Podcast Episode 8: Walking and Sensory Inquiry

WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form.

Transcript:

Welcome to WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation that aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast you will learn about walking and sensory inquiry. In podcast #7 you were introduced to a type of sensory walk called soundwalks or sonic walks. This podcast will examine other senses such as touch and smell and introduce you to concepts like synaesthesia and hapticality. WalkingLab is co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. You can find print publications related to these podcasts at walkinglab.org. While not necessary the podcasts are designed to be listened to while going for a walk.

I’m Rebecca Conroy, artist and researcher and I will be your host today. 

WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-specific walking research-creation events. WalkingLab acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories on which our work takes place. WalkingLab is accountable to Dylan Robinson’s insistence that land acknowledgements often operate from a politics of recognition and perpetuate settler colonial logics rather than disrupt them. As will be introduced through the podcast series WalkingLab asks walkers to consider where they are coming from in relation to Indigenous peoples and territories where they live and work, and to consider why a land acknowledgement is important to them.

Walking methodologies invariably invoke sensory investigations. Sensory studies have prioritized the senses in research including methods that foreground touch, smell, and sound. This is in part informed by an appeal to explore the non-visual modes of experience. The non-visual senses – touch, taste, smell, and sound – were historically viewed as subjective and intuitive, and as such rendered as illegitimate forms of knowing. Vision, which was equated with reason and objectivity was prioritized as a preferred method for qualitative research. With the turn to phenomenology, poststructuralism, and feminist theories of the body – which ruptured the mind/body dualism – the proximinal senses became an important subject of study and increasingly valued as a method of investigation. Further, the advancement in portable digital technologies, such as video cameras, smart phones, and voice recorders, and the shift to thinking about non-representational methodologies, also contributed to the prevalence and possibility of doing sensory research.

As the senses became increasingly entangled within the social sciences and humanities, many scholars noted their particular importance for qualitative research. Some of the most often cited include, Paul Rodaway, who argues that everyday experience is multi-sensual, though one or more sense may be dominant in a given situation. Likewise, Paul Stoller suggests that sensory reflexivity be accounted for by researcher and participant. David Howes’ work has significantly shaped the field, foregrounding a sensory approach to the study of culture, and the sociality of sensation. Sarah Pink, whose name is almost synonymous with sensory ethnography, argues that sensory perception is integral to social and material interactions, including walking research.    

In the first section of the podcast we focus on walks that isolate a particular sense. Crucial to our examinations of walking research is a focus on critical sensory studies that interrogate the ways that walking and the senses produce gendered, racialized, and classed bodies. 

Thinking-with Bark, a WalkingLab project initiated by Mindy Blaise and Catherine Hamm, experiments with multi-sensory and multi-species ethnography with early childhood teachers and students. The Bark Studio is an outdoor classroom in Cruikshank Park, Victoria Australia that occupies the traditional lands of the Marin Balluk Clan. Each week teachers and students go for a walk in the park along Stony Creek and think-with bark, specifically the varied Eucalyptus species, or Gum trees as they are commonly referred to in Australia. Gum trees shed their bark as part of their yearly cycle to rid themselves of moss, lichen, and parasites. The bark flakes off in interesting patterns, and colourful masses of texture. Blaise and Hamm’s sensory ethnography attends to the tactility of multi-species inhabitation in order to counter the logic that tames, simplifies, and controls young students’ learning. They ask: What happens when bark becomes the focus?’ Their ‘out and about’ walking and sensory research aims to open up possibilities for creating new ethical practices in light of human induced changes in the environment . In contrast to conventional early childhood research that would ask questions about children’s development eg. Can they hold a pencil? Can they pick up the bark? Do they listen to instructions? Can they decipher one sense from another?, thinking-with bark as a sensory inquiry explores the ways that children’s tactile experiences shape lively stories about human and nonhuman intra-actions.

Kimberly Powell, one of the WalkingLab’s lead researchers, also uses sensory ethnography with young children. In her project called StoryWalks Powell engaged a group of pre-school children on a series of walks in San Jose Japantown. On one walk the students were introduced to Ken Matsumoto’s public sculpture. The children were invited to climb on and touch the stone, and to create stone rubbings. In a subsequent walk, the students visited a memorial that they banged on with their hands, allowing the vibrations of sound to become a way of knowing sculpture, memory, and place. Collaborating with artist PJ Hirabayashi, and in cooperation with the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, Powell’s sensory ethnography examines walking, the choreography or movement of place, and migration.

Another WalkingLab example that attends to the proximinal senses is a smellscape walk. J. Douglas Porteous introduced the term smellscape to suggest how smells are place related. The smell walk was carried out by students in WalkingLab’s Stephanie Springgay’s graduate course on walking and sensory methodologies. Students walked and recorded smells using a variety of methods including colour annotations, descriptive words, and found objects to investigate the ways that place can be mapped using different sensory registers.

While the focus on the proximinal senses has disrupted occularcentrism, critical sensory studies argue that too often the senses are assumed to be neutral when in fact they produce racialized, gendered, and classed understandings of bodies and places. For example, fetid smells, particularly ones experienced in an urban city on hot days, are associated with infection and decay. These smells are then socio-culturally read as sticking to some bodies. Kelvin Low maintains that the sociology of smell is a process of othering. By “othering” Low means that in smelling and perceiving the other’s odor, the other becomes distinct because they smell different or unfamiliar. Particular smells become attached to particular bodies, not because that body emits a particular smell, but because of the racial and classed materializations between bodies, places, and smells.

In the Euro-Western taxonomy of the senses, smell and touch have been traditionally relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy, and as such, associated with animality and primitivism. Foul smells have historically been linked to incivility, filth, and poverty. The  smell walks examine the ways in which place is produced and negotiated through the senses. Students investigate how sensory experiences regulate and dehumanize particular bodies. For example, overly powerful smells, whether from exhaust fumes in dense urban areas, or the potency of ‘ethnic’ foods, are typically associated with pollution, and evoke sensory experiences of repulsion and disgust. Jim Drobnick uses the term odorphobia to describe the xenophobia associated with particular smells. Conversely, the lack of smell is often conceptualized as clean and sanitary. Some corporations brand particular scents that then become associated with class, for example, upscale hotels that defuse a scent in their lobbies. This smell is considered palatable and pleasurable, and associated with Euro-Western understandings of class, cleanliness, and leisure. 

The interest in the proximinal senses in walking research is significant for the ways that it has unsettled occularcentrism. In addition, sensory inquiry emphasizes the body and corporeal ways of knowing. However, such sensory turns need to account for the social, cultural, racial, sexual, gendered, and classed constructions of the senses. The senses are not neutral, but already exist as ethical and political demarcations of difference. In fact, as Pink suggests, the five-sense sensorium is a cultural concept used by Euro-western subjects as a way of ordering their world. It is not a universal concept.

Further, sensory inquiry needs to take into account nonnormative sensory experiences. Alison Kafer (2013), writing about disability in relation to environmentalism, questions how chronic fatigue or deafness, as just two examples, transform sensory inquiry. Consequently, while ‘isolating’ one sense can be a productive method in walking research, it simultaneously demands an accountability of the ways that difference is materialized through sensory inquiry. After the break we’ll introduce synaesthesia and haptic walks.

Synaesthesia usually refers to a psychological or neurological condition in which sensory stimulus from one sense is mixed up with another sense. For example, this can include a taste being associated with a colour, such as seeing red and immediately tasting licorice. Finish composer Jean Sibelius would hear F major when he saw his green fireplace. In walking research, synaesthesia can be deployed intentionally to defamiliarize a sensory experience of place and as a non-representational practice. Synaesthesia was used by WalkingLab’s Sarah E. Truman, coupled with the walking practice of the dérive, in her in-school research with secondary school students. These student-led walks are detailed in podcast #4.

The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU), a frequent WalkingLab collaborator created a synaesthesia walk in the Hamilton Farmers’ Market. In this walk participants strolled through the farmers’ market, taking stock of the various smells on offer, which they mapped using words from another sensory register. For example, the smell of lemon might be recorded as screeching metal. Synaesthesia as a literary device uses words associated with one sense to describe another. For example, “loud yellow,”  “bitter cold” . Rather than describing a scent by using descriptive words that are typically associated with a smell, the synaesthetic walk forced participants to think about the scent using language more commonly affiliated with a different sense. For example, instead of describing a smell in the market as being ‘oniony,’ the synaesthetic description could be ‘piercing sorrow.’ In the HPU walk, synaesthesia was used to push language; to write as a way of becoming atmospheric. As opposed to a representative description of the world, synaesthetic walks attend to that which is palpable and immanent.

Hapticality relates to the sense of touch. In walking research, hapticality attends to tactile qualities such as pressure, weight, temperature, and texture. The haptic is sometimes organized around kinaesthetic experience such as muscles, joints, and tendons that give a sense of weight, stretching, and angles as one walks. It can also be described as physical where you feel things on the surface of your skin. 

For example, walking scholar Hannah Macpherson’s (2009) work with visually impaired walkers, and their ‘sighted’ guides, focuses on tactile knowledge through the feet rather than the hands. The bodily practice of walking, Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers maintain, can be demanding, severe, and grueling. In contrast to embodied narratives of walking that extol the virtues of meditative drifting, writing about their Walking Library project they reflect on the arduous nature of walking across different landscapes, carrying heavy packs, and in the blistering sun. They emphasize the ways in which the corporeality of knowledge is shaped through movement.

There is no denying that sensory experiences, haptic feelings, and affective intensities course through walking research. What matters, is how we tune into sensation, synaesthesia, and hapticality. As Ahmed so cogently states, “there is a politics to how we distribute our attention”. From sensory walks with early childhood educators and students, and artistic experiments that isolate an individual smell, walking is an important and significant mode by which the senses, the synaesthetic, and the haptic can be mapped, conditioned, and materialized. 

WalkingLab’s critical work in this area reminds us that we need to account for the ways that the senses stick to different bodies and spaces in different ways. For example, smell is not neutral. How smells flow, how they become attached to bodies or places, and the kinds of encounters such flows generate are important as part of sensory research. The kinds of surfaces or atmospheres that walking methodologies evoke can be captured or managed and therefore participate in power and control. The future of walking methodologies requires not only innovative techniques to experiment with and account for sensory and haptic understandings, but must also attune to the ethics and politics of the senses. 

