Walking ‘With’, Walking Within

Walking is never just walking. Bodies are mobile in different ways and move with both quality and affect.

For instance, scholars have recently theorized about various embodied methods of mobility, such as drifting, cycling, and more, and how such methods might contribute to new forms of knowledge. Accessibility and various physical, but also political, infrastructural, legal, cultural, gender, and racial constraints — to mention a few — also influence the ways in which humans and nonhumans move. Considering the amount of variability in how to approach ‘walking’ as method as well as the multiple forms of nonhuman mobilities that intersect and co-produce the innumerable paths made and traversed, we ask how to further ‘hybridize’ walking methodologies.

Building on theories of hybrid and more-than-human geographies and Morizot’s concept of ‘tracking,’ this article provides theoretical and practical reflections upon walking as method in the context of more-than-human relations. Specifically, we describe and highlight the key takeaways from our methodological experiments on walking methods during four workshops presented for the ‘One by Walking’ research network during 2022 and 2023. Through these workshops, we speculate on the different qualities, tracings, and tracks walking comes to encounter and embody as a form of inquiry in respect to the more-than-human. Based on the experience and results of these workshops along with personal fieldwork experiences, we then provide participants’ and our own personal reflections to provide practical suggestions for how to approach walking in three key areas of relational research: ruderal, oceanic, and postindustrial places.

Daniele Valisena is Ph.D. in history of science, technology and the environment and post-doctoral researcher in environmental history at the University of Liège, Belgium, as part of the ERC-funded project The Body Societa, and as a part-time lecturer in environmental history of migration at NYU Florence.

He explores the links between zootechnics, more-than-human ecologies, Italian colonialism, and Fascist politics of science and nature.

Jesse D. Peterson is a lecturer with the Radical Humanities Laboratory and School of the Human Environment (Department of Geography) at University College Cork in Ireland. He researches human relationships to each other and the environment, so that people can better resolve environmental challenges and achieve more just and mutually beneficial societies.

This seminar is open to the networks mebers.