Walking as Critical Inquiry 3031299906, 9783031299902

Table of contents :
Series Editor’s Foreword
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Contents
Editors and Contributors
Walking as a Critical Art of Inquiry
1 Walking Through Study
2 Walking with Country
3 Walking Through Drawing
4 Contributions to This Volume
5 Concluding Thoughts
References
Common Worlding with Blasted Landscapes: Possibilities for Walking Research in Early Childhood Education
1 Walking-with the Common Worlds of Early Childhood
2 Putting Blasted Landscapes to Work
3 Pedagogical Experimentation
4 Conclusion
References
The Listening Body: Sound Walking, Wearable Technologies, and the Creative Potentials of a Vibrational Pedagogy
1 Introduction
2 The Art and Science of Listening
3 More-than-Human Senses and Sensors
4 Biosensing Practices
5 Becoming Listening Bodies
6 Discussion: Sound Walking as Vibrational Pedagogy
7 Conclusion: Toward a Vibratory Pedagogy
References
Out of the Blue: A Pedagogy of Longing
1 Walking with Blue
2 Affected by Blue
3 Staying in the Blue: Not Knowing in Artistic Research
4 Longing for Blue: A Pedagogy of Curiosity
References
Discovering Lostness: Wandering and Getting Lost as Research Methodology
1 Embodied Bipedal Knowledge
2 Gleaning the Benefits of Lostness
3 Wandering and Lostness as Research Methodology
4 Treading into the Unknown
5 Lostness and Place
6 Self, Lostness, and Place
7 Wandering Art/Ography as Creative Place Making
8 Final Thoughts
References
Anecdotal Edges: Propositions from Sketching the Walk as a Posthumanist Research Method
1 Introduction
1.1 Research with Place
2 Anecdotal Edges
2.1 Anecdotal Edges and Sketching
2.2 Anecdotal Edges with Walking
2.3 Wayfaring
3 Common Worlds
4 Relational Everyday Practices
5 Process Thinking
5.1 Creeping Language
6 Latour’s Propositions
7 Conclusion
References
Walking to Create an Environmental Arts Pedagogy of Music
1 Introduction
2 Grounding Literature
2.1 Walking
2.2 Soundwalks, Songlines, and Music Composition
3 The Symphonic Landscape: Four Autoethnographic Vignettes
3.1 Vignette 1: A Walk in the Forest
3.2 Vignette 2: New Surprises at the Creek
3.3 Vignette 3: A Musical Swing, a Dance for Sap, and Dirty Rhythms
3.4 Vignette 4: Planting Trees and Sticky Sap
4 Discourse on Music as an Environmental Arts Pedagogy
5 Conclusion
References
Entangled Subjectivities in Muslim Daughters’ Video Walks: Affective Narratives of Transitions from a Postcolonial Feminist Multisensory Ethnography
1 Trans-Emigra Research Context: Exploring the Construction of Girls’ Subjectivities and Parenting with Muslim Families
2 Setting to Music: The Entangled Subjectivities and Agencies of the Walking Narratives
3 Touching the City: Postcolonial Memories, Perceptions and Decisions
4 Affected by Posthumanist Ethnography: Place and Space as Multisensory Phenomena
5 Children Bodies’ Orientations Toward Objects in Public Racialized-Gendered Space
6 Conclusions
References