Thank you for listening to WalkingLab’s podcast series on Walking Research-Creation. You can find print publications and references on their website: walkinglab.org. Better yet, subscribe to the RRS feed so you can be notified whenever a new podcast drops!
WalkingLab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Podcast Episode 7: Sound Walks and Sonic Walks

WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast you will learn about soundwalks and sonic walks.

Transcript:

Welcome to WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation that aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast you will learn about soundwalks and sonic walks. WalkingLab is co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. You can find print publications related to these podcasts at walkinglab.org. While not necessary, the podcasts are designed to be listened to while going for a walk.

I’m Rebecca Conroy, artist and researcher and I will be your host today. 

WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-specific walking research-creation events. WalkingLab acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories on which our work takes place. WalkingLab is accountable to  Dylan Robinson’s insistence that land acknowledgements often operate from a politics of recognition and perpetuate settler colonial logics rather than disrupt them. As will be introduced through the podcast series WalkingLab asks walkers to consider where they are coming from in relation to Indigenous peoples and territories where they live and work, and to consider why a land acknowledgement is important to them.

Walking and sound have increasingly been combined in order to explore the sonic ecologies of place. The term soundwalk was first used by Murray Schafer in Vancouver, Canada in the 1970s to describe a method of identifying and describing the soundscapes of a particular environment. Schafer defined a soundscape as the acoustic features that make up a place. Different places have different soundscapes and one place might have different soundscapes at different times of the day, or in varying weather. Hidegard Westerkamp, another key figure in the history of soundwalking, defines the practice as an excursion that focuses on listening to the environment. Soundwalks are a practice of active listening and present an embodied, tactile, and auditory understanding of place. Soundwalks are designed to immerse a walker in the sounds of place and can be done individually or in groups. Sometimes the route is carefully planned and the organizer stops at particular locations and invites participants to tune into particular sounds and spaces. Soundwalks can be combined with other forms of documentation including recording devices, photography, and field notes. While there are particular features to soundwalks, sonic walks, and audio walks, some people use the terms interchangeably. The first part of the podcast will consider sound walks, listening walks, phonographic walks, and audio walks, drawing from WalkingLab projects that enact these methods. The closing section thinks with scholars and sonic walkers who unsettle the perceived neutrality of the sonic realm in research methods. 

Soundwalks emphasize tuning into non-visual sensory experiences. Researchers are interested in soundwalks for the ability to immerse walkers in a bodily sense of place. Barry Truax notes that the features of soundscape analysis include: keynotes, which are ever-present sounds; sound marks which are characteristic sounds of a place; and sound signals, which form the sonic foreground. 

One type of soundwalk includes the method of walking in silence, while paying close attention to ambient sounds. This is called a listening walk. In this instance, recording devices are not used. WalkingLab often concludes their Queer Walking Tours with listening walks, asking participants to walk in silence and absorb the immediate sounds of a place, but also to reflect on the concepts explored on the walk. After the break, we’ll discuss different types of soundwalks that record sounds and in some cases use artistic processes to mix and invent new sounds.

David Ben Shannon calls soundwalks that are recorded phonographic walks. Using portable recording equipment, phonographic walks inscribe the soundscape. Recorded sounds can be compiled after the walk in much the same way that interviews or other ethnographic field notes would be to shape a sonic understanding of a place. These recorded sounds can be used reflexively with participants after the walk, or they might be edited and mixed to create a sound installation or performance. As Shannon argues, these recordings can be manipulated to highlight or flatten experiences of oppression. 

For example, Ozegun Eylul Iscen examines how immigrants translate sounds in a new environment with the sensory repertoires they brought with them from other places. In Iscen’s research this is discussed as soundscape competence, whereby a newcomer’s experience of different sounds in a new urban context clash with previous sound habits and ways of knowing. Iscen’s fieldwork practices use walking and sound diaries, which are sounds recorded using a portable recording device that are then mixed into an acoustic sound composition and played using loudspeakers in an installation-type setup. Each loudspeaker broadcasts the sounds of one of the participants, but because each soundscape varies in length and pauses the installation creates complex dialogues.  

In addition to mobile listening and field recording practices, researchers and contemporary artists combine walking and sound to create what is commonly referred to as an audio or sonic walk. On an audio walk, participants are guided by listening to pre-recorded audio tracks that have been downloaded to their phones or other electronic devices. Audio walks create a type of immersive environment and invoke a heightened sensory experience: the focus is less on the soundscape of the walk, but on the sounds on the pre-recorded audio file. Camille Turner’s walking tour BlackGrange, discussed in podcast #3, was a live performance and is also a self-guided audio walk which can be accessed on walkinglab.org. This audio walk is linked with google maps and takes the listener to specific locations in the grange neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada. Audio walks are mobile and often site specific, incorporating recorded instructions, stories and other sounds to give the walker a multi-sensory experience. 

The Voice Exchange, a WalkingLab collaborator, used both the method of a soundscape and a sonic walk in a project. In their project, The Ghost Variations, they collected soundscapes from the University of Toronto’s main St. George campus. They recorded audio from different types of spaces, particularly focusing on silent or quiet spaces such as libraries, chapels, and outdoor courtyards. After recording the soundscapes, they created five different audio compositions, which included single layers of sound, multiple layers from the same space, or many layers from different places. The compositions could then be played while repeating the walks. Walking and retracing the routes while listening to the audio files disorients the audience and conjures ghostly narratives of past lives, as well as heightens walkers’ awareness to sound.

Another audio walk commissioned by WalkingLab is Walking to the Laundromat by Australian artist Bek Conroy (moi!). This sonic walk can also be accessed on the WalkingLab website. 

Walking to the Laundromat consists of a 106-minute audio track that participants listen to while doing their laundry at a public laundromat, interspersed with walks around a neighbourhood in between cycles. The audio track parodies the form of a ‘self-help’ audio book. Participants are greeted by a voice that instructs them about the particulars of their walks and washing. Intersected with this masterful and controlled voice are sounds that emerge as part of neo-liberal life, including a 1950s laundry detergent commercial, and new-age mindfulness music and well-being affirmations. Another layer intersperses discussions about capital, money laundering, and affective labour – particularly the gendered and domestic/service labour performed by those who clean, wash and perform care in underpaid, often violent domestic or service jobs. The mechanics of washing and folding are composed on the audio file, so the actions become routine, conditioned by the habits of domestic labour, the abject gendered body, and capitalism. Molding the clothes into soppy bundles, participants listen to audio compositions that connect laundry detergent to fish, to finance capitalism and menstrual blood. As participants drop their coins into the coin-operated machines, the performer’s voice links biopower to forms of financialization that obscure material bodies and labour. 

Walking to the Laundromat interrogates the ways that capitalism and neoliberalism render some lives disposable, and critiques the violence and whiteness of colonial sovereignty. The mindfulness soundtrack questions the ways in which mental illness and the internalization of labour impacts productivity. Women’s bodies and labour are foregrounded on the soundtrack and in the physical walk to and from the laundromat. Washing clothes, for instance, is frequently outsourced labour that is shifted to racialized and poor people. These gendered laboring bodies are perceived as excess matter, and as such function as surplus value. The narrative is layered with ambient sounds like water rushing, street noises, and the ding of a cash register. These multiple layers create a haptic vibration that is enmeshed with the sounds of the laundromat and the city where the walk takes place. 

As a closing proposition, this podcast thinks further with scholars who unsettle the perceived neutrality of audio capture and sonic research methods’ euro-western inheritances. 

David Ben Shannon highlights how the sound studies canon frequently seeks to flatten the sonic ontology, treating voice and music in the same way as ambient sounds; adopts a moralism that filters out human-made sounds as noise; or tries to minimise the anthropocentrism of listening by minimising the role of the listening/sounding subject. As an intervention into this field, Shannon and WalkingLab co-director Sarah Truman conducted a long-distance sounding composition walk. Rather than a conventional phonographic walk, in which the walker tries to capture pristine recordings of place, Shannon and Truman composed and produced songs. These songs sound like the landscape in that they worked with the affective intensities that shaped the experience: for instance, wind, sadness, hornets’ nests, and a sudden encounter with a racist Brexit campaigner. 

Alexandra Vazquez argues that while researchers and artists have been drawn to sonic and sound methods for their potential to disrupt the ocular-centrism of Euro-Western knowledge frames, the interdisciplinary field of sound studies, from which such research draws, needs to be critiqued for its historical alignment with whiteness and masculinity. This emphasis relies on what Jennifer Lynn Stoever calls the ‘listening ear’: Stoever contends that white people position their listening as capable of hearing sound neutrally, and so without prejudice, even while it sorts sound along racialising binaries: for instance, white/black, music/noise, sense/nonsense etc.

As a counter-proposition, ethnomusicologist Allie Martin (2019) positions soundwalking as a Black feminist method precisely because listening and sound are never neutral. Her phonographic walking project explores how the gentrification of Washington DC silences and displaces, having the effect of making the space ‘louder’, through nightclub expansions, yet ‘quieter’ through noise abatement policies based on the politicisation of what/who is marked as noise. All the while, her recordings audibly mark her attempts to keep herself safe as a Black woman walking alone. Martin argues that the non-neutrality of soundwalking amplifies her positionality as a Black woman, which is often perceived as ‘tainting’ the neutrality of many forms of knowledge production, while muting the pseudo-objectivity of more passive forms of recording.

Similar to how WalkingLab’s projects have asserted that walking itself is never neutral, sound and sonic walks add another layer to this argument reminding us that we need to account for the ways that the genealogy of sound studies and particular sonic registers resonate between bodies and spaces in different ways. The future of walking methodologies requires not only innovative techniques to experiment with and account for sonic and spatial understandings of place, but must also attune to the ethics and politics of sound.

Thank you for listening to WalkingLab’s podcast series on Walking Research-Creation. You can find print publications and references on their website: walkinglab.org. Subscribe to the RRS feed so you can be notified whenever a new podcast drops!

WalkingLab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Podcast Episode 6: Walking-With Place

WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast you will learn more about the concept of place, including: critical theories of place, more-than-human theories of geology that unsettle the distinction between living and non-living matter, Indigenous knowledges that centre Land, and a post-human critique of landscape urbanism.

