(Un)settling Methodology: Walking the City of Memphis with Transcorporeality in a More-than-Human World

Wesam M Salem

doi:10.7577/rerm.3854

Abstract

In this paper, I explain how I engaged with walking as a sensory and relational inquiry that provoked thinking differently and intra-actively of research, and the entanglement (Barad, 2007) of our bodies with the space and matter. As I walked the city of Memphis, assemblages of my emplaced body movement, subjectivities, senses, feelings, and interactions with the materiality of the space deconstructed and interrogated the neoliberal normalized narratives of othering and belonging. Situating the walks within transcorporeality (Alaimo, 2012), transmateriality (Springgay & Truman, 2017a), and the spactimematter entanglement (Haraway, 2015), I share how these walks generated three lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari,1987) that transformed my thinking of research methods and opened up spaces for new ways of knowing beyond the linear and the prescribed. The three lines of flight, I discuss in this paper, informed and shaped my thinking of: my research methods with respect to interviewing Muslim American youth, the embodied experience of walking within the entanglement of space time matter in a more-than-human world, and the concept of (dis)placed bodies within the postcolonial thought.

Highlights

I was introduced to walking methodologies as part of a special cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional graduate course at the University of Memphis
As we explored how bodies areplaced by the intersections of inequality, race, social class, I realized that I am aplaced body at the intersection of thought, research practices, and the politics of belonging
As an immigrant Middle Eastern American, head-covering Muslim woman, my skin, religion, gender, and language shove me to the margins and my Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology 2020, 11(1) Special Issue (Un)settling Methodology: Walking the City of Memphis... 52 body isplaced as different

Summary

Introduction

I was introduced to walking methodologies as part of a special cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional graduate course at the University of Memphis. Conducting research with Muslim American students within the Western academia and the hostile sociopolitical sphere that viewed difference as threatening, I could not escape the (dis)placement of particular research practices. I situate the three walks I took in the Memphis neighborhood of Annesdale while I draw from the course readings. I share three generative lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that informed my thinking of my research methods and deterritorialized thought, space, time, and matter. I discuss in this paper, how these lines of flight informed and shaped my thinking of my research methods with respect to interviewing Muslim American youth, the embodied experience of walking within the entanglement of space time matter in a more-than-human world, and the concept of (dis)placed bodies within postcolonial thought

Situating the Walks

First Line of Flight

Second Line of Flight

Third Line of Flight