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Visual Studies
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Walking across disciplines: from ethnography to arts practice Sarah Pink; Phil Hubbard; Maggie O'Neill; Alan Radley Online publication date: 22 March 2010
To cite this Article Pink, Sarah , Hubbard, Phil , O'Neill, Maggie and Radley, Alan(2010) 'Walking across disciplines: from
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Visual Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, April 2010
Guest Editors’ Introduction RVST
Walking across disciplines: from ethnography to arts practice SARAH PINK, PHIL HUBBARD, MAGGIE O’NEILL and ALAN RADLEY Guest Editors’ Introduction
While walking has long been implicated in ethnography and arts practice, in recent years it has become increasingly central as a means of both creating new embodied ways of knowing and producing scholarly narrative. This introduction explores this cross-disciplinary coalescence of interest in peripatetic practice. It raises a series of questions inspired by the walking/arts event, which was the starting point for this collection, as well as by the articles and works published in this special issue.
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INTRODUCTION In March 2008, the ROAM walking arts weekend was held in Loughborough, organised by RADAR, Loughborough University’s Arts Programme.1 Over this otherwise predictably damp English weekend, seven artists and artist-groups – Active Ingredient, Claire Blundell Jones, Duncan Speakman, Tim Brennan, Mark Gwynne Jones, Lottie Child, and Tamara Ashley and Simone Kenyon – led a series of walking events in which participants wandered, hiked, shuffled and stalked across the town of Loughborough in the East Midlands, seeing, hearing and feeling it in new ways. Through a variety of different manoeuvres and tactics, including use of soundwalks, street theatre, historical re-enactment, urban choreography and online gaming, these activities were designed to encourage local participants to experience their town afresh. For participants less familiar with Loughborough, the artworks also offered routes towards corporeal ways of knowing the town that rendered it significant in ways far beyond the maps we used to find its starting point in the museum.
Five of the artists who contributed to ROAM have produced work for this special issue. These contributions tell us something about walking arts practice, capturing both the visual and the performative nature of their walks. Tamara Ashley and Simone Kenyon give us a glimpse into their celebration of the act of walking (in the Pilkington Library at Loughborough University and the Pennine Way). Lottie Child takes us on her journey as a ‘street trainer’ in Loughborough with local inhabitants Camilla, Greg, Kev and John-Mark. Street training involves participants in the ‘perpetual making of public space’. Claire Blundell Jones’ performative walk, saunter, stroll with the tumbleweed encourages observers to glocally re-imagine the local environment through the imagined landscape of the Wild West. Tim Brennan’s contribution documents his artistic methodology of manipulating the guided walk using the ‘Luddite Manoeuvre’ he performed at ROAM. Brennan’s ‘Manoeuvre’ is a ‘montage’ of walking, discursive performance, and narration (of quotes from historical and philosophical texts) along a guided walk (‘Manoeuvre’) that also encourages performative interventions from participants (see also Myers’ article in this issue, and Pink 2009). Mark Gwynne Jones takes us ‘Off the beaten track …’ in a performance walk and a poem inspired by a Lewis Carroll poem, the Carillon tower in Loughborough, and the need to change the way we look at things. The RADAR event created a series of connections between our own interests as academics working in the town’s university, arts practice and the physical and phenomenological realities of Loughborough. It also
Sarah Pink is Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Her work usually involves the use of visual methods and media. She is particularly interested in areas that involve crossing disciplinary boundaries and the development of applied and public scholarship. Her books include Doing Visual Ethnography (2007 [2001]), The Future of Visual Anthropology (2006), Visual Interventions, ed. (2007) and Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009). Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Social Geography at Loughborough University. He is interested in urban theory and the geographies of everyday life, and has a particular focus on the geographies of sexuality. His books include Key Ideas in Geography: The City (2006), The Sage Companion of the City (2007), Thinking Geographically (2002) and Key Thinkers on Space and Place (2008). Maggie O’Neill is Reader in Criminology in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University. Maggie has a long-standing interest in and engagement with collaborating with artists through ethnographic research (specifically biographical narrative research), participatory action research and participatory arts. Her interdisciplinary research career has developed at the intersections of cultural, critical and feminist theory; renewed methodologies for socio-cultural research – including arts-based methodologies (ethno-mimesis); and praxis through participatory action research (PAR). Her concept of ethnomimesis captures the process of and relationship between arts-based practice and ethnographic research. The outcomes of recent research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with Phil Hubbard and four community arts organisations can be accessed online at: www.beyondbordersuk.com; www.makingtheconnections.info; and http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2009/jan/13/sense-of-belonging-exhibition. Alan Radley is Professor of Social Psychology at Loughborough University, UK. His research has involved using visual methods to study social experience in material contexts, including hospital wards and urban spaces used by homeless people.