Walking-with place

Welcome to WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation. This series aims to distil WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In podcast #5 in this series, listeners were introduced to the Queer Walking Tour as a way of doing place-based research. In this podcast you will learn more about the concept of place, including: critical theories of place, more-than-human theories of geology that unsettle the distinction between living and non-living matter, Indigenous knowledges that centre Land, and a posthuman critique of landscape urbanism. The WalkingLab queer walking tour Stone Walks on the Bruce Trail: Queering the Trail will serve as an example. WalkingLab is co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. You can find more information at walkinglab.org. While not necessary the podcasts are designed to be listened to while going for a walk. For this walk we suggest a walking or hiking trail.

I’m Rebecca Conroy, artist and researcher and I will be your host today. 

WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-specific walking research-creation events. WalkingLab acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories on which our work takes place. WalkingLab is accountable to  Dylan Robinson’s insistence that land acknowledgements often operate from a politics of recognition and perpetuate settler colonial logics rather than disrupt them. As will be introduced through the podcast series WalkingLab asks walkers to consider where they are coming from in relation to Indigenous peoples and territories where they live and work, and to consider why a land acknowledgement is important to them.

Place is a fundamental part of walking research. WalkingLab has identified five threads where place is mobilized in walking studies : 1) the walking interview; 2) pedestrianism; 3) walking tours and ethnographic research; 4) mapping practices; and 5) landscape and nature. This podcast takes up the landscape and nature thread. You can read about the other threads in the book Walking Methodologies in a More-than Human World: WalkingLab.

Conventional usages of the word ‘place’ mean a specific, fixed location, such as the city of Mumbai, or the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Feminist scholars, such as Doreen Massey, have shifted the ways in which we understand place as something fixed and static, to place as a set of relations between humans, non-humans, and the environment. 

Place often appears in walking research in the context of walking in nature. In many instances nature is often figured as separate to culture, wrapped up in settler-colonial nostalgia for an empty wilderness that never existed, and caught up in a neoliberal health agenda that is tied to Whiteness. Critical disability scholar Alison Kafer argues that nature reserves and hiking trails are shaped around normativity, specifically a compulsory neurotypicality and able-bodiedness. Normative understandings of able-bodiedness suggest that particular bodies are necessary in order to overcome the separation between nature and culture. Kafer’s analysis describes not only the ways that disability is understood as ‘out of place’ in nature, but how access is framed as being against environmentalism. For example, she discusses how environmental activists often argue that non-normative bodies and their support systems, such as wheelchairs, are harmful to fragile ecosystems, while paths cut for able bodies seem not to be. In this way, abled bodies are seen as natural and disabled bodies are understood as unnatural.

Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie argue that place-based learning and research is entrenched in settler colonial histories and territorialism, and does not sufficiently attend to Indigenous understandings of Land. Tuck and McKenzie contend that place privileges settler perspectives that maintain distinctions between nature and culture, and where land is merely a backdrop. Moreover, the emplacement of certain bodies often relies on the legal and political replacement of the Native by the settler, through property rights, forced removals, residential schools, sustained and broken treaties, adoption and resulting ‘apologies.’ 

Finally, place in walking studies has rarely taken into account how human bodies and geologic bodies are co-composed. Kathryn Yusoff asserts that discussions about the Anthropocene, the geological era shaped by human-initiated environmental degradation, marks the human as both affecting geology and affected by it. Yusoff’s concept of geosociality is the enmeshment of bios and geos, which expands notions of agency, vitality, politics, and ethics beyond human and non-human organisms to include non-organic matter. 

With these critical insights in mind, in the next section of the podcast we examine a WalkingLab queer walking tour.  

Stone Walks on the Bruce Trail: Queering the Trail was a WalkingLab queer walking tour, that unfolded along a 9-kilometer section of the Chedoke to Iroquoia Heights walking trail in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. [https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=pronouce+Iroqouia+]

This trail is part of the 900 Km Bruce Trail that follows the edge of the Niagara escarpment. WalkingLab opened the walk with a pop-up lecture on the history of walking, and introduced notable critiques of trail walking that privilege fitness and health: these critiques were touched upon in podcast #4. Further along the trail, in a grassy meadow, WalkingLab spoke about their use of the term queer, and its implication for thinking otherwise about walking-with practices. As highlighted in the podcast #5, WalkingLab uses the term queer in various senses, including attending to sexuality and gender identity, and defamiliarising established assumptions. Margaret Somerville suggests that, in the same way that LGBTQ+ experiences subvert the gender binary that structures heternormativity, queerness may also destabilize the nature/culture binary that structures humanism. In this way, Walkinglab’s Stone Walks on the Bruce Trail: Queering the Trail queers the nature-culture binary, demanding a different orientation to human and more-than-human entanglements.

Katherine Wallace, a geology professor from the University of Toronto, gave a pop-up lecture about the formation of the trail, noting that where participants were walking was once under an ancient tropical sea closer to the equator. She added that the escarpment has undergone more change in the past 100 years than in the previous 9000 years because of human activity, such as quarrying and highways. Wallace’s lecture impressed on the walkers that geology, while typically thought of as fixed and stable, is in fact under constant change. 

Yusoff contends that we must understand ourselves as geologic subjects: not only in the ways that we have acted on the earth and extracted use-value from the land, but that humans are geologically produced. Yusoff evokes the term geosocial to call attention to the ways that the geological and the social are knotted, while also attending to different geologic scales. While the earth has typically been understood as a geologic surface upon which social relations occur, geosociality for Yusoff, insists on the imbrication of geological formations and social formations. In other words, both are materialized simultaneously.

Both Wallace and Bonnie Freeman, an Indigenous scholar from McMaster University, gave pop-up lectures that spoke about the layers of rock as stories. These stories are told through traces of water ripples, ancient critters, and fossils that make up the different sedimentary rocks, and also stories of human and nonhumans who have lived with the land. 

Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear reminds us that while current scholarship influenced by post-human ideas such as Yusoff’s geosociality has asked questions about the agency of inorganic matter, Indigenous peoples have long thought about the vitality and sentience of nonhuman entities, including stone. She contends that the problem with settler thinking is the way it attaches agency and liveness exclusively to white humans. The consequences of white-centred humanism is that different human and non-human entities are as such considered less-than-human or inhuman. 

Freeman’s  pop-up lecture described her walking journeys with Indigenous youth and place-based knowledge that is Land-centred. She noted that place-based knowledge is knowledge that we receive from and with the Land, and that this knowledge is also collective and relational. She talked about Indigenous guardianship of Land, which comes in the form of interaction with Land, not just care and maintenance of Land through systems of colonization and control. Freeman stated that as we “continue to speak and act upon the land it becomes a reciprocal relationship to us – an active engagement that maintains a balance within all things.” Walking, she noted, was an important part of place-based knowledge. “We learn as we walk,” she said. 

In a heavily forested section of the Iroquoia Heights Trail, Kanien’keha:ka [Pronounce. kgah-nyen–kgeh-hah] scholar Kaitlin Debicki gave a pop-up lecture about a methodology she developed of reading trees. Debicki follows Aninishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts in arguing that the earth has agency, and that human agency is an extension of that agency. Similarly, Debicki contends that trees don’t simply grow out of or on the land, they are Land. Walking, then, happens with rather than on Land. In the final section of the podcast the artist collective TH&B’s contributions will be discussed alongside the concept of landscape urbanism.

Towards the end of the walk, participants emerged from the forest at the top of the trail, on an expanse of land populated by rusty fences, course grasses, and a soaring electrical pylon. TH&B, a collective of four artists from Hamilton, Ontario named after the former Toronto, Buffalo, Hamilton railway, had pushed and pulled a heavy blue wooden crate on wheels along the trail with the walkers. Arriving at the clearing, TH&B opened the crate, tipped it on its side, and proceeded to roll out a very large boulder, announcing the inauguration of the TH&B park. On the boulder was a metal plate in the form of the TH&B insignia. TH&B talked about how their projects investigate the entanglement of the post-industrial with the natural: for instance, how recent scientific research has shown that rocks often contain evidence of industrial waste. Their work ruptures the nature-culture binary, entangling together industrial symbols and objects with place. 

TH&B’s performance throughout the day had occurred along a section of a former Electric Railway that ran along what was now the Bruce Trail. The railway was blasted out of the escarpment in 1906 before being closed in 1931 and eventually transformed into a hiking and biking trail in 1996. The trail is similar to other urban efforts to re-naturalize de-industrialized space, often referred to as landscape urbanism. Dominant urbanization ideologies argue that re-designing former rail lines or hydro corridors into green spaces and public parks increases health and social benefits, public art and cultural innovation, and adaptive re-use of space. Despite such rewards, landscape urbanism functions as a normalizing process based on racialized, classed, ableist and heteronormative ideologies that co-opt conservation in order to ‘clean-up’ and ‘push out’ different populations, and maintain settler colonial heteronormative elite spaces. Likewise, green restoration movements typically regulate the types of people and behaviours that use the trails, and obscure the space’s industrial legacy.

Engaging with the types of tensions that emerge in landscape urbanism, Randy Kay gave a pop-up lecture on the many uses of the Bruce Trail, including those living on the margins of society who occupy side trails in tents or even small caves, and youth who gather around unauthorized campfires. Kay intersected environmental issues with race and class, asking walkers to consider who is displaced by restoration projects. Kay’s talk highlighted the geosocial and political violence of landscape and its complicity with dehumanization.

Thinking place as geosocial and as Land demands a consideration of the earth where we walk and public parklands not as commodities to be owned, used, and managed by humans for extractive profit but rather as relational. While the movement to re-green, re-wild or retreat from post-industrial areas can be seen as climate positive, landscape urbanism and conservation continue to maintain distinctions between life and nonlife and are invariably human-centred. Moreover, they continue human mastery and control of nature’s wildness and so portray landscapes as inert. Instead of a retreat from former indisutralisted space, Stacy Alaimo would insist on an ethics of inhabitation. This inhabitation is not occupation, but rather a form of ethical action that arises from recognising one’s material role in a larger more-than-human network. As Alaimo states, “being materially situated in place holds in it possibilities that do not neatly replicate or privilege traditional geographic patterns of geometry, progress, cartography, and conquest”. 

