Research-creation activities will examine walking through three interconnected thematics:
1) Civic engagement and critical public pedagogy. Walking around a neighbourhood, or another environment, as a way of experiencing it, is a well-established method. However, humanist research has dominated this area, foregrounding human’s mastery over the land and detachment from place. Re-thinking a material relation to land, a co-extensiveness of body and place, this thematic will develop and analyze walking methodologies informed by complex intersections or intensities of relations that exist of local politics, global flows, and will conceptualize civic engagement as formed through a meshwork of interwoven lines.
2) Media and technology. Increasingly researchers are turning to digital technologies such as cell phones, GPS, and ipad applications in fieldwork. These mobile technologies subtly alter the experience of place. For example a cellphone transmits changes in gait, modulating what comes to be noticed and with what quality of attention. As such, technology can no longer be considered extraneous or as mere tools of research, but rather they are an inextricable dimension of placemaking and movement. As such, our research will contribute to the pioneering use of mobile cameras such as wearable ‘gopro’ technology.
3) The anarchive. Research methodologies that rely on mobility, movement, and the senses call into question traditional practices of documentation and archiving, which operate on a model of passive storage and representation. Re-thinking the archive through ‘walking’ opens up archival practices to dynamic, open, and mutating events. Written texts, images, performances, video recordings, and art works hold together multiple compositions. These compositions might be fixed in form but simultaneously they are embedded in fields of shifting relations. How can we think of documentation and the anarchive as inseparable from process and movement?