Home » Research group » SCG » Events » Workshop on walking

SCG Home	Profile	Events	Staff
Research	PhD Research	MA Homepage	Collaboration

‘Peripatetic Practices’: a interdisciplinary workshop on walking

31st March 2008

This one-day interdisciplinary workshop in central London addressed different ways of thinking through and about the practice of walking. The themes engaged with during the 23 presented papers ranged from the practices of pilgrim walkers on the route to Santiago de Compostela in North-Western Spain, to walking interviews in Birmingham using GPS technologies. Other forms of walking practice discussed included walking as a form of surrealist practice; researching contemporary walkers and walking behaviours; walking as a form place making; walking as a mode of travel; and walking and CCTV surveillance. Throughout the day artist Suze Adams projected her photography relating to the theme of walking (http://www.suzeadams.co.uk).

Discussants Professor Tim Cresswell, Royal Holloway, University of London; Dr Jo Vergunst, University of Aberdeen and Dr John Wylie, University of Exeter, helped to draw attention to some of the common themes that cut across the workshop, such as rhythm, temporality, narrative, embodiment, mobility and articulation. They also raised some significant theoretical and empirical questions that will require further discussion amongst academic communities involved in walking as a topic or a mode of social research. Such questions include:

- How does walking reinforce certain presences and absences within our social research?

- In what ways does a universal humanistic subject haunt discussions of walking practice? And how do we avoid valorising an undifferentiated, normative individual walking body through a focus on walking practice?

- What are the specific bodily modalities of walking practice? And how does walking involve a foregrounding of the present? What is the added value of interpreting artwork as a form of social commentary on walking?

- To what extent does a focus on walking encourage a foregrounding of memory and ideas of authenticity in research? And why? What about a focus on displacement and forgetting as a focus for research on walking?