Stone Walks on the Bruce Trail aimed to intervene in the ways that place in walking research does not take into consideration geology, Indigenous knowledges of Land, and critiques of landscape urbanism. Tuck and McKenzie maintain that place typically describes the surface upon which research happens and where data is collected. Stone Walks on the Bruce Trail: Queering the Trail sought to queer walking-with by: bringing issues of the geologic and Indigenous knowledges of Land to bear on walking research, place, and the Bruce Trail; challenging landscape urbanism’s re-naturalization and restoration, which continues to bifurcate nature and culture, human and inhuman; and queering the ‘natural’ beauty of the trail through artistic interventions as natureculture happenings. Walking-with place insists on a relational, intimate, and tangible entanglement with the lithic ecomateriality of which we are all apart.

Thank you for listening to WalkingLab’s podcast series on Walking Research-Creation. Don’t forget you can find print publications and references on their website: walkinglab.org. Subscribe to the RRS feed so you can be notified whenever a new podcast drops!

 WalkingLab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Podcast Episode 5: Queer Walking Tours

WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast, you will learn about a method WalkingLab calls Queer Walking Tours. Queer Walking Tours offer a form of place-based research.

Transcript:

Welcome to WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation. This series aims to distil WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast, you will learn about a method WalkingLab calls Queer Walking Tours. Queer Walking Tours offer a form of place-based research that attends more responsibly and ethically to issues of place. This podcast is in conversation with the next podcast in this series, which explores theories of place in more detail. WalkingLab is co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. You can find more information at walkinglab.org. While not necessary the podcasts are designed to be listened to while going for a walk.

I’m Rebecca Conroy, artist and researcher and I will be your host today. 

WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-specific walking research-creation events. WalkingLab acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories on which our work takes place. WalkingLab is accountable to  Dylan Robinson’s insistence that land acknowledgements often operate from a politics of recognition and perpetuate settler colonial logics rather than disrupt them. As will be introduced through the podcast series WalkingLab asks walkers to consider where they are coming from in relation to Indigenous peoples and territories where they live and work, and to consider why a land acknowledgement is important to them.

Walking tours as a research method, a tourist event, and an everyday practice, are a commonplace method of getting to know a place, including its hidden histories, obscure stories, and state-sanctioned narratives. They typically take place on foot and are usually led by a guide with expert knowledge of a place. 

What most walking tours have in common is the idea of place, and that through a walking tour, participants can uncover something new about a given place’s historical, political, social, or cultural context. However, traditional walking tours tend to reinforce dominant versions of history, power relations, and normative or fixed understandings of place. This place-based knowledge can serve various forms of power and maintain the status quo, including the ongoing violence of settler colonization and the erasure of racialized, gendered, and disabled bodies. 

Place appears across many disciplines and fields. Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie contend that, in the social sciences, place is often under-theorized or treated as a surface upon which research happens and as such is marked as distinct or separate from humans and non-humans. They also contend that Indigenous understandings of Land are typically absent from Euro-Western understandings of place. 

WalkingLab developed a method called ‘Queer Walking Tours’ to advocate for a critical consideration of place. This criticality not only recognizes place as socially, culturally, politically, geosocially, and relationally constructed but also considers and maps-against place-based processes of settler colonization. Theories of place will be explored in more detail in podcast # 6 in this series. For the remainder of this podcast, the focus will be on how the Queer Walking Tour is organized and why. In the final section, Stone Walks Lancaster: Migration, Militarisms, and Speculative Geology, a queer walking tour will be described in detail. This queer walking tour was curated by WalkingLab for the Capacious conference in Lancaster Pennsylvania, in August 2018.

Queer walking tours are one example of walking research-creation. Research-creation combines creative and scholarly research practices, and supports knowledge and innovation through artistic and scholarly investigation. More details on walking research-creation are provided in the introductory podcast. Queer Walking Tours activate the notion of queerness in various senses. In one sense, WalkingLab activates queerness to attend to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, 2 Spirit, Intersex, Asexual and other queer gender and sexual identities. WalkingLab is cautious of the ways in which some queer identities now bolster normativity and White supremacy. WalkingLab also activates queerness to defamiliarize established assumptions: for instance, to defamiliarize the assumption that walking is a convivial practice and that all bodies move through space equally, which was discussed in the introductory podcast.

To begin to develop each Queer Walking Tour, WalkingLab treats the physical place where the walk will occur as a proposition to drive their thinking. In this way, they try to shift place from being a surface where the walk will occur into becoming a concept. This allows the walking tour to approach the place for the tour obliquely offering many different angles.

For example, in Stone Walks Lancaster, the physical place of Lancaster where the walk took place also became a concept for queering that place. Turning Lancaster into a concept, WalkingLab settled on three militarisms associated with the name and place of Lancaster: first, the Lancaster Bomber, which was a British World War 2 heavy bomber; second, the Lancaster Treaty of 1744, which took place between the colonial governments of the Virginia and Maryland Colonies and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and was signed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where the Queer Walking Tour took place; and third, the Sims’ Speculum, which was invented by Marion Sims, of Lancaster South Carolina; although Sims made numerous advances in medical technology that were significant for women’s health, they came at a violent cost: Sims used enslaved women to test his surgeries and operated on these women without anaesthesia for hours. 

WalkingLab introduced these militarisms to participants in the first of several pop-up lectures that took place along the walk. These militarisms pried open the place-concept Lancaster for participants, asking them to think through a queer-feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial framework as they walked.

Once the concept is established, to organize the actual walk, WalkingLab invites scholars, educators and/or artists to create their own interventions: either, artistic interventions or pop-up lectures related to the concept that will be presented on the walking tour. In this example, the concept was militarism associated with the name and place of Lancaster. 

The invitation asks presenters to think about the concept in relation to their own research and/or art practice, and to problematize the concept in relation to the place where the walk takes place. Presenters know that they will be presenting a 15–20-minute talk or doing an artistic performance/intervention during the walk, but WalkingLab does not assign specific places on a map at this stage. Presenters are asked to provide a title or theme for their talk but they are not required to submit scripted papers or abstracts as one would for a formal conference. In other words, while there is a method to the practice of Queer Walking Tours, what might happen on the walk remains open to the speculation, to chance, and to the dynamics of both the participants who come on the walk and the environment. However, this is not to say that the pop-up lectures or artistic contributions are random or careless. 

WalkingLab also plans the walk’s route in advance: first, using Google Maps and then walking the route to get to know it through their own bodies and gait. They also consider how different (racialized, gendered, disabled) bodies might move through the route. There is a thoroughness and exhaustiveness to the curatorial practice. Presenters are assigned a site along the route for their pop-up lecture or intervention, but not because they will be imparting specific information about a particular place, but because their talk or performance cuts obliquely across place, provoking new critical insights and considerations. In the next section of the podcast the queer walking tour Stone Walks Lancaster: Migration, Militarisms, and Speculative Geology will be described in detail. 

On the Stone Walks Lancaster tour, Chad Shomura gave a talk titled Settler Affect in Native Lands while standing on a street corner that, while currently populated by row houses and a convenience store, was the site of the Lancaster jail from 1753 to 1851 and the Conestoga massacre in 1763. There is a small plaque on the corner that refers to the massacre. However, Shomura’s talk did not reinforce this colonial narrative but worked frictionally, obliquely, or queerly against the dominant discourses available at that particular site. Drawing on Vanessa Watt’s Place-Thought, Shomura asked participants to think about recognition and what it entails historically and in the present. He spoke of enduring worlds (plant, animal, land, and people) and re-centered Indigenous cosmologies to that crowded, small patch of concrete sidewalk.

Other pop-up lectures included Sarah Cefai’s narrative-poetic piece called Market Exchange in Experience Capitalism on the steps of the Lancaster Central Market, one of the oldest farmers’ markets in the United States. Cefai took up the concept of the market queerly, discussing the predatory nature and militarisms of online dating, toxic White masculinity, humiliation, and misogyny. 

Michelle Wright’s lecture Discipline & Punish and Entanglement focused on an epiphenomenal understanding of time, where the past is constructed in the present. Standing where the former train depot, an important stop on the Underground Railroad, was located, her talk narrated past and present abolitionist movements. 

Dana Luciano’s lecture on speculative geology and sinkholes invited walkers to pay better attention to the material world, to the relationship between interhuman violence and genocide, to the Anthropocene, and to the ways that geology is imbricated with settler colonialism. 

Greg Seigworth, a Lancaster resident and host of the Capacious conference, provided what was called ‘Lancaster Shimmers’ – affective notes on the city’s changing residents and places. The walk ended with an invitation to participants to walk in silence for an extended period of time, in this case, through the Lancaster Cemetery, in the dark. 

Each Queer Walking Tour also includes an artistic intervention that invites walking participants to respond to place affectively and bodily. For the Lancaster walk, WalkingLab handdrew and then screen-printed each Lancaster militarism onto cardstock 5×7 inches in size. Each card had a piece of red embroidery floss and a needle attached. Participants were invited to hand-stitch onto the cards during the walk and as they listened to the different pop-up lectures. Participants could follow the image’s contours, create text, draw on feminist cross-stitching, or mark their responses by deconstructing the image itself.

Break

In chapter 8 of the book, Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world, Springgay and Truman discuss the affective and ethical-political contours of walking. This chapter is available as a free download from the WalkingLab website: WalkingLab.org. In the chapter, they argue that contours germinate, assemble, and shape things. As a practice of thinking-in movement, Queer Walking Tours contour queerly, introducing irregularity, curves and friction. A part of contouring as a walking research-creation practice has been to hold in tension the history and inheritances of walking and walking methods. Who walks, how they walk, and where they walk require constant queering. Using location as a proposition and applying a queer-feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial ethics, the walking tours make different aspects of a place felt in unexpected ways. Walking makes a place palpable as different configurations of bodies, materials, environments, and texts come into being. Queer Walking Tours offer a way of conducting place-based research that is rigorous, examines place as a cultural, and political manifestation, and disrupts settler-colonial understandings of a place.

Thank you for listening to WalkingLab’s podcast series on Walking Research-Creation. Remember to go to walkinglab.org to find more of their publications, including a free download of chapter 8 of our monograph. WalkingLab encourages you to share the podcast or tell a friend about the series. Subscribe to the RRS feed so you can be notified whenever a new podcast drops!

