Walking as Embodied Research

Walking as Embodied Research
Author: Christian Ernsten
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2024-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040144195

In recent years, walking has emerged as a methodological tool and as a conceptually exciting point of departure across a range of disciplines and practices. This volume explores walking as a form of embodied research practice that offers fresh perspectives on key contemporary debates and areas of interest. These include the climate emergency and the debate around the Anthropocene, decolonial thinking and the struggle for social justice, feminist and queer walking methodologies, and the notion of the ‘infraordinary’ and practices of everyday life. Contributions to this volume are by scholars, artists and practitioners drawn from a wide range of disciplines and fields, and from across the Global South and North. An overarching theme of the volume is the manner in which the act of walking brings the body into presence as a material part of the research process, and the forms of attentiveness that this encourages. Another theme is the intimate connection between the act of walking and the act of writing. As familiar landscapes change under the weight of Anthropogenic environmental change, walking becomes an act of witnessing and a spur to action. Rather than being a singular activity, walking itself is understood as a socially, economically and politically constructed and contested act. This volume will serve as a source of inspiration to readers from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who are interested in walking methodologies and in new and sustainable research practices.

Embodied Inquiry

Embodied Inquiry
Author: Celeste Snowber
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2016-11-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9463007555

"Embodied Inquiry is offered to all who want to deepen the connection to their bodies. Here is the inspiration to see your body as a place of inquiry, learning, understanding and perceiving. Listening to the sensual knowing and aliveness within the body can inform our personal and professional lives and reveal the connections between living, being, and creating. Snowber writes this book in poetic and visceral language as a love letter from the body wooing readers to inhabit their own skins and celebrate the beautiful and paradoxical place where limitations and joy dwell together. Touching on the vastness of our body’s call to us, Embodied Inquiry explores solitude, paradox, inspiration, lament, waking up to the sensuous, ecology, listening, and writing from the body. This is not a manual, but a book to accompany you in befriending the body and let your own gestures, stories and bodily ways of being lead you to listen to your own rhythm. Whether an artist or educator, researcher or administrator, performer or poet, seeker or scientist, you will find this book as a companion to sustain a vibrant life and co-create a better world. “A beautiful, creative and highly original book. Written with passion and wisdom, this book makes significant contributions to arts-based research, artistic research practice, embodiment, and living artful, intentional and connected lives. A stunning achievement.” – Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., author of Method Meets Art and editor of the Social Fictions series “Snowber offers wisdom for learning to live exotically, erotically, emotionally, and ecstatically. Reading Embodied Inquiry is like walking on a wilderness trail, in sunlight-infused rain, learning to embrace the possibilities of vitality and vulnerability, joy and grief, love and loss.” – Carl Leggo, Ph.D., poet & professor, University of British Columbia “Weaving prose and poetry, Snowber awakens our sensual and embodied self at the very roots of living. This deeply personal work will move educators, researchers, artists, and those for whom lived experience is core to their creative processs.” – Daniel Deslauriers, Ph.D., Professor, Transformative Studies Doctorate Program, CIIS" /div

Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World

Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World
Author: Stephanie Springgay
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2017-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351866486

As a research methodology, walking has a diverse and extensive history in the social sciences and humanities, underscoring its value for conducting research that is situated, relational, and material. Building on the importance of place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and rhythm within walking research, this book offers four new concepts for walking methodologies that are accountable to an ethics and politics of the more-than-human: Land and geos, affect, transmaterial and movement. The book carefully considers the more-than-human dimensions of walking methodologies by engaging with feminist new materialisms, posthumanisms, affect theory, trans and queer theory, Indigenous theories, and critical race and disability scholarship. These more-than-human theories rub frictionally against the history of walking scholarship and offer crucial insights into the potential of walking as a qualitative research methodology in a more-than-human world. Theoretically innovative, the book is grounded in examples of walking research by WalkingLab, an international research network on walking (www.walkinglab.org). The book is rich in scope, engaging with a wide range of walking methods and forms including: long walks on hiking trails, geological walks, sensory walks, sonic art walks, processions, orienteering races, protest and activist walks, walking tours, dérives, peripatetic mapping, school-based walking projects, and propositional walks. The chapters draw on WalkingLab’s research-creation events to examine walking in relation to settler colonialism, affective labour, transspecies, participation, racial geographies and counter-cartographies, youth literacy, environmental education, and collaborative writing. The book outlines how more-than-human theories can influence and shape walking methodologies and provokes a critical mode of walking-with that engenders solidarity, accountability, and response-ability. This volume will appeal to graduate students, artists, and academics and researchers who are interested in Education, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Affect Studies, Geography, Anthropology, and (Post)Qualitative Research Methods.

