Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue advances and interrogates walking as a methodology and research method in the social sciences. Walking is something we do every day, as a lived experience, a source of knowledge, a means of dialogue and exchange with oneself, others, nature, the environment and as an aid to thinking, reflecting and memory. Social science is increasingly “on the move”, underpinned by advances in digital methods, a focus on our mobile lives, and the growth of creative, sensory, arts-based multi-modal methods, used by sociologists, ethnographers, anthropologists, geographers, environmentalists, biographical researchers and arts based researchers.

As an innovation in social research methods the turn to walking builds on and attaches to the previous “turns” in sociological research, such as the narrative, biographical, visual and sensory “turns” as well as the performative “turn”. Walking also resonates with geographical traditions of embodied “field-work” and recognition of the social and spatial nature of knowledge production (Lorimer 2003; Dewsbury & Naylor 2002; Rose et al., 2022). There are important connections too, with walking, in the long history of social research that seeks to understand social inequalities, through, for example, the work of Engels, Mayhew and Orwell, the pioneering research by the Chicago School of Sociology with migrant and marginalised communities and gender politics in the writing of Virginia Woolf, the suffragette marches and gender based protest movements.

As the papers in this special issue evidence, the act of walking engages all the senses, the importance of looking, hearing, feeling and we argue, the art of paying attention (Ingold this volume). Walking methodologies offer a powerful way of communicating about experiences and ways of knowing across cultural divides, time, and history. The walking body produces society and sociality is created in walking (Ingold & Vergunst 2008; Horvath and Szakolczai 2018; O’Neill & Roberts 2019: 23). In short, walking focuses attention on the sensory, kinesthetic and mobile dimensions of lived experience, the relationship between the visual and other senses (Edensor 2010, Myers 2010, Pink et al., 2010, Bates and Rhys-Taylor 2017).

Focusing upon the real, the reality of experience and how we come to know and understand experience (Erlebnis) and the phenomena of lived experience (our being in the world), returns us to pressing issues of theory and methodology in conversations between Sociology, the Social Sciences, Anthropology, and the Arts. This is because walking is a mundane activity, but it is also the basis of thinking and making and can also be a political act (for example, suffragette marches, and global marches in solidarity with Black Lives Matter). When we walk, we are awake and aware, and it is just such wakefulness in concrete, embodied movement that renders walking as an experience so uniquely rich (See Edensor 2010; Gros 2015; Morris 2020; Smith, 2015, Truman and Springgay 2017). We reflect here on this richness from a number of perspectives.

Interdisciplinarity and the art of paying attention

The papers in this collection all focus on the value and importance of inter-disciplinarity, transdisciplinarity (Mullally et al.) and the relationship between methodologies and methods or techniques. In walking-based research the interviewer is a “companion” along the way and this brings into sharp relief and “troubles” the researcher-subject relation (see O’Neill and Roberts 2019: 19). In walking interviews the researcher and participants/co-walkers are experienced as embodied, relational beings, and the conversation, interview or dialogue “opens a space, where embodied knowledge, lived experiences and memories can be shared” (O’Neill and McHugh 2017: 211) and importantly provides knowledge about walkers’ relationship with their environments, that may not otherwise arise in a standard interview. This is because walking helps us to know our limits; it inspires thinking and reflection through the art of paying attention, as well as a renewed focus upon research methods in the arts and social sciences. Walking, by its movement inside and through the world can “lay bare the social conditions” and can “capture our being-in-the world” (O’Neill & Roberts, 2019) or indeed “reveals” this (Ingold this volume).

This special issue emerged from two separate events at University College Cork that explored the relationship between epistemology, methodology and methods in walking research, engaging with a range of creative, organic and collaborative methods such as ethnographic, participatory, co-productive methods and activism or advocacy in research.

Walking, Thinking, Talking – the art of paying attention, a collaboration with Dingle Creativity and Innovation Hub, took place over a weekend in March 2020. Taking place on the Dingle Peninsula in collaboration with the Dingle Creativity and Innovation Hub, participants, including postgraduate students, were invited to take part in walking conversations and walking presentations by social researchers and artists (and artists who are social researchers), transition year students at Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne, historians and environmentalists, in relation to non-conventional or transdisciplinary conversations concerning theory, practice and methods (non-procedural methods) relating to landscapes, time, history, the senses and ecology. In the same year, UCC's Institute for Social Science in the twenty-first Century (ISS21) hosted an online seminar on Walking Methodologies in June 2020 as part of its Creative Methodologies Seminar Series, which sought to explore innovative methodological approaches in the social sciences and reflected a desire among social-science researchers from across numerous disciplines in UCC to develop a culture of reflexivity and methodological imagination in their research praxis.