WalkingLab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Podcast Episode 4: Critical and Creative Approaches to Walking in Schools

WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast, you’ll learn about the complex ways that students can engage in walking as a method of inquiry.

Transcript:

Welcome to WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation. This series aims to distil WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast, you’ll learn about the complex ways that students can engage in walking as a method of inquiry. WalkingLab is co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. You can find print publications of these podcasts at walkinglab.org. While not necessary the podcasts are designed to be listened to while going for a walk. This walk could take you along an urban river or around a school yard.

I’m Rebecca Conroy, artist and researcher and I will be your host today. 

WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-specific walking research-creation events. WalkingLab acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories on which our work takes place. WalkingLab is accountable to  Dylan Robinson’s insistence that land acknowledgements often operate from a politics of recognition and perpetuate settler colonial logics rather than disrupt them. As will be introduced through the podcast series WalkingLab asks walkers to consider where they are coming from in relation to Indigenous peoples and territories where they live and work, and to consider why a land acknowledgement is important to them.

An outcomes based approach to education is modeled on colonial notions of mastery, and whiteness. Within this framework both the arts and walking practices are incorporated in schools when they can be proven to make contributions to student creativity, attainment, attention, and wellbeing in the service of specific outcomes. This podcast examines two in-school walking research-creation projects that resist outcomes-based models of schooling through a critical use of walking and arts practices. 

The podcast begins with Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed’s Upside-Down and Backwards, which was a month-long artist residency in an urban elementary school and part of a research-creation project called The Pedagogical Impulse directed by Stephanie Springgay. Documentation of this project can be found at thepedagogicalimpulse.com. The artists worked with grade 3 and 6 teachers and the students – who were predominantly newcomers to Canada and socially and financially marginalized – to develop a series of research-creation projects that asked questions about entanglements between nature and culture, citizenship, and belonging. The project also intervened into the sentimental colonial nostalgia for landscape painting and nature that persists in the Canadian elementary curriculum. 

Landscape paintings often present the Canadian landscape as a pristine and unoccupied wilderness, and settler-colonizers as heroic explorers. In Upsidedown and Backwards, Jickling and Reed introduced the students to contemporary art that critically explores the Canadian landscape and offers counter-images. For instance, Cree artist Kent Monkman’s paintings, which re-enact iconic landscape paintings while telling stories of Indigenous genocide; or Ian Baxter&’s reflective souvenirs, which disrupt the binary between the self and the natural, allowing the viewer to see themselves as part of nature. These in-school lessons shaped the basis for the walking research-creation projects. 

Landscape art is often used idealistically, to reconnect students with nature. Similarly, Sheelagh McLean contends that outdoor education programs are often framed as methods for reconnecting students with nature. In outdoors education, students are sometimes presented with environmental problems, such as climate change, but without attending to how capitalism, White supremacy, and settler colonialism are part of environmental degradation. In this way, the uptake of walking in education fails to consider its role in White settlers’ claim to land. Karen Malone suggests that these pedagogical methods situate nature as inanimate, children as seperate to nature, and humans as dominant over nature. Moreover, Malone argues that families and communities who don’t engage with particular forms of nature-based learning are often described as depriving their children. Such problematic understandings of nature and landscape promote particular versions of citizenship, nationalism, and belonging in which some bodies are already marked as either natural or unnatural. McLean contends that while place-based environmental curricula imply decolonization, they are portrayed as a place for white bodies to escape crowded urban spaces and reclaim their innocence. This was reflected in the students personal experiences where landscape was defined as specifically ‘Canadian,’ outside of urban Toronto, and not something that they had personally experienced or were welcomed into.

Margaret Somerville and Monica Green contend that posthuman place-based and environmental educational research requires an attention to intimacy, to counter the idea of nature as distinct from culture. In Upside-Down and Backwards, the teacher and artists started from the proposition of intimacy. In one project, students walked-with round mirrors the size of an average child’s head: Students posed for photographs with the mirrors in front of their faces to reflect landscape, sky, or other objects such as brick-walls. This resulted in a series of student portraits, in which faces became entangled with nature. Intimacy here is not a human-centric model of care, where students got to know their local environment, or learnt about sustainability. Rather, intimacy becomes acts that intervene and make visible students’ entanglements within a landscape. This contests the idea of nature as White, innocent, empty and separate. In another example, students walked Toronto’s Don River. The walks meandered through familiar paths and neighbourhoods. Typically, nature-based learning, as explained by Malone, asserts that nature is something distinct from culture, urbanization, and humans. Landscape, in the Canadian context, is often associated with the wilds of national parks, not inner-city spaces such as the Don River. In walking-with the Don the students moved with the intimate contours of landscape. 

In another project, the classes walked to Brickworks Park. The students walked-with Elinor Whidden’s Rearview Walking Sticks. The Walking Sticks consist of discarded rear view car mirrors attached to large tree branches, which allow the user to see behind them on the path. They symbolize walking on rugged terrain where additional support is necessary. However, using them on human-made boardwalks and paths seemed absurd. Similarly, as navigation devices, looking behind you while walking forward obscured the student’s sight, complicating issues of safety and orienteering. 

Jack Halberstam argues that success, mastery, and heteronormativity can be countered with approaches that “embrace the absurd, the silly and the hopelessly goofy.” Halberstam contends that, in education, seriousness, rigorousness, and disciplinary training confirms what is already known in advance. The walking sticks were unnecessary in a gentrified parkland, yet disrupted the assumption that there is a need to know how to behave, to know in advance how to walk in landscapes. These absurdities were punctured by the students’ reflections caught in other student’s mirrors. Not one student with one reflection, but a multitude of diffracted bodies interrupting the landscape and walking. In contrast to dominant images of landscape as wild and empty, Upside-Down and Backwards swarmed with children’s bodies moving, walking, dancing, talking, laughing and sometimes screaming. The students’ portraits and their walking-with experiments explore land and body, nature and culture, not as severed, but as entangled with colonization, immigration, urbanization, and pollution. 

Working against the history of Canadian landscape where landscapes are captured devoid of humans, the walking-with events contest notions of citizenship and identity, and the easy separation of nature, self and culture.

Let’s now explore the second in-school project.

Sarah E. Truman’s Dérive through these Charter’d Halls was a four month in-school research-creation event with a diverse cohort of grade nine English students in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. The students examined the relationship between walking as a method for generating content, as a narrative device, or a literary theme. They also critically challenged outcomes-based approaches to walking in education, where walking is framed as a method for inciting creativity and for improving literacy.

Rather than structuring the project around an outcome-focused assessment of literacy, the research-creation events of the project focused on the ethical-political concerns that emerged through the students’ walking, reading, and writing. Students would walk while completing readings and writing related to different prompts. On one project, the students walked-with the idea of the dérive or ‘drift’. Many walking scholars and artists have used versions of the dérive, borrowed from the Situationists, to re-map space. The students were intrigued by the notion that within a dérive the idea is to drop usual ‘relations’ and set out to explore ‘appealing’ and ‘repelling’ places. The students were eager to try this out in their school, although, as one student noted, the places of repulsion may outweigh the places of attraction. Several students also commented that deliberately walking or ‘drifting’ in some places in the city and at certain times of the day may be dangerous – particularly for racialized and gendered bodies – and acknowledged  how walking scholarship (and schooling) still assumes the cis-white-enabled male body as the norm. 

During the student’s drifts through the school they created literary maps of their affective experiences of space and place. Mapping is a common practice in school curricula, where students might for instance map the topology of school space using drawings and place names: such maps are usually representational. The students’ literary maps, on the other hand, are created using a variety of literary devices including: metaphor, assonance, lists, exaggeration, rhyme, and synesthesia: they can’t be easily used to physically locate oneself within the school. Rather, they are ‘counter-archival’, in that they mark out the students’ sensory and subjective understandings of place, and are open to constant modification. You can find out more about counter-archiving and counter-mapping in previous podcasts in this series. The students’ literary maps point at the multiple tensions of walking-with inside and outside of school space, illustrating how bodies at the intersection of gender and race are already marked as out of place and as such how walking and movement are always constrained, disciplined, and codified. 

One of the literary devices used to create the narrative maps was synesthesia, which is when writers use one sense to describe another. The students’ synesthesia dérive disrupted the habitual use of language to describe smell, taste, touch, sight and sound, and instead conveyed students’ experience of place in complex ways. For example, one student scribbled on their map: Salted sweat grunted out of limbs. Another wrote: The air takes on a different taste, sweet and hazy. Splinters of the soft brown shades linger humid on my eyelids.

Other literary devices included listing. The use of listing as a literary device links seemingly disparate agents into a tense unity. For example, one student mapped a stairwell in the school’s interior:

Thunder of feet

Rough Walls

High climb

Food falls

Spider webs

Peeky holes

Cold air

Bell tolls

Lists function similar to Deleuze and Guttari’s partial objects. Partial objects are “pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, and so simultaneously hint at both gaps and connections.” The synaesthetic maps and the lists reveal the ways that students understand institutional space and its effect on student bodies and learning. 

Another walking and mapping technique included the re-naming of school spaces. For example, the office became ‘swivel chair blues’ and the examination room became ‘Data Source’ with ‘No-exit.’ These humorous descriptions evoke what Halberstam calls the “toxic perversity of contemporary life”, where success and progress continue to marginalize students labeled as at risk, urban, and outside of mainstream culture. As Sara Ahmed notes, to be affected by an object is not just to experience that individual object but also whatever surrounds that object. In this way, chairs and stairwells, which might seem less important in school than standardized tests and assessment reports, move into the centre and link up with other connective devices on the maps. 

While the field of literacy studies in education has expanded to include environmental literacies, as well as emotional, and place literacies, literacy still functions through an inclusionary logic where particular people are deemed ‘illiterate.’ Like the discussion of  landscape above, which continues to demarcate nature as White and neutral, and as such marking racialized students as unnatural, literacy in the west continues to function as a White civilizing process that neutralizes, sanitizes, and commodifies language skills. Literacy in schools in the west is built around a White supremacist monoculture. To be literate means to know in advance what literacy is, and how to perform literate acts. 