Walking Bodies

Walking Bodies
Author: Helen Billinghurst
Publisher: Triarchy Press
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1913743101

A curated collection of papers, provocations and actions from the 'Walking's New Movements' conference held at the University of Plymouth in November 2019

Walking Methods

Walking Methods
Author: Maggie O'Neill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317295021

This book introduces and critically explores walking as an innovative method for doing social research, showing how its sensate and kinaesthetic attributes facilitate connections with lived experiences, journeys and memories, communities and identities. The book situates walking methods historically, sociologically, and in relation to biographical and arts-based research, as well as new work on mobilities, the digital, spatial, and the sensory. The book is organised into three sections: theorising; experiencing; and imagining walking as a new method for doing biographical research. There is a key focus upon the Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (WIBM) on the move to usefully explore migration, memory, and urban landscapes, as part of participatory, visual, and ethnographic research with marginalised communities and artists and as re-formative and transgressive. The book concludes with autobiographical walks taken by the authors and a discussion about the future of the walking interview as biographical method. Walking Methods combines theory with a series of original ethnographic and participatory research examples. Practical exercises and a guide to using walking as a method help to make this a rich resource for social science researchers, students, walking artists, and biographical researchers.

Walking Through Social Research

Walking Through Social Research
Author: Charlotte Bates
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317201671

As an ethnographic method walking has a long history, but it has only recently begun to attract focused attention. By walking alongside participants, researchers have been able to observe, experience, and make sense of a broad range of everyday practices. At the same time, the idea of talking and walking with participants has enabled research to be informed by the landscapes in which it takes place. By sharing conversations in place, and at the participants’ pace, sociologists are beginning to develop both a feel for, and a theoretical understanding of, the transient, embodied and multisensual aspects of walking. The result, as this collection demonstrates, is an understanding of the social world evermore congruent with people’s lived experiences of it. This interdisciplinary collection comprises a unique journey through a variety of walking methodologies. The collection highlights a range of possibilities for enfolding sound, smell, emotion, movement and memory into our accounts, illustrating the sensuousness, skill, pitfalls and rewards of walking as a research practice. Each chapter draws on original empirical research to present ways of walking and to discuss the conceptual, practical and technical issues that walking entails. Alongside feet on the ground, the devices and technologies that make up hybrid research mobilities are brought to attention. The collection is bookended by two short pedestrian essays that take the reader on illustrative urban walks, suggesting routes through the city, as well as ways in which the reader might make their own path through walking methods. An innovative title, Walking Through Social Research will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics who are interested in Sociology, Geography, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies and Qualitative Research Methods.

Embodied Research Methods

Embodied Research Methods
Author: Torkild Thanem
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2019-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 152646389X

Disembodied research erects false dichotomies between flesh and reason, and between the corporeal and the social. By contrast, Torkild Thanem and David Knights engage with approaches and practices that exploit the body’s capacity to generate knowledge, craft lively accounts, and create fleshy concepts. These approaches enrich our understanding of how people live, work, and interact with their bodies within the social world. Thanem and Knights discuss methods, practices, and personal experiences which involve bodies in the research process – in generating and analysing empirical material, reflecting on the work they do as researchers, and turning research into written text. Embodied Research Methods is an important and practical resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students across the social sciences, and a thought-provoking read for researchers in these areas.

Walking as Critical Inquiry

Walking as Critical Inquiry
Author: Alexandra Lasczik
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2023-06-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3031299914

This book is a transdisciplinary, international collection situated within a genealogy of experimental walking practices in the arts, arts-based research, and emergent walking practices in education. It brings together emerging cartographies of relation amongst walking practices ranging across arts-based, ecological, activist, decolonising, queer, critical and posthuman modes of inquiry. Its particular investment is in the proliferation of artful modes of inquiry that open up speculative practices and concepts of walking as an orientation for pedagogy, inquiry, and the everyday, resisting the gaze of privilege and the relentless commodification of human and nonhuman life processes. This is important work for the burgeoning demand for creative methodologies in the social sciences, and more specifically, for arts-based educational research.

The Walking Qurʼan

The Walking Qurʼan
Author: Rudolph T. Ware
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2014
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1469614316

Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa

Poetic Inquiry

Poetic Inquiry
Author: Sandra L. Faulkner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2019-07-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351044214

Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method and Practice examines the use of poetry as a form of qualitative research, representation, and method used by researchers, practitioners, and students from across the social sciences and humanities. It serves as a practical manual for using poetry in qualitative research through the presentation of varied examples of Poetic Inquiry. It provides how-to exercises for developing and using poetry as a qualitative research method. The book begins by mapping out what doing and critiquing Poetic Inquiry entails via a discussion of the power of poetry, poets’, and researchers’ goals for the use of poetry, and the kinds of projects that are best suited for Poetic Inquiry. It also provides descriptions of the process and craft of creating Poetic Inquiry, and suggestions for how to evaluate and engage with Poetic Inquiry. The book further contends with questions of method, process, and craft from poets’ and researchers’ perspectives. It shows the implications for the aesthetic and epistemic concerns in poetry, and furthers transdisciplinary dialogues between the humanities and social sciences. Faulkner shows the importance of considering the form and function of Poetic Inquiry in qualitative research through discussions of poetry as research method, poetry as qualitative analysis and representation, and Poetic Inquiry as a powerful research tool.