Tim Ingold's keynote at the symposium in Dingle is the first paper published in this special issue, because it gives us coordinates for thinking, doing and making in an uncertain world, through walking as a critical and creative practice and it makes the distinction between procedural and non-procedural thinking and methods. At the heart of Tim Ingold's paper is a focus upon “paying attention”, built upon decades of work as an anthropologist and with creative walking practices. In order help readers to understand the meaning of to “pay attention” Tim reflects on distinctions between “knowledge” and “wisdom”, the relations between “doing and undergoing, or between intentional and attentional models of action”. He argues that “Education, science and the state are powerful machines for the production of ignorance” and skilfully turns our attention to the value and importance of not knowing as the seedbed for “the wisdom that lies in attending to things”. Paying attention involves connection and attunement, not instrumentally as methodology (a set of protocols “devised to immunise the investigator from any infection arising from too close a contact with the phenomena of his or her investigation”) but phenomenologically, the importance of astonishment, connected to the possibility of “not knowing” and indeed, awe and wonder. He writes that “An astonished attention is one that goes along with and answers to the movements of things. It allows us to correspond with them”. Correspondence facilitates “undercommoning” (‘joining with other souls in the adventure of undergoing) rather than the surety of understanding. For instead of the procedural methods and dominant mediums of education and science, Tim's keynote urges us towards the world in hope and possibility and by paying attention to things we evoke wisdom, astonishment, undercommoning and “truly open our eyes to the world around us”.

Walking research - interrelated themes

Tim's keynote evokes a number of interrelated themes, that further emerged when thinking, talking and walking in contemporary Ireland and across these two events; these are represented in the papers that make up this special issue. The epistemological knowledge bases that we are working with and from, represent differing paradigms in research, as well as different foci. The papers represented in this issue draw from knowledge bases including arts practice, animal human studies, sociology of sustainability, phenomenology, mobilities, refugee studies, youth studies, disability studies, critical social theory, biographical sociology, literary and arts based research. As a result, we bring different, yet intersecting, questions and practice of walking methodologies.

For example, many of the papers are using participatory, arts based and co-productive research methods. Key questions that emerge across these papers include the importance of astonishment and wonder in transdisciplinary research and of paying attention to the possibilities of sustainability and sustainability citizenship using walking as a critical pedagogic practice, towards a world of “hope and possibility”. Ger Mullally, Maggie O’Neill and colleagues from the Dingle Creativity and Innovation Hub discuss the importance of walking as a participatory, convivial and “non-procedural” method to reflect upon the development of transdisciplinary pedagogy, that might elicit socio-ecological sustainability and sustainability citizenship. They argue for walking as a critical, creative pedagogy that underpins the connected curriculum at UCC, as a dynamic and relational way of learning in action, and in the process what they call “sustainability competence” (Wiek et al. 2011) is facilitated, through participatory, relational and imaginative teaching and learning methods. Walking as critical pedagogy “places co-walkers within the enfolding and unfolding relations between body, space, place, the senses and social relations.” Sustainability competence and citizenship are both relational and emergent and can be facilitated through walking practices, collective learning and collaborative working practices; drawing upon community knowledge, art and poetry in this case (through the work of Maggie Breen, Andrew Duggan and David Holden), that evokes trans disciplinarity and sharing knowledge in understandable and meaningful ways. Hence “the university in the community” and a “connected university” is facilitated. For the authors, walking practices also challenge the “dominant hegemonic tendencies behind disciplinary “silos” whilst at the same time enabling a “disciplinary humility” (Tripp and Shortlidge 2019, 2020) that values radical transdisciplinary knowledge forms- through a radical democratic imaginary. Thus offering “a renewed methodology for transdisciplinary critical pedagogy and praxis for socio-ecological sustainability” that “pays attention”.

We also focus upon: the dilemmas and challenges of co-production; the political/advocacy possibilities of walking with young people and migrants; questions around participants as experts, or what artist Misha Myers (2006) calls “situational authority”; researcher reflexivity; the exploration of trust in social research; and praxis (purposeful knowledge), or the usefulness of participatory methods for interventions in policy and practice and the relationship between theory, experience and action.

