Audio-Walks: Walking in Geography and Interactive Documentary Art

Abstract

A growing part of the discussions on interdisciplinary approaches in geography focuses on integrating the arts into the methods of research on the one hand, and into the possible ways of displaying research and its findings, on the other hand. In this paper I share some observations regarding the epistemology and methodology of interdisciplinary approaches of geography and art, or what has been called the 'GeoHumanities' (Dear). More specifically, this paper summarises the exegesis of an audio-walk project called 'Blacksburg Walks' combining interactive documentary art and social sciences for the study of food systems in Blacksburg, VA, involving walking as research method and form of display. Observing how discourse and practice interweave in the walking approach's association to representations of 'sustainability' in this example, I call for epistemological vigilance (Bourdieu) in the GeoHumanities. The sustainability discourse carries modern dualisms of body/mind, nature/culture and reproduces the goal of dominating nature (Luke): a postmodern yearning for harmony between humanity and nature short-circuits a deeper process through technological thought (Marcuse). A problem we can also observe in urban planning's walkability discourse, where the notion of harmony (Harvey, Gunder) and technological habitus restrict the scope of walking. “Making the body explicit unsettles the production of geographical knowledge” (Longhurst, 1997); we need to take a closer look at the social construction of notions such as body, walking, nature, environment, space and the epistemology of embodied knowledge engaged in walking approaches. The exegesis leads me to suggest that the true power of the GeoHumanities involving art in general and walking in particular might lie in the analyses of the art/research process from which new theoretical construction can evolve.