ISSN 1472–586X printed/ISSN 1472–5878 online/10/010001-7 © 2010 International Visual Sociology Association DOI: 10.1080/14725861003606670
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Guest Editors’ Introduction
presented an exciting opportunity to bring together artists and scholars who use walking and in some cases visual and/or audio media as part of their practice. The walking weekend was followed by a one-day seminar hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, with RADAR, on the university campus. Each of the four speakers (the walking artist Hamish Fulton, anthropologist Andrew Irving, the geographer Tim Edensor, and the artist and anthropologist Misha Myers) had been invited to Loughborough to spend the weekend engaging with the art performed that weekend. While their presentations were focused on their own practice and research, we sought to offer opportunities for reflection and to identify further synergies between this and the ROAM programme. Likewise a good number of the forty or so people who attended the seminar had come to Loughborough to spend the weekend engaging with the art in the town. In this special issue we cannot hope to reproduce the atmosphere of the seminar nor the actual experience of art, but it has been our intention to draw together the key components of these combined events to make evident the connections and synergies that can emerge through such engagements. Therefore the composition of this special issue is intentionally interdisciplinary. It includes the work of artists and scholars across anthropology, geography, sociology, cultural criminology, and social psychology. The Walk, the image that appears on the front cover, likewise draws together art and scholarship. David Crouch – the artist – is a professor of cultural geography whose research interests intersect with our own. In the final section of this introduction we discuss the nature and crossovers of these articles and reflections on practice. In the next section of this introduction we map out something of the interdisciplinary field of scholarly practice in which this work is located by critically reviewing existing theoretical and methodological treatments of walking in a set of key ‘ethnographic’ disciplines – anthropology, sociology and human geography – before noting the centrality of walking in post-disciplinary endeavours. Then, taking up the theme of the journal – Visual Studies – we consider the implications of this focus on walking in ethnography and in art for ‘visual’ studies. Given the difficulty of considering visual practices, images or experiences in isolation from the other senses and narratives, consideration of the relation between the visual and the haptic experiences of walking remains a vitally important question. We hence suggest that a focus on walking and movement offers one way to situate the visual within social, scholarly and artistic practice. Indeed, it encourages
us to recognise the visual as always embedded in the multisensoriality and movement that is integral to the practice and experience of everyday life: what Patterson (2009) terms the interplay of the visceral and visual. WALKING ACROSS ETHNOGRAPHIC DISCIPLINES References to walking were not uncommon in theoretical and ethnographic literatures of the twentieth century. For example, Ingold and Lee Vergunst (2008) trace discussions of walking as a topic for comparative study in the work of Marcel Mauss (1934[1979]) and in Pierre Bourdieu’s work on habitus (1997). Most notable, perhaps, is the influence of Michel de Certeau’s (1984) understanding of walking as a practice of everyday life, which is not only evident as a reference point for many academic contributions to contemporary discussions of walking (e.g. Gray 2003; Lee and Ingold 2006; Pink 2007; Edensor 2008), but also informs the work of walking artists in a variety of different ways. Tellingly, de Certeau’s most cited essay on practices of walking situates these in the urban, noting that the ‘thicks and thins’ of the urban text are made by practitioners through acts of walking. The city is thus a key setting in which walking as practice has been explored, with the urban choreographies of the ‘sidewalk ballet’, practices of cruising, psychogeographical peregrinations, urban orienteering, flaneurialism, parkour, town trails and urban dérives all suggesting different ways of exploring how the city is made and remade tactically, ‘from below’ (see Hubbard 2006). Discussions of how walking/moving with others has led to, or is comprehensible through, ethnographic insights rooted in fieldwork experience can also be found in many twentieth-century ethnographies. The most obvious examples here include the work of Clifford Geertz, as noted by Lee and Ingold (2006), and that of Colin Turnbull (1961, discussed in Pink 2007), as well as some infamous works more broad in outlook but hinged around the street or sidewalk as site of encounter – for example, William Foote Whyte’s (1943) Street Corner Society, Jane Jacobs’ (1961) Life and Death of Great American Cities and Elijah Anderson’s (1991) Streetwise. Working in rather different traditions of urban ethnography, numerous Marxist humanists picked up the mantle of Walter Benjamin and used walking as the pivot around which they hinged numerous observations on the alienated nature of everyday life: commentators as varied as Henri Lefebvre, Marshall Berman, and Guy Debord have incorporated ruminations on the pedestrian experience into their critical accounts of contemporary urbanism. The ghost of Benjamin, and his