In their paper, Claire Edwards and Nicola Maxwell call for greater attention to be paid to the ways in which social and bodily difference shapes the politics and practices of mobile methods. Drawing on research exploring disabled people's socio-spatial knowledges and experiences of urban un/safety in Ireland through the use of “go-along” interviews, they interrogate both what this method can contribute to understandings of disabled people's embodied encounters with urban un/safety, but also its limits and politics as a form of research practice. As they illustrate, moving with participants has the potential to reveal disabled people's complex spatial knowledge(s), and the entanglement of human and non-human relations – bodies, emotions, objects, spaces - which shape encounters with un/safety. However, they also call for renewed attention to be paid to the socio-spatial politics and affective relations which shape the dynamics of mobile methods themselves. Recognising that go-alongs may not always open up participative, dialogic spaces of inquiry, they argue that mobile methods need to become more acutely attuned to both diverse bodily and sensory capacities and the disabling socio-political contexts which shape disabled people's everyday lives. Only by remaining reflexively attuned to these dynamics can normative (ableist) assumptions about mobility be interrogated and challenged.

While all of the papers in the collection discuss walking methodologies, they also show how walking can be enfolded with different modes of expression. A number of the papers introduce art, literature or music to invoke new ways of seeing or hearing while walking, and others highlight the potential of combining visual methodologies with walking methods. Thus the collection explores the possibilities of multi-modal visual, sensory, transdisciplinary and relational methods in social research that are transdisciplinary and “non-procedural”(Truman and Springgay 2017).

Mastoureh Fathi draws on the Walking-Interview-as-Biographical-Method approach (O’Neill & Roberts 2019) in her study, integrating walking interviews with participant-led photography and shared food-consumption activities, to develop a multi-sensorial and dialogic methodology in her research with young migrant men in Cork city. Seeking to understand stories of placemaking in migration, the author reveals how this methodology allowed temporal, sensorial, spatial and tacit understandings of placemaking to emerge, thus enabling marginal narratives of the city to be told. The paper emphasises the role of walking in creating new connections between bodies and spaces, which, together with the visual recording of scenes along the way through photography, enables the sharing of temporal, sensorial, spatial and tacit meanings of place. In particular, the study highlights the ways in which walking methods trigger unexpected discussions, create space for reflection, reveal the embodied nature of placemaking, and convey unspoken emotions.

Deirdre Horgan, Eluska Fernández and Karl Kitching use Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM) in the context of what they call “new walking methods” to work with eleven year-old girls in a working class community, who are part of the PEACH project, in order to understand how they relate to and navigate their neighbourhoods and how they make sense of wellbeing, belonging and place in the neighbourhood. Using “walk along” interviews the girls’ experiences are told in place and along the way through stories, photographs and drawing, “mapping, mobile and visual methods.” The walking methods enabled the research team to attune to the girls’ social worlds and allowed the discussion of political and sensitive topics to emerge. In particular, the methods revealed the girls’ positioning as active agents in the construction of local community and enabled “unexpected” data, which often challenged individualising discourses of wellbeing, to emerge on “child cultures, family and community life, belonging, wellbeing and futures.”

Lyudmila Nurse and Chika Robertson combine music and walking, articulated as “musical steps” in their work with young musicians during Covid19 lockdowns, to explore how walking impacted on wellbeing and also on their perceptions of music, what they “heard and felt” during the walks. Methodologically, they combine walking as a biographical method (O’Neill and Roberts 2019) and musical “breathing exercises” (Osborne 2021 in the creative application of walking as a biographical method. Following an account of a walkshop led by Maggie O’Neill (held online) for the young people and some members of their families, the paper explores a series of questions posed by Lyudmila Nurse and Chika Robertson, such as: how did walking change the young musicians” emotional perception of music; how did they reflect upon what they felt and heard during the walks; how did the walks influence their mental wellbeing during and after, both personally and musically; and finally how did the walks impact upon cultural perceptions and familial contexts.

Storytelling is, hence, central to all of the papers, for example, the narratives that are created and co-created with participants, the biographies of people, place and space that intersect with temporal dimensions that are involved in walking in place. Place/space and temporality are cross cutting themes as contributors provide different perspectives on the value of walking-as-method in producing rich understandings of lived experiences of the social and physical world. Related to this are the many ways that walking together produces sociality. This is evident across all of the papers, as well as what Ingold calls “the art of paying attention”.

Two very different papers explore these themes. Kieran Keohane retraces a path, or modus, from the Oracle at Delphi to Benjamin's flaneur, from the Chicago to the Birmingham Schools, and from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a modern precursor to the walking-talking classroom to a radical pedagogy and methodology for the twenty-first Century championed by O’Neill and her co-walkers. Keohane celebrates both the madness in the method and the method in the madness of Joyce’ walking classroom finding both comfort and inspiration in the gift relation of O’Neill's post-millennial adaptations. Above and beyond the current fashion or mode de jour walking together becomes a radical act of co-creation remembering and re-imagining the present as a path to the future.