Walking lutruwita/Tasmania: Navigating Place Relationships Through Moving and Making
1 Walking Methodologies
1.1 In Relation/Positioning the Self
1.2 Why Walking Methodologies
2 Walking with the River
3 Un-settling Settler Place-Making
4 Listening to the River
5 Making Marks/Marking Time in Place
5.1 Listening to the Body with Place
6 Knotting Time
7 Making-with-Place
References
Walking in Suriashi as a Radical and Critical Art of Inquiry
1 Background
2 Artivism: Suriashi Walking with a Radical Potential
3 Choreography as Political March
4 Aesthetic Experience as Artivism
5 Method
5.1 Suriashi as Walking and as Experimental Pilgrimage
5.2 Participants
6 Example #1: Suriashi Intervention at Gothenburg Culture Festival
6.1 Gothenburg Culture Festival
6.2 Radical Walking for a Critique of Real Estate Speculations
6.3 Radical Walking for a Confirmation of Ephemeral Lineage
6.4 Walking Is Dancing
6.5 Suriashi Walking Begins
6.6 A Public Fountain as a Manifestation of What Is Not There
7 Example #2: Suriashi as Protest at Yuen Long Station, 2019
7.1 Be Water—A Constructed Daoist Concept
7.2 Cheung Walks at Yuen Long Station as a DIY Micro-artivism
8 Example #3: Suriashi with Master Students at University of Gothenburg
8.1 Performative Walking as New Methodology in Higher Education
9 Discussion
References
Walking and Cultivating a Critical Community of Practice
1 Introduction
2 Journey
References
Walking-With Covid: Posthuman Walking Propositions
1 Introduction
2 COVID-19
3 Posthuman Covid: Virocene Agency
4 Methodology
4.1 Walking-With Posthuman Covid and Process Philosophy
5 Walking-With Posthuman Covid: Engaging Speculative Propositions
6 Walking-With Posthuman Covid Proposition 1: Walk-With a Camera (Artist/Learners in China)
7 Walking-With Posthuman Covid Proposition 2: Draw in Place (Artist/Teacher in Australia)
8 Concluding Thoughts
References
The Wonders of Wandering Through Magical Comic Territories: Towards a Feminist-Queer-Crip Laughter
1 Introduction: Towards a Female Clown World that Goes Beyond Self and Species
2 Cunt Clown Show: A Brief Script of a Wonderful Fantasy Journey
3 Multidimensional discussion
4 Stories yet to Come
References
Walking/Writing, Sensing Side-By-Side: A Decolonial Inquiry
1 Introduction
2 Post-feminist, New Materialist c/a/r/tographic Influences on our Walking/Writing
3 Sensory Ethnography and Walking/Movement Arts-Based Methodologies
4 Sensing Side-By-Side: Sensing as Women
5 Sensing Side-By-Side: Deep Histories from Archives, Books, Feelings, and Fleeting Thoughts
6 Sensing Side-By-Side: Plants, Animals, Weather
7 Recreating Belonging and Connection to Country, to Nature, to Deep Histories, to Each Other
References
Scores for Walking-with: Exploring Difference and Space Through Collective Practice
1 Opening Exercise
2 Introduction
3 Moving-with Difference and not Knowing?
4 On Scores
5 Scores to Walk-with
5.1 Walk-Me-Through
5.2 Collective Slow-Dwelling
6 Closing
References

