Walking as Embodied Research: Coloniality, Climate Change, and the ‘Arts of Noticing’

Abstract

‘Walking is the speed for noticing….’ In 2014, I began convening walking seminars together with the researcher Christian Ernsten and the documentary photographer Dirk-Jan Visser. Each seminar involves a mix of scholars, artists, curators and activists and results in various work: journal articles, musical scores, photographic essays, and creative non-fiction. This chapter sets out the thinking behind the walking seminars, drawing on a variety of sources: recent interventions in the environmental humanities, decolonial thinking and practice, arts-based research methods and ideas around embodied research and the senses. Not least, it draws on the long history of writing about walking as a way through which to engage the world and intervene in social scenarios. As we enter the ambiguous new epoch of the Anthropocene, and as familiar landscapes change and degrade, we need—more than ever—to pay attention, to notice, to take care. For scholars, this arguably involves leaving the ‘white cube’ of the seminar room for more materially involved and implicated forms of engagement with our research subjects. The humble, everyday act of walking offers one route towards such modes of engagement.