The students’ literary maps of the school mapped students’ understandings of how language functions to control and dehumanize students. Walking-with in the school became a method for exploring inside and outside of school place collectively, to consider the ways that language is already pre-supposed and pre-determined in advance. Walking-with, as a mapping practice, shifts literacy from its concern about particular ‘coded’ meanings toward intensities and their effects. The students’ maps create intimate diagrams of school places that don’t represent place, but rather entangle their relations with learning, institutions, and literary practices. 

Walking-with can be a significant and important method for working with students in educational contexts, but only if it is used critically. Walking is sometimes taken up as a slow, antiquated, and embodied way of moving through space, in order to counter what is perceived to be the negative effects of digital technologies on young peoples’ lives. Walking becomes a way to reconnect with place and people, and is valued because of its affiliation with understandings of health and environmental consciousness, purity and its perceived accessibility. Moreover, in pandemic times, educators are increasingly looking to outdoor models of learning, including walking, as a ‘safer’ way to learn. Yet, as we discussed in podcast 2, discussions of place rarely take into consideration the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, people of colour, and ethnic minorities.

In Truman’s project, the intersectionality of gender, race, and ethnicity was discussed by the students as limiting where they could safely walk, including on routes to and from school. When walking is valued for its health benefit, or inherent relation to creativity, or used to promote ‘green’ initiatives in schools, the legacies of walking as White, male, autonomous, and as part of ongoing settler colonialism remain intact. As discussed in Jickling and Reed’s project, walking and nature rationalized through discourses of ‘disconnection’ and ‘reconnection’ is part of the production of White subjectivity that continues to re-inscribe a separation between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, landscape and Other. Walking is never simple, slow, or benign. Walking-with is complex, unruly, and political.  

Thank you for listening to WalkingLab’s podcast series on Walking Research-Creation. 

You can find out more about the projects discussed in this podcast at thepedagogicalimpulse.com and walkinglab.org. Subscribe to the RRS feed so you can be notified whenever a new podcast drops!

WalkingLab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

Podcast Episode 3: Walking as Counter-Archiving

WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast, you’ll learn about walking as counter-archiving and Afrofuturism.

Transcript: 

Welcome to WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation. This series aims to distil WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast, you’ll learn about: walking as counter-archiving and Afrofuturism. WalkingLab is co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. You can find print publications of these podcasts at walkinglab.org. While not necessary the podcasts are designed to be listened to while going for a walk. 

I’m Rebecca Conroy, artist and researcher and I will be your host today. 

WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-specific walking research-creation events. WalkingLab acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories on which our work takes place. WalkingLab is accountable to Dylan Robinson’s insistence that land acknowledgements often operate from a politics of recognition and perpetuate settler colonial logics rather than disrupt them. As will be introduced through the podcast series WalkingLab asks walkers to consider where they are coming from in relation to Indigenous peoples and territories where they live and work, and to consider why a land acknowledgement is important to them.

In podcast #2 counter-mapping was introduced. Counter-mapping is an approach that works against dominant power structures. It questions the assumptions produced by conventional maps, and recognizes different knowledge systems. Counter-mapping re-maps the landscape to account for: exclusions and omissions, lived experiences, regionalisms, and local knowledges. In this podcast you will be introduced to another counter practice: walking as counter-archiving. Counter-archives can unsettle linear understandings of time. This podcast focuses on another commissioned and curated WalkingLab project, BlackGrange by Camille Turner. Photo documentation of this project as well as a self-guided audio tour of the walk can be found on the WalkingLab website: walkinglab.org.

In podcast #2 you were introduced to the ways that official maps can exclude and erase Indigenous and Black histories, and serve in the production of imperialism and settler colonialism. Settler-colonialism is an ongoing process of occupation that results in the forced removal and disappearance of Indigenous peoples from traditional territories. Like maps, official archives also displace Indigenous and Black histories. This podcast will focus on the problem with conventional archives and discuss walking as a counter-archiving practice. 

Archives are bound by historical structures of categorization, identification, and state-sanctioned logic and are solely representative of those with power and control. Only particular traces and records of the past are documented as archives conceal, reveal, and reproduce the power of the state. As such, archives predominantly leave out or erase queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour. As Cheryl Thompson argues, “the invisibility of black subjects in Canadian archives has as much to do with past collection practices as it does with present ones. We continue to idealize certain aspects of our collective identity while demonizing others”. Syrus Ware similarly argues that conventional archives regulate what is allowed to be remembered. The archive, he claims, always begins with whiteness. Even queer and trans archives, Ware contends, are marked with erasures of Black and Indigenous lives. 

Counter-archiving is more than a process of diversifying conventional archives. This means it is not simply about adding previously erased or hidden histories to an archive, but a method of interrogating the logic of archives. As Ware (2017) notes, counter-archiving is a practice of interrupting the whiteness of archives. For Ware, this means disrupting the narrative that Black subjects are new additions to existing archives and an insistence that Black lives have always been present. Counter-archives become practices that are more relevant to lived experiences and histories. 

Normative conceptualizations of time are linear, chronological, and tethered to capitalism and progress. Progressive time is equated with humanist notions of freedom, rationality, peace, equality, and prosperity. This progressive time privileges particular versions of humanity, where certain bodies and subjects are always rendered out of time. Elizabeth Freeman (2010) names this normative value of time chrononormativity. Chrononormativity includes a teleological unfolding of events such as birth, marriage, death and also the everyday regulations of watches, calendars, and schedules. Chrononormativity enables some bodies and events to be perceived as historically significant, while others are erased or forgotten. Accordingly Queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour have continuously been excluded from official timelines, or archives. As Camille Turner, states, Black subjects are not only erased in official state narratives, when they do appear in archives they appear not as humans, but as property. In the next section the discussion will focus on how Camille Turner’s BlackGrange walking tour is a practice of counter-archiving.

BlackGrange by Camille Turner takes the form of a walking tour that starts with official archival fragments of Black history in Toronto. Combining archival fragments with speculative fiction, performance, meditation, ritual gestures, and song BlackGrange rethinks and re-imagines the present by illuminating histories of the African Diaspora in Toronto’s Grange neighbourhood. The Grange is an area in downtown Toronto and in close proximity to Kensington Market and Chinatown, where the walks took place in podcast #2. BlackGrange intervenes in the logics of official archives: archives that falsely describe Canada as a country committed to multiculturalism and benevolence. The dominant narrative of Blackness presents Canada as a safe place that welcomes racialized others. The production of Canada as a White state is indebted to the erasure of Blackness.

Blending archival material, Afrofuturism, and performance, Turner pieced together fragments that existed of Black history in Toronto, with speculative fiction, performance, meditation, ritual gestures, and song. Afrofuturism and speculative fiction envision an alternative world or future, where time, space, bodies, and behaviours are defamiliarized, ruptured, or expanded. 

Each stop on the BlackGrange walking tour was a significant place for Black History in Toronto, Canada such as the First Baptist Church. This church was founded by travellers of the Underground Railroad, who were excluded from the city’s white churches. Official archival accounts of Canada’s history falsely describe Canada as a country committed to multiculturalism and benevolence: a place that welcomes Black slaves escaping the United States. Black history exists in Canada’s official archives through the history of the Underground Railroad. As Katherine McKittrick contends, this history falsely describes Canada as a country committed to multiculturalism that welcomes racialized others. This logic of benevolence and safety, McKittrick argues, masks an ongoing history of colonialism, Indigenous genocide and struggles, and Canada’s role in transatlantic slavery. Moreover, the production of Canada as a White state is enacted through the erasure of Blackness. 

For most of the stops on the BlackGrange tour, the history of the people and place are not publicly visible. Only one place is marked with a very small plaque and as such much of this history remains erased. BlackGrange not only re-maps this erased and forgotten history onto the Canadian landscape, it questions the mechanisms that enable the ongoing erasure of that history. Katherine McKittrick states that while Canada’s mythology has been shaped by the idea of fugitive American slaves finding freedom and refuge in Canada, Black feminism and Black resistance are ‘unexpected and concealed’. Black people arrived in Canada via multiple means, not just as a passage into ‘freedom;’ and as Turner’s walking tour makes explicitly clear, Canada also legalised the enslavement of Black people. Turner reminds us that ‘eleven of the twenty-five founding fathers [of Toronto] were slave owners; in fact, they were allowed to bring slaves here duty free!’ In fact, the area where the walk takes place, called the Grange, was once the slave owner Peter Russel’s farmland. Although it problematizes the idea of Canada as benevolent, BlackGrange also resists a reading of Black history as exclusively violent or traumatic. For instance, Turner used ritual – such as song, water ablutions, and the offering of fruit and flowers – as ways to move erased narratives from being locked into a victim narrative. 

Ware contends that when counter-archives begin with people of colour, they refuse inclusion and engender a different sense of time. Official archives function by removing ‘things’ from circulation, preserving them, documenting them and interpreting them. In this way, the official archive shapes time into a straight line, beginning with the official account of history. Ware describes this account of history as a ‘past that is not a past’, in that it is neither ‘finished’ nor ‘objectively true’. However, when starting with Black lives, the counter-archive can problematize official accounts of the past, refusing inclusion into the archive, and resisting a focus on damage-centred research. In this way, BlackGrange is an example of Afrofuturism, which will be examined in the final section of this podcast.

Afrofuturism is a cultural and aesthetic speculative worlding that re-imagines generative and irresistible Black futures. Afrofuturism, Audrey Hudson contends, creates Black spaces, imaginations, and futures while acknowledging the past. In Afrofuturism, the idea that the future will supersede the past is unsettled. Instead, the future is haunted by the past. If Black futurity is incommensurable with archival time, then Afrofuturist temporalities become strategies for unsettling and refusing the linear time of the archive. BlackGrange mobilizes a fictional time traveller, who travels back in time, but who simultaneously affirms a future where the archive is open, and where Black bodies are not silenced or property. Entangling fact and fiction in a futurepresent Turner’s walk unsettles time, and the way that linear archival notions of time serve the interests of power. The time traveler creates a speculative future context for the narrators, who then tell stories from the past, but importantly the walk itself is situated in the present. The narrators have travelled back to our time to share their insight and in doing so they demonstrate a temporality that is interwoven and in flux. The stops along the way become a living geography of present day Toronto, full of the still audible (if one listens properly) voices from history. Walking as counter-archiving enacts these understandings of futurity, where the future is not a romanticized ideal, but in constant re-figuration. 

