Research-Creation Walking Methodologies and an Unsettling of Time

Abstract

This article examines two walking events that explore questions of sovereignty, borders, histories, and time through strategies of speculation, counter-cartographies, and anarchiving practices. To the Landless by Dylan Miner and Miss Canadiana's Heritage and Cultural Walking Tour: The Grange by Camille Turner ask us to imagine a past, present, and future that are radically different from ongoing settler colonialism and White supremacy. Stepping ‘out of time’ has important implications for the kinds of research-creation events it germinates. Chronological time is so pervasive and powerful that we as qualitative researchers are often caught up in its neoliberal progress narrative. Walking with scholars and artists who refuse time's organization and the fixing or preservation of state narratives disrupts colonial legibility and the repeated imposition of the normative order. Unsettling time becomes a model for research and education that are outside colonial, neoliberal, and dominant ideologies. To unsettle something is to open it up to possibility.