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search for the sacred in the ruins of the city, also features in the pseudo-academic attempts to evoke the character of the city associated with the psychogeographically tainted ramblings of Iain Sinclair, Stuart Home, Peter Ackroyd, Edmund White, Patrick Keiller and Patrick Wright, among other notables. It has, however, been much more recently that walking has been conceived as a methodological concern within the context of discussions of ethnographic practice, with the connections between fieldwork and walking in the field beginning to be usefully teased out. If we are to identify a ‘landmark’ work in this area it would be Lee and Ingold’s (2006) essay ‘Fieldwork on Foot’, although a series of other works in this area also stand out – including Katrín Lund’s (2006, 2008) work in Scotland and Spain, Wylie’s (2005) traverse of the South West Coastal Path, Kusenbach’s (2003) espousal of the collective walk as the means to explore ‘street phenomenology’, and Andrew Irving’s explorations of walking and visual practices as a route to understanding other people’s interior dialogues (Irving 2007, and also in this issue). It has also, until recently, gone largely unnoticed that walking is not unusual in ethnographic or documentary film (see Pink 2007, and also Irving, this issue) – an outstanding example being a walk that Lorang, the protagonist of David and Judith MacDougall’s Lorang’s Way (1979), takes the filmmakers on around his compound (discussed by Jhala 2007; Pink 2007). While a thorough review of walking as a strategy in filming and representing everyday walking remains to be undertaken, it seems reasonable to understand walking in filmic representations as a means by which viewers might be invited to engage with film via movement forward through an environment rather than merely by watching/observing from a distance (Pink 2009). However, new themes in methodological appreciation usually emerge as part of precise configurations of theoretical, methodological and empirical convergence and openness. The case of the ‘rise of walking’ in social sciences and humanities agendas is no exception. Here the prominence of notions of movement, knowing, flow and place in contemporary social theory (albeit in different forms in different academic disciplines), along with substantive interests in mobility and movement – in their multiple manifestations – go some way towards explaining this. Of particular significance here is the recognition that walking is (drawing from the work of Ingold 2000, 2007, 2008) not simply something we do to get from one place to another, but it is in itself a form of engagement integral to our perception of an
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environment. We cannot but learn and come to know in new ways as we walk, making walking an ideal means of learning as an ethnographer (i.e. doing ethnographic research – see Ingold and Lee Vergunst 2008; Pink 2007; see also Irving in this issue). It is also a powerful way of communicating about experiences and ways of knowing across cultural divides (e.g. Irving 2007), including in both policy and knowledge transfer contexts (see O’Neill and Hubbard in this issue). The contemporary interest in walking as an ethnographic method has developed in a climate not only where there have been new theoretical and substantive interests in movement, but also where new approaches to ethnographic methodologies have come to the fore – generating literatures that reflect on and develop contemporary and innovative forms of ethnographic practice. There are current debates about what constitutes ‘proper’ ethnography (see Pink 2009, 9), perhaps shaped by recognition of the range of new methodologies of data recording, geo-referencing and mapping that can be used to ‘capture’ walking. For instance Atkinson, Delamont, and Housley argue for a return to a classic ethnography in a context where they see ethnography as becoming ‘fragmented’ through the development of and a focus on specific types of method and ‘data’ (2007, 33). There is a danger that people who take that perspective would think of walking as ethnographic practice that involves just another novel method or attempted short cut to understanding other people’s everyday experiences. But we would argue otherwise. As we have outlined above, walking is well established in ethnographic practice. In some research contexts, long-term engagement in the everyday life of other people as it is lived over long periods of time is not possible due to time limitations or because of the nature – and/or affective intensity – of the experiences the ethnographer is trying to understand. As the contributions to this issue show, walking with others or asking others to represent their own experiences through walking offers an inspiring route to understanding. It also need not be a method that is used in isolation. Indeed, as various existing examples that combine walking, ethnography and arts or visual practice demonstrate, it often forms part of a complex of research practices (e.g. Butler 2006; Tolia Kelly 2007; Myers 2006); Pink 2007, 2008, 2009). ARTWALKS: THE VISCERAL IN THE VISUAL As we noted above, there has been a proliferation of walking methods not only in ethnography, but also in arts practice. Indeed, there are many ways in which