Thank you for listening to WalkingLab’s podcast series on Walking Research-Creation. Don’t forget you can find print publications and references for these podcasts on our website: walkinglab.org. Better yet, subscribe to the RRS feed so you can be notified whenever a new podcast drops!

WalkingLab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Podcast Episode 2: Walking as Counter-Mapping

WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast, you’ll learn about counter-mapping, walking and decolonisation, and the geographies of race.

Transcript:

Welcome to WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation. This series aims to distil WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. In this podcast, you’ll learn about counter-mapping, walking and decolonisation, and the geographies of race. WalkingLab is co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. You can find print publications of these podcasts at walkinglab.org. While not necessary the podcasts are designed to be listened to while going for a walk. For this podcast you might consider walking in an urban area.

I’m Rebecca Conroy, artist and researcher and I will be your host today. 

WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-specific walking research-creation events. WalkingLab acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories on which our work takes place. WalkingLab is accountable to Dylan Robinson’s insistence that land acknowledgements often operate from a politics of recognition and perpetuate settler colonial logics rather than disrupt them. As will be introduced through the podcast series WalkingLab asks walkers to consider where they are coming from in relation to Indigenous peoples and territories where they live and work, and to consider why a land acknowledgement is important to them.

Mapping has been used by imperial and colonial powers to exploit natural resources, to claim land, and to legitimize geographical borders. Maps produce a sense of certainty and entitlement to land, as well as a sense of the land as stable. Cree scholar Dallas Hunt writing with Shaun Stevenson argues that mapping reaffirms dominant, nation state and settler-colonial conceptualizations of Canada’s geography. Settler-colonialism is an ongoing process of occupation that results in the forced removal and disappearance of Indigenous peoples from traditional territories. In this way, Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods assert that mapping and normalized geographic understandings continue the erasure and segregation of racialized subjects. The racialization of space, they argue, is often theorized as essentialized or detached from actual geographic places. 

Alternatively, counter-mapping, is an approach that works against dominant power structures. It questions the assumptions produced by conventional maps, and recognizes different knowledge systems. Counter-mapping re-maps the landscape to account for: exclusions and omissions, lived experiences, regionalisms, and local knowledges.

The focus of this podcast are two counter-mapping WalkingLab projects that conceptualize space as regional and relational. These projects were commissioned by WalkingLab and photo documentation of these walking projects can be found on the WalkingLab website: walkinglab.org. To the Landless by Métis artist Dylan Miner and the Red Line Archive and Labyrinth, by Walis Johnson disrupt dominant narratives of place and futurity, re-mapping Land. Throughout this podcast series we will use the concept Land, with an upper-case L, as articulated by the Canadian Indigenous scholar Sandra Styres. Land in this sense is not mere earth, but acknowledges an Indigenous framework that embraces earth, air, water, humans, and non-humans as vital, pedagogical and relational. Land, with the upper-case L, encompasses all living and non-living matter. 

Geopolitical borders are social and physical constructions. They police and protect labour, and materialize understandings of purity and safety. Heightened concerns about migration have fuelled the fortification of geopolitical borders as racialized sites that restrict human bodies. In this way, Gloria Anzaldúa maintains that ‘borderlands’ enact emotional and physical trauma. As Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie note, borders and border-crossing have been used by social science researchers as a metaphor. However, a figurative use of ‘border transgression’ fails to account for the lived realities of those who die crossing actual borders each day. Moreover, the ability of some bodies to move freely across borders while others are criminalized reflects unequal power dynamics. 

Walking researchers need to similarly question the ways that border concepts get used and materialized in their work. In North America, the absence of visible borders, such as fences, allowed settlers to believe that the land was unoccupied, or terra nullius. Settlers wilfully interpreted this as though the land was free for them to claim. In this way, fences demarcate ownership and property and are part of the North American ideology of progress and capitalism. Dylan Miner describes how this demarcation impeded Indigenous ancestral movements and failed to recognize Indigenous spatial knowledges. Instead of state-sanctioned borders, Miner asks us to attend to an understanding of regionalism which is based in Indigenous understandings of Land.

To the Landless was created by Métis artist Dylan Miner. On the walk participants walked through Chinatown and Kensington Market, in Toronto, Canada, a dense multicultural neighbourhood situated on the traditional lands of the Seneca and Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of the Credit River. Kensington is a mix of surplus stores, and ethnic food shops, alongside trendy cafes and restaurants. Chinatown is located adjacent to Kensington. 

During the walk participants read from the writings of feminist anarchists Emma Goldman, who lived between Chinatown and Kensington in 1928, and Lucia Gonzáles Parsons, from whom the title of To the Landless is borrowed. Unable to separate history from the present and future, Miner asked participants to walk-with and converse-with these two contentious and important activists and thinkers from history. 

Gonzáles Parsons and Goldman were often in conflict with each other, in part because their anarchist beliefs stemmed from different generations and different orientations to feminism. Gonzáles Parsons was born in the southern United States in 1851. As a woman of African, Mexican, and Indigenous ancestry, she employed feminist intersectional, anti-state, and anti-capitalist activism throughout her life. 

Goldman meanwhile, was born in Russia in 1869. Goldman was known for advocating for birth control and sexual freedom for women, as well as for her opposition to capitalism. Considered by the government as one of the most dangerous women in the United States, she was eventually exiled and deported in the 1920s when the US government feared persons without US citizenship. Goldman lived out most of her remaining years in Europe, but returned to Canada to give lectures frequently, and died in Toronto in 1940. Goldman is considered one of the most important figures in the anarchist movement. Property, wrote Goldman, “condemns millions of people to be mere non-entities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a grey, dull and wretched existence for themselves.” Gonzáles Parsons was similarly vocal about the perils of capitalism. She was one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, and stated at its Founding Convention in 1905 that revolution would return the land “to the landless, the tools to the toiler; and the products to the producers.” 

Gonzales Parson’s anarchism and her radical thought was in direct opposition to the White pro-capitalists at the time. The media invoked numerous stereotypes to defame her including calling her a savage, and emphasized her hair, dark skin, and black eyes. In the press, Gonzales Parsons was often described using racist epithets and positioned as a former slave. Lauren Basson explains that such profiling was used to create a distinction between capitalist, American bodies, and foreign, anarchist bodies. In this way, borders become racialised, dividing White Americans from Black foreigners. Gonzales Parsons herself denounced any African American ancestry, holding fast to her Indigenous lineage. To be Indigenous, she often claimed, was to be American and as such anarchism was not in opposition to American values, but rather represented ‘American’ ideology (where the ‘true’ American was the Indigenous American). Anarchism, for both Parsons and Goldman, argued for freedom from man-made laws and governments imposed by violence and coercion.

As a counter-mapping walk, To the Landless re-mapped anarchism onto the contemporary Toronto landscape. Miner re-mapped place by speculatively bringing Parsons and Goldman together in Toronto, a place that Parsons never physically visited. During the walk Miner shifted arbitrary governmental borders and instead adopted a spatial logic based in relations, collective practices, and community organizing. 

To the Landless took place in the month of May 2017. This date is significant, as not only is May 1st International Workers’ Day, but also 2017 was the 150th anniversary of Canada’s confederation—popularly referred to as Canada 150, or Canada’s birthday. Numerous counter-events, including art projects, critiqued the celebrations. These critiques included debates about the treatment of Indigenous peoples, residential schools, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and the current social and economic crisis. To the Landless was hosted in conjunction with an exhibition called What does one do with such a clairvoyant image? at Gallery 44 and Trinity Square Video. The exhibition included a series of photo-based works by Miner, and was curated as a critical response and intervention to Canada 150.  In imagining Parsons and Goldman in conversation with each other, and in Toronto, To the Landless intervened into Canada 150’s commemoration of the violently-imposed Canadian border and nation state, and its reinforcement of the narrative of progress and capitalism.

To the Landless’s counter-mapping, in the words of Gonzales Parsons, imagined an era of labour “when capitalism will be a thing of the past, and the new industrial republic, the commonwealth of labour, shall be in operation”. The collective action of walking, reading, and talking attended to the ways that Indigenous and settler peoples need to engage in what Hunt and Stevenson describe as ‘mutual care,’ as they re-map and re-learn new geographical practices. 

The counter-mapping performed by To the Landless is similarly materialized in Walis Johnson’s The Red Line Archive and Labyrinth, which is the second of the two WalkingLab projects described in this podcast. 

The Red Line Archive and Labyrinth is an ongoing public art project that engages pedestrians in conversations about race, spatial narratives, and the history of redlining. Redlining began in New York City in 1934 to indicate the risk of real estate development in particular communities. Residents in red lined neighbourhoods were unable to access housing loans, mortgages, and other financial services. Race was the primary factor in determining where the red line was drawn. For the WalkingLab iteration of the Red Line project, Johnson created an intricate maze out of red ribbon in the grounds of the Weeksville Heritage Centre in Brooklyn, New York. Johnson invited participants to walk the red line with her.

The red line is an example of a Black geography. Katherine Mckittrick describes Black geographies, as spatial understandings of anti-Blackness and its violence: she argues that there are multiple Black geographies, including the plantation house, the fields, the prisons, the slave ships, and the slave quarters. In this way, Black geographies are not nouns, but ongoing verbs. McKittrick further argues that asking African Americans to assimilate into Euro-Western ideas of society requires Black people to join a system that thrives on anti-Blackness. Anti-Blackness is linked to urban infrastructural decay and geographic surveillance. McKittrick maintains that Black geographies are regarded as dangerous, unruly, and empty, even when they are excessively populated. Black geographies are bound up with redlining, which results in a kind of forced placelessness. Further, while research can focus on the places where Black subjects live to unsettle oppressive structures—for instance, revealing the inequalities of redlining— McKittrick contends that this continues to naturalize racial difference, but this time naturalizing it onto place rather than an individual Black subject. In this way, such research continues to reduce Black lives to statistics and facts. In order to counter-map Black geographies, McKittrick demands that we turn to artists, writers, and thinkers for whom Blackness “works against the violence that defines it.”