Citation preview

Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7

Alexandra Lasczik Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles David Rousell Editors

Walking as Critical Inquiry

Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research Volume 7

Series Editor Barbara Bickel, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, USA Editorial Board Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA Barbara Bickel, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL, USA Pam Burnard, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA Peter Gouzouasis, University of British Columbia, North Vancouver, BC, Canada Andrea Kantrowitz, State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, USA Kelly Clark-Keefe, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA Morna McDermott McNulty, Towson University, Catonsville, MD, USA Richard Siegesmund, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL, USA

Arts-Based Educational Research continues to garner increased interest and debate among artists, arts writers, researchers, scholars and educators internationally. Further, the methodologies and theoretical articulations associated with Arts-Based Educational Research are increasingly employed across the disciplines of social science, education, humanities, health, media, communications, the creative arts, design, and trans-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research. This book series offers edited collections and monographs that survey and exemplify Arts-Based Educational Research. The series will take up questions relevant to the diverse range of Arts-Based Educational Research. These questions might include: What can Arts-Based methodologies (such as Arts-Based Research, Arts-Informed Research, a/r/tography, Poetic Inquiry, Performative Inquiry, Arts Practice-Based Research etc.) do as a form of critical qualitative inquiry? How do the Arts (such as literary, visual and performing arts) enable research? What is the purpose of Arts-Based Educational Research? What counts as Arts-Based? What counts as Educational? What counts as Research? How can Arts-Based Educational Research be responsibly performed in communities and institutions, individually or collaboratively? Must Arts-Based Educational Research be public? What ways of knowing and being can be explored with Arts-Based Educational Research? How can Arts-Based Educational Research build upon diverse philosophical, theoretical, historical, political, aesthetic and spiritual approaches to living? What is not Arts-Based Educational Research? The hinge connecting the arts and research in this Arts-Based Educational Research book series is education. Education is understood in its broadest sense as learning/transformation/change that takes place in diverse formal and informal spaces, places and moments. As such, books in this series might take up questions such as: How do perspectives on education, curriculum and pedagogy (such as critical, participatory, liberatory, intercultural and historical) inform Arts-Based inquiries? How do teachers become artists, and how do artists become teachers? How can one be both? What does this look like, in and beyond school environments? Arts-Based Educational Research will be deeply and broadly explored, represented, questioned and developed in this vital and digitally augmented international publication series. The aesthetic reach of this series will be expanded by a digital online repository where all media pertaining to publications will be held. Queries can be sent via email to Mindy Carter [email protected].

Alexandra Lasczik · Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles · David Rousell Editors

Walking as Critical Inquiry

Editors Alexandra Lasczik Southern Cross University Bilinga, QLD, Australia

Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles Southern Cross University Bilinga, QLD, Australia

David Rousell RMIT Melbourne, Australia

ISSN 2364-8376 ISSN 2364-8384 (electronic) Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research ISBN 978-3-031-29990-2 ISBN 978-3-031-29991-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design: Sun Kyoung Kim This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Foreword

Here is a book unbound. To be clear, the book does have a front and back cover. It has print and images on its pages. Yet, for me, this is where conventional wisdom about how a book as a container for ideas is expected to behave, stops. Walking as Critical Inquiry immediately and persuasively opens my practice of, or more, with reading, setting it into uneasy motion. The book’s transdisciplinary process-oriented provocations and critical-aesthetic expressions attune me to how my hand moves from one page to the next. It asks me to attend to a generative thicket of relational, theoretical, and political investments, each quickening my heartrate and compelling a wrangling with why sitting with one chapter generates a sense of respite while others make me ache. The work as a whole works on and in me, summoning me to work with becoming more and differently deliberate about the lines I walk, draw, dream, or dance. I read and I am taught, through a pedagogy of incitement, to ride the lines with considered openness and to commit, with care, to inventing ways I might modulate where my thinking-making steps or stumbles. Walking, in the hands (and hearts) of this book’s editors and authors, is given a portal to many worlds. These worlds are, for example, ancient, embodied, virtual, philosophical, contemplative, and culturally specific to country. Situated in tangible accounts of walking practices taken up by diverse scholars living and working in communities on five continents, a series of “critical movements” are enacted across the book’s 15 chapters, collectively making possible “the formation of alternative concepts and theorisations of walking beyond the pale limits of normative recognition and intelligibility” (p. 5). This criticality artfully threads together the multimodal and vibrant set of walking practices explored in Walking as Critical Inquiry, pulling the field of arts-based educational research into, as the editors suggest, “new territories of practice where the ‘walk’ is retheorised through a philosophy of movement” (p. 5). The authors/editors of this volume are extraordinary theorists, who have successfully attracted a wide range of equally extraordinary artists, scholar activists, practitioners, educators, and additional theorists who bring radical and contested theoretical propositions to life. The theoretical and conceptual territory, the book travels productively, challenges readers by doing the important work of joining others in their efforts to bring posthumanist, decolonizing and critical perspectives into contact with v