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relationships between walking and arts practice have been and continue to be forged.2 Here we note some of the key intersections that are emerging as crossovers between academic and arts practice increase, highlighting those that are particularly relevant to this issue. A first point to note is how the work of very established walking artists – e.g. Hamish Fulton and Richard Long – is being attended to by academics. For example, Tim Ingold reproduces Richard Long’s photograph ‘A Line Made by Walking’ (1967) in his Lines: A Brief History (see Ingold 2007, 44). The image shows a line that Long has made by walking on grass (Ingold 2007, 43). Long’s work is discussed further by Tim Edensor in this issue, and we make a particular connection with the work of Hamish Fulton (see http://www.hamish-fulton.com/). Fulton’s work is particularly interesting since although he has used a range of media through which to represent the experience of walks, in his contribution to this special issue he represents experiences of walking through an artwork that engages with written text. In addition to his many exhibitions, Fulton continues to publish his art in book form, which provides a route for its wider dissemination. In contrast, some of the walking art we experienced during the ROAM weekend in Loughborough was produced to be experienced only through walking. Second, it is clear that the work of artists who use walking as part of their practice is becoming increasingly influential in academic work. Such work has provided inspiration for scholars seeking new ways to make their work accessible to broader audiences (whether policy makers or simply a general public). Indeed, in our contemporary context it becomes increasingly important not only that academic work should engage with public issues, but also that it might be presented as public scholarship that has social and cultural impact, and it is here that arts practice offers new routes to communicating beyond conventional boundaries. In this special issue this trend is represented in particular in the work of O’Neill and Hubbard, inspired by the practice of Misha Myers, whose own contribution combines arts and academic practice to reflect on the ways walking can be both performative and communicative. The writing of other academic contributors in this issue is likewise never far from discussing the work of walking artists. Tim Edensor, in particular, finds much inspiration from the work of Long, Francis Alys and Jeremy Deller and from their ability, in different ways, to evoke the rhythms of the city through different modes of ambulatory art. Alerting us to the different strictures that control our
walking, these artists flag up very different ways in which walking can offer a tactical remaking of the city. Looking at the work presented here from another perspective, the ROAM event and seminar in Loughborough sought to engender further connections between walking, ethnography and arts practice. The introductions to the work of the participating artists presented here also invite readers – especially those who might be academics dissatisfied with conventional textbased media – to consider new ways of communicating ethnographic experience. For example, by combining a range of different performative and communicative media in his walks, including, of course, the feel of the ground underfoot, Tim Brennan shows how our understandings of urban histories and realities can be shaped on a range of different corporeal and cognitive levels which become interwoven as we walk and experience (see Pink 2009 for a longer discussion of this). What, we might ask, would a conference in which the presentations were precisely walked, rather than spoken in a closed room, be like? WALKING AND VISUAL STUDIES In recent literatures across a variety of academic disciplines the visual is now being re-situated as an element of the multisensoriality of everyday contexts (e.g. Mitchell 2002; Edwards and Bhaumik 2009; Pink 2009). This does not render the idea of ‘visual studies’ irrelevant, yet it does require us to ask both how the way we approach the visual might be refigured to account for the senses and how visual practices might be implicated in relation to those that have more emphasis on corporeal experience. Put more simply, it means that when we study visual forms and practices we need to account for the other senses and when we study corporeal practices we need to account for how vision and visual forms are inextricable from these experiences. The interface between walking, ethnography and arts practice invites both perspectives. Indeed, we should not see this contemporary focus on walking as a challenge to the idea of ‘visual’ studies, in the sense that it focuses attention on the kinaesthetic, mobile and sensory/felt dimensions of lived experience. Rather, it needs to be conceptualised as serving to situate the ‘visual’ in visual studies as always contextualised through the multisensoriality and mobility that characterise everyday experience. As an embodied, and emplaced, activity, walking must always be understood as multisensory (see for example contributions to Ingold and Lee Vergunst’s (2008) edited volume; Patterson 2009). A consideration of walking in arts practice and in (visual) ethnography brings to the
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Guest Editors’ Introduction