Johnson’s counter-mapping project re-claims spaces within the red line for the community; participants shared in relational conversations with Johnson as they walked and performed rituals with water. Like Dylan Miner’s To the Landless, The Red Line Archive and Labyrinth project critically questions North American narratives of progress and capitalism, which are upheld by racist and classist mapping processes such as redlining. Walking, for both Miner and Johnson, becomes a thinking-in-movement, a practice that counter-maps possible futures. Inviting participants into a conversation as they walk, Johnson considered how walking might create a ‘new’ geography of New York that re-imagines Black people, communities of colour, and the working class at the centre, rather than the margins of society. The concluding section of the podcast will consider the counter-mapping practices of Black Lives Matter.

The political intention to counter-mapping was encapsulated by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Taking place in cities all over the world, these protests responded to the murders of Black people through pervasive individual and systemic racism, including George Floyd and Brionna Taylor amongst others. While marching, protestors were invited to chant the names of Floyd and Taylor. Chanting and holding signs that acknowledge people from different times and places re-mapped these individuals into cities all over the world, counter-mapping against the argument internationally that anti-black institutional violence is an ‘American problem’. Collective action, beginning with Black lives, disrupted geopolitical notions of national boundaries, and instead re-mapped the city through solidarity.

Thank you for listening to WalkingLab’s podcast series on Walking Research-Creation. You can find print publications and references on their website: walkinglab.org. Tune into podcast #3 which focuses on another commissioned walking project by Camille Turner called BlackGrange. The podcast continues to interrogate walking and geopolitics of race. Subscribe to the RRS feed so you can be notified whenever a new podcast drops!

WalkingLab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Podcast Episode 1: Introduction to Critical Walking Methodologies

WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. This is the first podcast in the series. In this podcast you will learn about critical walking methodologies and walking research-creation. If you are an artist or new walking researcher, this podcast will introduce you to the field of walking studies and WalkingLab.

Transcript:

Welcome to WalkingLab’s podcast series on walking research-creation that aims to distill WalkingLab publications and content into audio form. This is the first podcast in the series. In this podcast you will learn about critical walking methodologies and walking research-creation. If you are an artist or new walking researcher, this podcast will introduce you to the field of walking studies and WalkingLab. WalkingLab is co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. You can find print publications related to these podcasts including colourful graphic representations of these podcasts at walkinglab.org. While not necessary, the podcasts are designed to be listened to while going for a walk.

I’m Rebecca Conroy, artist and researcher and I’ll be your host today. 

WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-specific walking research-creation events. WalkingLab acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories on which our work takes place. WalkingLab is accountable to Dylan Robinson’s insistence that land acknowledgements often operate from a politics of recognition and perpetuate settler colonial logics rather than disrupt them. As will be introduced through the podcast series WalkingLab asks walkers to consider where they are coming from in relation to Indigenous peoples and territories where they live and work, and to consider why a land acknowledgement is important to them.

This introductory podcast will discuss the need for critical walking methodologies that trouble the often overused figure of the flaneur, and provide an overview of walking research-creation. You can find examples of this critical walking practice in subsequent podcasts.

Walking has a long and diverse history in the social sciences and humanities. Recently, there is a sense of urgency and affirmation surrounding walking which is entangled with the desire to generate research and knowledge in situ, that is community-based, and that is attuned to more-than-human entanglements and encounters. In an era of complex social and political issues—such as climate change, capitalism, and forced migration, to name a few—there is an increasing demand for public and community action. Further, academics continue to grapple with ways to present research findings to non-academic audiences, while marginalized and oppressed people take up ways to transform and decolonize social and political space and institutions. To this end, walking has become more than a utilitarian or pedestrian mode of getting from place to place; walking is an ethical and political call to collective action.

Significantly, amidst the urgency and renewed interest in walking, is a shift in the ethical and political (in)tensions that are brought to bear on questions of who gets to walk where, how we walk, under whose terms, and what kind of publics are produced. Against the backdrop of health and well-being that promotes walking as a free and accessible way to exercise, critical walking scholarship accounts for the ways that walking is imbricated in legacies of settler-colonial harm, white supremacy, and functions to police and regulate diverse bodies.  

To that extent, the flâneur is a problematic walking trope in that he is conditioned by autonomy, ability, Whiteness and masculinity, and as such he is able to walk anywhere, detached from the immediate surroundings. The flâneur emerged as a distinctive figure in nineteenth-century Paris. He was portrayed as a disinterested, leisurely observer of the urban scene, taking pleasure in losing himself in the crowd and becoming a spectator. As an elite figure, the flâneur was able to wander the city, with no purpose or destination in mind. The flâneur enjoys a tremendous amount of spare time, is free to move in urban space, and possesses the detachment of a scientist, although he often writes or is written about poetically. The flâneur remains anonymous and detached from the city and thus is supposedly able to observe the world around him. Walter Benjamin wrote on, and popularized the anaesthesia of the flâneur. In the decades since, many qualitative researchers, particularly those interested in urban ethnographies, use the flâneur to inform their practices. 

Instead of the flâneur WalkingLab posits different conceptualizations of walking that think critically about what it means to move. For example, disability scholar and activist Eliza Chandler narrates how when walking in the city her body is figured as being in-place and different at the same time. Chandler’s critical disability research emphasizes the problematic images and representations, including those offered via walking, that need to be disrupted. Instead of the strolling flâneur, Chandler’s walking narratives of dragging legs, and tripping toes enacts a different narrative of moving in the city. In another example, Garnett Cadogan details his experience of walking in New York City and the list of tactics that as a Black man he has to employ such as no running, no sudden movements, no objects in hand, no hoodies, and no loitering on street corners. Quite unlike the invisible and detached flâneur, Cadogan’s tactics emphasize the material realities of ‘walking while black.’ 

Feminist walking artists and scholars Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner argue that the history of walking engenders a ‘fraternity’ and valorizes individualistic, heroic, and transgressive metaphors. Taking up Heddon and Turner’s convictions, WalkingLab is attuned to critical walking methodologies that don’t assume walking is a convivial, automatically embodied, inclusive and depoliticized mode of doing research and pedagogy. Theoretically aligned with feminist theories, anti-racist theories, queer and trans theories, critical disability studies, affect studies, and anti-colonialism, WalkingLab insists that walking methods must engage with the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and disability. Critical walking methodologies attend to walking beyond health or as an innovative method, and in particular take up walking with an attention to anti-ableism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism. Critical walking methodologies insist that the intersections of identity, the place where research takes place, and how one moves through space be critically complicated and accounted for. 

For example, WalkingLab collaborated with Carmen Papalia to re-create the project White Cane Amplified. Here Papalia replaces the white cane with a megaphone, which the artist, who himself is a ‘non-visual learner,’ uses to instruct other pedestrians and vehicles about his presence and to request help from participants in crossing streets and navigating urban spaces. Papalia, in contrast to heteronormative notions of a self-reliant male strolling through the city, requires participation from others in order to navigate safely. Although dressed in dapper clothing reminiscent of the historical figure of the flâneur, Papalia queers the notion of a flâneur who is described as an incognito spectator who strides effortlessly through crowds in detached anonymity.

Papalia instead continually speaks through his megaphone, “Is anyone there? Can someone help me cross the street? Is it safe to cross? I can’t see.” Papalia requests assistance from strangers, yet the megaphone rather than serving as a device that provides assistance, amplifies his anxiety and vulnerability. 

WalkingLab approaches critical walking methodologies as a practice of ‘walking-with.’ Walking-with is informed by Indigenous scholars Juanita Sundberg, Bonnie Freeman and Jon Johnson, who articulate with as a ‘more-than’ orientation. With is a preposition. It is used to indicate associations and connections between entities. However, walking-with is more than merely additive. It is not simply a + sign, rather with is the ethico-political (in)tensions brought to bear on walking, the place where one walks, and the concepts, bodies, and archives that are co-composed by walking. What this means is that with does not simply indicate that a walker is walking-with a dog, with a sunset, or with another walker. Rather, with is a milieu; an active set of relations that are composed of dimensions and vibrations that materialize a moment of space-time. Withness emphasizes complicated relations and entanglements with humans, non-humans, Land, and an ethics of situatedness, solidarity and resistance. Walking-with is a deliberate strategy of unlearning, unsettling and queering how walking methods are framed and used in the social sciences and the arts. After the break we’ll discuss walking research-creation.

WalkingLab’s critical walking methodologies materialize through research-creation practices. Research-creation combines creative and scholarly research practices, and supports knowledge and innovation through artistic and scholarly investigation. Research-creation can be described as the complex intersection of art, theory, and research. Research-creation asks important questions about how we come to do what we do in the university at this moment in time? How can we create transdisciplinary practices that disorient and disrupt disciplinary, methodological, and ideological boundaries in the university or more broadly in many different institutions?

Research-creation is a geographically specific term that has emerged in Canada as a signifier for artistic-research, where emphasis is placed on the co-imbrication of creative practices and academic research. Notably, it is the term used by our major funding body, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and therefore must also be recognized as constructed within increasingly neoliberal institutional models of knowledge mobilization. 

While research-creation might very well be driven by an institutional desire for legibility and value, if informed by feminist, queer, and anti-racist practices, it has according to Natalie Loveless the potential to interrupt the university as we know it. Loveless claims that research-creation has enabled artist-researchers the opportunity to re-story their interdisciplinary practices within institutions, and challenge questions about the legibility of art as research. 

Research-creation is composed by concepts rather than discrete definitions or procedures. Rather than thinking about existing data to be mined and extracted from a research site, the generativity of thinking-making-doing of research-creation germinates and seeds. Research-creation is not a thing but an event that emerges from the middle. To practice research-creation requires being inside a research event. This means that quite often an artist-researcher does not have all their directions or procedures determined prior to beginning an inquiry.

Walking research-creation insists that walking scholarship open up transmaterial relations between human and nonhuman entities, become accountable to Indigenous knowledges and sovereignty to Land, consider the geosocial formations of the more-than-human, prioritize affective subjectivities, and emphasize movement as a way of knowing. Walking research-creation is accountable to an ethics and politics of critical walking methodologies. 

Thank you for listening to WalkingLab’s podcast series on Walking Research-Creation. You can find print publications and references on their website: walkinglab.org. You can subscribe to the podcast series using our RSS feed. 

WalkingLab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.