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one another through the fascinating ethico-aesthetic practice/thinking of walking-asartful inquiry. Chapters “Common Worlding with Blasted Landscapes: Possibilities for Walking Research in Early Childhood Education”–“Scores for Walking-with: Exploring Difference and Space Through Collective Practice” hold material that has rich aesthetic merit, tightly bound to the critical walking through inquiry projects and the theoretical frameworks each author puts to work. While many books attempting to articulate the partially ineffable contact points between, for example, movement, poeisis, ethics, ecological degradation, and the process philosophies and critical methodologies that work to disrupt ignorance and the status quo, exist—few that I am aware of have the breadth of diverse examples of the particular modes of contact or encounter that this book holds. This volume turns to many of the key works of other artists/scholars/educators, especially those giving shape to the emergent literature connecting ABER and posthumanist theory. Yet it does so with its own unique vibratory signature, inventing for the ABER community a type of “uncommon field guide”, a term gifted and conceptualised by author/artist of the Chapter “Anecdotal Edges: Propositions from Sketching the Walk as a Posthumanist Research Method”, Sarah Hennessey. Among other propositions, Walking as Critical Inquiry guides its readers through an “approachable, dialogic way of dismantling one vestige of colonialism by attending to the slow, close and relational ways of being in more-thanhuman worlds” (p. 79). ABER scholars have always sought to work at the edges of easy recognition, trusting critical and creative practices to unsettle structures bent on elevating proceduralism and sameness. Kelly Clark-Keefe, Ed.D. Associate Professor and Vice Chair Department of Education College of Education and Social Services University of Vermont Burlington, VT, USA

Foreword

There are few things I would rather do more than to go on a walk with a good friend. Moving through time and space with interesting conversation, generative ideas, curious thoughts, or humorous musings within various places creates a particular pedagogical occasion. Whether that walk takes place in a forest, on a beach, on urban streets, in the halls between academic conference sessions, or over the phone while wandering through the passages of my own home, ambulatory engagement, for me, walking plays a major role in my thinking, sensing, and being. In response to this tome, I created nine collages upon reflection of recent walks from my camera roll (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Week of Walking: Baltimore, Maryland, USA & Roma, Italia (January 25–30, 2023). Montage triptych of image 1, 2, and 3

I have walked, (literally, metaphorically, methodologically, theoretically, and philosophically), with Drs. Lasczik, Rousell, and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles for years now as we have overlapping interests beyond walking. We have served together on boards, committees, and presented on panels in academic conferences. Their ideas are fresh, accessible, and engage with the environment, the poetic, the sensorial, and with affect. Having published and presented widely on issues concerning arts-based and arts-based educational research on an international level, I regularly gain new vii

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insights in my conversations with these creative and courageous scholars who are not afraid to ask questions or take walks, outside of well-tread paths of traditional scholarship (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Week of Walking: Baltimore, Maryland, USA & Roma, Italia (January 25–30, 2023). Montage triptych of image 4, 5, and 6

This volume that these walking scholars have brought together near one another is a walking party of speculative potentials with critical friends from diverse backgrounds and fields, but that are all invested in walking as a concept, methodology, or form. Key to this edited collaboration are the contributions from authors that reimagine walking beyond privileged perspectives of certain bodies, sites, and histories. The authors in this edited book write using a variety of research methods, including, but not limited to ethnography, artistic research, posthumanist methods, autoethnography, sensory ethnography, and post-qualitative methods. Some of the concepts discussed and forms presented include queer crip theory, environmental education, wearable technologies, bio-aesthetics, embodied making, suriashi acts, poetic visual essays, and artistic scores. Save a few, these are voices that are new to me. It is always good to expand one’s own understandings and what better way than to listen while walking with a crew of diverse thinkers, doers, feelers, writers, and sensers (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 Week of Walking: Baltimore, Maryland, USA & Roma, Italia (January 25–30, 2023). Montage triptych of image 7, 8, and 9

