted in overlooked, marginalised, or taken-for-granted people, places, and landscapes. Informed by both authors' ongoing research journeys, we argue that walking in troubled places can help scholars dig into the reservoirs of emotion, affect, vitality, and multi-temporality people experience in post-conflict landscapes, thus opening up new research vistas in places scholars might not have sought to look using only sedentary methods. K E Y W O R D S heritage, Northern Ireland, post-conflict space, Troubles, walking methods 1 | INTRODUCTION Violent conflict leaves its mark. It causes physical scars on bodies, creates absences where things and people have been permanently altered or destroyed, conditions avenues of memory and recall, and disrupts everyday mobilities and lived geographies. Violence leaves a legacy of "troubling remnants" (Jarman, 2002) and "spectral traces" (Jonker & Till, 2009). The former refers to material architecturemilitary fortifications, left-behind security paraphernalia, murals and monuments to the dead, places scored with the vestiges of horror and anguish. These tangible remains "trouble" post-conflict space, raising difficult questions of what to preserve, what to remove, why, and for whom. The latter refers to "surfacings of the dead," those "phantoms, histories, remnants, submerged stories and ways of knowing" capable of unearthing alternative cartographies of meaning and memory (Jonker & Till, 2009, p. 306). In this paper, we argue that the walking family of methods (henceforth walking methods) is a potentially transformative means of examining the striated layers of meaning inscribed into public space and everyday life in the aftermath of political violence. Yet in spite of the growing popularity of these methods across a host of disciplinary fields, they have rarely been applied to these purposes in post-conflict space. Specifically, we argue that the insights generated through walking methods have the potential to trouble dominant productions of post-conflict space by revealing alternative narratives of the past and alternative investitures in places and landscapes. While walking methods are no methodological panacea (Robinson & McClelland, 2020), they can help

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