fore the interrelatedness of the visual and the other senses (see Pink 2009). Indeed, the experience of compiling this journal issue from what was initially an arts event – and subsequently a series of four spoken, performed presentations with visual and/or multimedia components – has reinforced the importance of reflecting on how and why we might reduce the phenomenological world of movement and sensoriality to printed text. The ‘why’ is perhaps easier to express, in that this experience has led to a series of insights that can appropriately be expressed in conventional images and words, and in doing so form a bridge between experienced realities as they are known in practice and intellectual ways of knowing, debating and theorybuilding (which themselves are of course also multisensory realities). The ‘how’, in that we have been committed to doing this in a conventional printed journal format – albeit one that allows a significant number of images – has challenged us to find ways to bring art, ethnography and theory together in the same text. This issue opens with the printed artwork of Hamish Fulton, a piece of work in which words become art. As contributors we have used printed text, in combination with photographs and/or video stills, to represent experiences of walking (Pink 2007; and see O’Neill and Hubbard, and Radley et al., in this issue). It was not so difficult for us to bring our scholarly reflections to the readers using text, since this is the conventional process of academic discussion. However, bringing such a direct appreciation of the art of the walking artists who participated in the ROAM weekend whose art depended on us being there to experience it was an impossible challenge. Therefore, to achieve some presence we asked the artists themselves to write about their art and include images in ways that would describe and reflect on their practice in order to make it accessible to readers on a different level. The relationship between walking, ethnography and arts practice presents a set of opportunities and challenges for the (visual and writing) scholar and artist. In this special issue we have begun to consider how, in practice, some of these might be resolved, but this remains an area ripe for investigation. The use of printed words and images to represent the experience of walking and its emotional and embodied affects also brings with it theoretical and methodological implications. One of these is that we need to understand the potential of text that combines still images and written words to represent/describe and comment on the multisensory experience of walking and the affective dimensions of this. Contributors to this volume approach this in different ways. For example, Andrew Irving invites us into the transcribed verbal narrative of Alberto, who is
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retracing the steps he took on the day of his HIV diagnosis. Alberto’s narrative is framed but uninterrupted by scholarly musings, and accompanied by sets of photographs taken by Irving during their walk together. Here somehow we get the sense of the anthropologist photographing something of what he is being told and experiencing corporeally. Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard also combine descriptive passages with photographs that represent the shared walks. Why might photography be an appropriate medium for these purposes? One answer lies in existing discussions of the relationship between touching and seeing. For example, the anthropologist Michael Taussig (1993) has emphasised the tactility of vision, the anthropological filmmaker David MacDougall understands seeing and touching as sharing ‘an experiential field’ (1998, 51) and the film theorist Laura Marks likewise emphasises that touch and the other senses are impacted in, and not separated from, vision (2000, 22). To understand the relevance of photographs to these texts, an acknowledgement of the relationship between vision and touch is pertinent. However, it is more appropriate for our purposes here to extend this (as these and other writers also acknowledge) so as not to see the senses as separate modalities (and indeed remembering that the five-sense modern western sensorium is in itself a modern western construct) but, following Ingold, to recognise that, for instance, ‘looking, listening and touching, therefore are not separate activities, they are just different facets of the same activity: that of the whole organism in its environment’ (Ingold 2000, 261). Regarding the potential of photographs to represent walking, we can therefore start to understand such images not as visual objectifications of experiential realities, but as texts that suggest or invite routes through which other people’s multisensory ways of knowing in movement might be imagined or imaginable. Likewise, this signifies a move away from the idea of privileging vision or visual knowledge, and instead recognising that the production and viewing of images happen in multisensory environments and are experienced in ways that are embodied and multisensory. Therefore we might then suggest that the photographs presented here, not only by Irving, but also in the articles by O’Neill and Hubbard, Myers, and Radley et al., equally have the potential to invite viewers to empathetically imagine how and where that photograph was taken in a sensory moment of movement, through a material, sensory, social and emotional environment. Indeed, the question of the relationship between walking, images and the environment is a rich area for analysis and begs further exploration. In his article in this issue, ‘Ways of mind-walking: reading, writing, painting’, Tim Ingold takes this up. Ingold raises questions about imagery and walking, comparing the latter with reading and writing,
