Walking Histories, Un/making Places

Abstract

This article is a methodological examination situated within a larger multisited project on the formation and regulation of communities of sex workers in Yokohama, Japan, and Vancouver, Canada, in historical and social discourse. Tracing the fragmented and elliptical histories of these communities, we are attentive to the potential for walking, and specifically walking tours, as an ethnographic method, a mode of historical engagement, and a means to reflect on our unfolding and shifting space–body relationships as we move across spaces of inquiry with varying levels of ease/tension. We seek to understand walking tours as a means and method to critically engage the histories that we seek to uncover and the absences we face in our attempts to uncover them—not only the social relations that constitute and are constituted by the space but also our own relationship to current communities that exist in the space—and the ways our lifeworld entanglements interfere with and give shape to our research endeavors. We problematize academic tendecies to situate lifeworld entanglements as secondary or superfluous to the research process. By tactically spatializing our personal experiences in a series of endnoted digressions, we make strange academic writing conventions of appropriate form and content.

Walking Borders: Explorations of Aesthetics in Ephemeral Arts Activism for Asylum Seeker Rights

“…By foregrounding, sensorial embodied, emplaced “lifeworld entanglements,” we like Aoki and Yoshimizu (2015) claim that such elements are not “secondary or superfluous to the research process” (p. 273), but rather integral and noteworthy. We both participated in the boat-folding gatherings and the durational walking of the imposed borders.…”

Revisiting walking as mobile place-making practice: a discursive perspective

“…Even when designed and created with the specific purpose of offering a tourism experience, they are trails only by virtue of people following them. Thus, while trails offer particular frameworks to the people that move on them, they are also produced through these movements (Aoki & Yoshimizu, 2015). Particularly, the multisensory body and embodied space have emerged as important concepts in this respect (Lew, 2011;Morris, 2011).…”

A Life in Motion: Exploring Auto/Biographical Exchanges by ‘Walking With’ Nelson Sullivan

“…(William Helmreich, 2015: 3) Walking is a well-established, if not regularly used, research tool in sociological and ethnographic practice. Whether it is 'walking the field' to delineate a research area (see Jephcott, 1963), the use and analysis of walking tours as an ethnographic method to give 'shape' to sex worker research (Aoki and Yoshimizu, 2015), the walking practices of hunter gatherers (Tuck-Po, 2016), improvisational walking through industrial ruins (Edensor, 2016), exploring city life (Bendiner-Viani, 2005;Helmrich, 2015), the ways in which walking produces time-space and the experience of place (Edensor, 2010), or shared walking experiences with research participants as attenuation (Pink et al, 2010), to name but a few. Likewise, the idea of walking through a space as a form or enactment of auto/biographical practice is not a new idea.…”