Foreword

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The artist Adam Milner says that he learns from his walks, even if it is a composition from a spilled bag of Cheetos that landed on the pavement, just so (see Goldstein, 2021). I invite anyone interested in the value of speculative practices, particularly in walking methodologies, to walk and learn with these scholarly friends in playful critical creation. Daniel T. Barney, Ph.D. Professor + Practicum Coordinator Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Graduate Studies Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) Baltimore, MD, USA

Reference Goldstein, C. (2021, July 15). ‘A spilled bag of cheetos on the sidewalk is a stunning composition’: Watch artist adam milner make art from… well, anything. Artnet News. Retrieved from January 17, 2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/adam-milner-art21-1989424

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Arts-based Educational Research Special Interest Group (ABER SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for their leadership and foresight in assembling this book series. We are grateful to have had the opportunity to publish in their important Studies in Arts-based Educational Research (SABER) series with this timely collection of walking inquiries. We gratefully acknowledge the generous contributions of our reviewers, who, in these COVID-impacted years, gave generously of their time to perform this invisible labour, unremunerated. We name them here to recognise this generosity of spirit and peer support and to once again and offer them our grateful thanks.

Reviewers Barbara Lounder Richard Saunders White Nupur Sachdeva Patricia Osler Kim Snepvangers Melissa Caminha Michaela Pegum Pohanna Pyne Feinberg Catalina Hernandez-Cabal Thilinika Wijesinghe Sarah Peters Zuzana Vasko Alicia Arias-Camisón Coello Rana Jreidini Veena Balsawer Adi Brown Laís Cardoso da Rosa xi

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Jason Cox Jun Hu Donna Kehl Jessica Castillo Inostroza Barbara Bickel Louise Phillips

Acknowledgements

Contents

Walking as a Critical Art of Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alexandra Lasczik, David Rousell, and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

1

Common Worlding with Blasted Landscapes: Possibilities for Walking Research in Early Childhood Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cory Jobb

13

The Listening Body: Sound Walking, Wearable Technologies, and the Creative Potentials of a Vibrational Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Rousell, Michael Gallagher, and Mark P. Wright

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Out of the Blue: A Pedagogy of Longing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alison Shields

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Discovering Lostness: Wandering and Getting Lost as Research Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lucy Bartholomee

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Anecdotal Edges: Propositions from Sketching the Walk as a Posthumanist Research Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Hennessy

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Walking to Create an Environmental Arts Pedagogy of Music . . . . . . . . . Matthew Yanko

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Entangled Subjectivities in Muslim Daughters’ Video Walks: Affective Narratives of Transitions from a Postcolonial Feminist Multisensory Ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Montserrat Rifà-Valls and Sara López-Ruiz Walking lutruwita/Tasmania: Navigating Place Relationships Through Moving and Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Antonia Aitken

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Walking in Suriashi as a Radical and Critical Art of Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . 151 Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt Walking and Cultivating a Critical Community of Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Laura K. Reeder Walking-With Covid: Posthuman Walking Propositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Adrienne (Adi) Brown, Alexandra Lasczik, and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles The Wonders of Wandering Through Magical Comic Territories: Towards a Feminist-Queer-Crip Laughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Melissa Caminha Walking/Writing, Sensing Side-By-Side: A Decolonial Inquiry . . . . . . . . . 231 Alison L. Black, Catherine Manathunga, and Shelley Davidow Scores for Walking-with: Exploring Difference and Space Through Collective Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Catalina Hernández-Cabal