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where the material presence of letters on a page can be understood like footprints left in the earth. Ingold’s argument is that walking ‘surely involves the exercise of both eye and mind’, an argument used to undo the idea that images are copies of the world, which would mean that picturing is a matter of images, while walking is a meeting with the reality of landscape. By reference to Christian monastic practice, the painting tradition of Aboriginal peoples, the work of Kandinsky and the writing of the tenth-century Chinese landscape painter Ching Hao, Ingold claims that the structure of art and the structure of the world are the same. The apparent insubstantiality of walking and the permanence of art objects can then be seen to be a diversion from the way that walking engages and shapes the world as envisaged, rather than merely seen. The combination of walking, ethnography and arts practice, however, not only invites us to engage in questions around the philosophy of perception and knowledge, it also has important practical implications, which we explore in the next section. WALKING, ART, ETHNOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL INTERVENTION One of the possibilities created by combining art and ethnography is that for ethnographers, arts practice opens a whole new set of potentials for communicating outside of academic contexts – or what has come to be called ‘knowledge transfer’ (although from the perspective from which we write in this introduction, that very term has the problematic connotation that knowledge is an objective ‘thing’, units of which can be transferred from one mind to another). There is, however, a case for considering how walking art and ethnography might have particular potential for intercultural/transcultural communication and, following from this, for asking what role the combination of walking, art and ethnography might have in public scholarship. Can the incorporation of walking-based practices within participatory methodologies have policy impact? And what might be the role of (audio) visual media in this? Some of the contributors to this special issue are working towards answering these questions, and, moreover, demonstrating through their own practice some of the ways in which the combination of walking, art and ethnography can constitute forms of social intervention. Myers (2006; see also Myers’ article in this issue) and O’Neill and Hubbard (see their article in this issue) combine participatory methodologies and walking arts practice. In Myers’ recent work in Plymouth,
‘performative spaces’ are created in the walks with refugees territorially, digitally (see www.homingplace.org) and in the imagination, and they help participants (as well as audiences) to reflect on transnational experiences in a performative way. Myers calls this ‘conversive wayfinding’. O’Neill (2008) suggests that in exploring the in-betweenness, the hyphenated, hybrid space between ethnography and art/walking (ethno-mimesis), we may occupy a third space, a potential space/dialogic and a methodological space where transformative possibilities and visual and textual products can emerge that may feed into cultural politics and praxis and help processes of social justice via a politics of recognition, thereby countering the misrecognition of the asylum seeker, refugee, migrant – the Other. O’Neill and Hubbard’s use of walking arts practice (see their article in this issue) is indebted to Myers (2006),3 and takes place within the context of a participatory action research (PAR) and arts practice involving four community and participatory arts organisations to explore the senses of belonging negotiated by asylum seekers, refugees or undocumented migrants in the English East Midlands. In the walks discussed, interventions take place throughout the entire process of PAR, and more specifically in the walks where new arrivals guide policy makers along their map/route from a place they call home to a special place – thus leading to interventions in art, politics and policy. SUMMING UP By pulling together walking, ethnography and art – both at the seminar and in this issue – our intention has been to explore and make explicit the interdisciplinary achievements and potentials that lie in this field. As this issue demonstrates, there is a contemporary convergence of theoretical, methodological, art-based, practical and activist engagements through these engagements with the often taken-for-granted practice of everyday life – walking. This makes clear the possibilities that lie in exploring and considering this fundamental human activity from different perspectives and with different intents. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The creation of this special issue would not have been possible without the funding and practical support of Loughborough University. The ROAM arts event was led by Nick Slater, the university’s Arts Director, as part of the RADAR programme of events that create
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connections between the town and the university. We would like to thank Nick and the staff at RADAR for their enthusiasm for the walking, art and ethnography theme and for their help and support for the seminar. The walking, art and ethnography seminar was generously funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. We are grateful to the university for supporting this event, to our four speakers, and also to the forty or so participants (some of whom travelled from abroad to attend) for enriching our discussions.
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NOTES [1] For details of RADAR, see http://arts.lboro.ac.uk/radar/ about_radar/. [2] A recent example is the ‘All great thoughts are conceived by walking’ (the title is a quote from Nietzsche) workshop held at the Tate Modern in 2007, which maintains a blog at http://walkart.wordpress.com/. [3] The project is inspired by and replicates Myers’ walks around Plymouth.
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