Jessica Amberson turns her focus to walking methods in the domain of human-animal-place relations and the practice of dog-walking. Situating her work at the intersection of Human-Animal Studies and New Walking Studies and drawing on many hours of walking interviews with “dog people” in Cork, she explores how personal and social identities are made and (re)made through the act of dog walking. Interrogating the diverse ways in which walking the dog becomes a meaningful act, her paper demonstrates how for some, it represents an everyday, habitual, mundane practice; for others it is intimately bound up in their personal well-being and identities as family members, carers and members of their wider community, facilitating individual and social connection to place. In total, the paper calls for a greater interrogation of dog-walking as a “practice of hybrid identity-making” and asks us to take seriously the complex human-animal relations which shape, and are shaped, on the move; in this context, non-human animals are seen “not as objects – other - but as subjects - as self”.

Walking research methods are not without their challenges. Walking takes time, process time and in academic careers is often undertaken in the context of lack of time; furthermore, relational time is needed to do this kind of collaborative research - building relationships and trust as relational goods (see Mullaly et al., Horgan et al., Fathi, Amberson). Challenges of co-production and participatory methods include for example, tokenism – “invite, invoke, ignore” (O’Neill and Webster 2005) – as well as the dangers of making assumptions about walking as a normative bodily act (see Edwards and Maxwell). How do researchers reflexively guard against and address this, and how do we manage the ensuing power dynamics, ethically, imaginatively, purposefully? Furthermore, walking in time and place can mean disruptions in the interview process; this can be helpful for a biographical interview but may also challenge the ethics/ethical practice of a research project depending on the situation. Walking together may elicit talk that the co-walker may not have said in different circumstances, as walking together creates a kind of intimacy that can raise ethical issues (see for example Erel et al. 2019, Erel et al. 2022). This special issue explores these questions and, in doing so, highlights the possibilities as well as challenges of using walking methodologies, and seeks to make a contribution to current debates surrounding the sensory and mobile turns and the possibilities of co-production in social research.

Walking art and walking research

There has been a flowering of walking in artists’ practice, across the visual and performing arts in the last two decades, evidenced by the development of the walking artists network since its foundation in the UK in 2007, supported by an AHRC research networks grant in 2010. The network now lists 725 artists across an international terrain and runs conferences, symposia and workshops, including the walking women's symposium in London at Somerset House in 2016 curated by Clare Qualmann and Amy Sharrocks. Heddon et al.’s (2022) UKRI and AHRC funded Walking Publics/Walking Arts: walking, wellbeing and community during Covid 19 (www.walkcreate.org) explored the public's experience of walking during Covid as well as the walking practice of artists. A report and a walkbook of walking recipes by 30 artists curated by Heddon et al. (2022) both share the findings of the research and offer creative recipes by artists to inspire and support people to walk.

In the spirit of Walking Publics/Walking Arts and the creative intersections between walking art and walking research we include a number of artists’ pages in the special issue from artists who presented at the Dingle symposium: Blake Morris, Andrew Duggan, Maggie Breen and Noel O’Neill. In the artists’ pages we draw attention to the Arts and Paying Attention as well as the power and importance of walking in arts practice, and not least the transformative power of the arts, especially in inter and transdisciplinary research,

Blake Morris calls attention in Walking and the Art of Invitation, 5 Notes and 3 Invitations to the importance of the “invitation” to walking arts practice. Since 2009 he has only made art works that are walks. In his article Blake Morris tells us “A walk does not necessarily convey a story, rather it asks you to make your own” and moreover, “It is in the creation rather than the reception of experience that the medium of walking can be found”. Blake highlights the art of storytelling, through walking as invitation. Andrew Duggan made TALAMH, a photowork created in response to the walking/communicating/connecting to the ground [talamh] experience we shared in the Artists walk he curated in the area of Clogher beach as part of the Dingle Walking Conversations symposium. Maggie Breen's evocative poem “The Spaces Between” connects us sensorially and phenomenologically to storytelling, biography, and the landscape – time, space, and place. Noel O’Neill's strong visual images of Coumanare Lakes Loop walk and Dowdys Wire Loop walk, bring us in touch with the landscape and the art of walking and paying attention. Noel O’Neill's images document more than twenty years of hillwalking.

We hope this special issue on walking methodologies inspires readers of IJS to: think, critique and reflect on walking as a creative research method; take up our invitation to walk as research, as arts practice or a combination of both; and practice the art of paying attention, for in doing so, we may experience in non-procedural ways, “correspondence” and “undercommoning” in an uncertain, yet possible world.