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Alexandra Lasczik is Professor, Arts and Education, in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University, Australia. She is currently Research co-Leader of the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research Centre [SEAE]. Lexi is Expert Educator with 40 years’ experience in the Visual Arts. She is also Practising Artist whose chosen mediums are painting, photography, poetry, walking, and creative writing. Travel, movement, and migrations are large themes in Lexi’s work, as are the Arts and Arts-based Educational Research [ABER], particularly A/r/tography. Lexi is Artivist, committed to equity and social justice, and her spirited advocacy of a high -quality arts education for all spans across her entire career. She has been awarded Southern Cross University’s Faculty of Education Researcher of the Year, twice (2015 and 2018) and Faculty of Education HDR Supervisor of the Year (2021). Alexandra has extensive teaching experience in the arts in Australia and internationally and is Specialist with respect to the Visual Arts, teaching and learning, creative curriculum design and innovative pedagogies, with particular expertise in the engagement of at-risk youth through the arts. Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles is Professor of Sustainability, Environment and Education at Southern Cross University. She is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education, as well as Research Leader of the “Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education” (SEAE) Research Centre. Her research centres on climate change, childhoodnature, posthuman philosophy, and child-framed research methodologies. She is particularly focussed on the pivot points between environmental education, science, philosophy, and the arts. She has led over 40 national/international research projects and published more than 150 publications. She has been recognised for both her teaching and research excellence in environmental education, including an Australian Teaching Excellence Award (OLT) and an Australian Association for Environmental Education Fellowship (Life Achievement Award) for her outstanding contribution to environmental education research.

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Dr. David Rousell is Artist and Social Researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Education at RMIT University, where he co-directs the Creative Agency Research Lab for transdisciplinary studies of creativity. He is also Visiting Research Fellow in the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI) at Manchester Metropolitan University and Adjunct Research Fellow at Southern Cross University. His research is invested in a creative reimagining of educational cultures, theories, and environments in response to climate change and often involves artful collaborations with children, young people, and their wider ecological communities. His recent books include Immersive Cartography and Postqualitative Inquiry (Routledge, 2021), Doing Rebellious Research (Brill, 2022, w/ Burnard, Mackinlay, Dragovic), and Posthuman Research Playspaces: Climate Child Imaginaries (Routledge, 2023, w/ Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles).

Contributors Antonia Aitken Launceston, Australia Lucy Bartholomee University of Texas, Austin, USA Alison L. Black University of the Sunshine Coast, Sunshine Coast, Australia Adrienne (Adi) Brown Southern Cross University, Gold Coast, Australia Melissa Caminha ERAM University School, Girona, Spain Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles Southern Cross University, Bilinga, Gold Coast, Australia Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt Stockholm University of the Arts, Stockholm, Sweden; University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden Shelley Davidow University of the Sunshine Coast, Sunshine Coast, Australia Michael Gallagher Manifold Lab, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK Sarah Hennessy Faculty of Education, Western University, London, ON, Canada Catalina Hernández-Cabal Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, US Cory Jobb University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada Alexandra Lasczik Southern Cross University, Bilinga, Gold Coast, Australia Sara López-Ruiz Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain Catherine Manathunga University of the Sunshine Coast, Sunshine Coast, Australia Laura K. Reeder Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

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Montserrat Rifà-Valls Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain David Rousell Creative Agency Lab, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Alison Shields University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada Mark P. Wright Centre for Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice, University of the Arts, London, UK Matthew Yanko The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Walking as a Critical Art of Inquiry Alexandra Lasczik, David Rousell, and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

Abstract This transdisciplinary, international collection is situated within a genealogy of experimental walking practices in the arts, arts-based research, and emergent walking practices in education. It brings together emerging cartographies of relation amongst walking practices ranging across arts-based, ecological, activist, decolonising, queer, critical and posthumanist modes of inquiry. Its particular investment is in the proliferation of artful modes of inquiry that open up speculative practices and concepts of walking as an orientation for pedagogy, inquiry, and the everyday, resisting the gaze of privilege and the relentless commodification of human and nonhuman life processes. This is important work for the burgeoning demand for creative methodologies in the social sciences, and more specifically, for arts-based educational research [ABER], which is pushing creative methods of inquiry into zones of contact previously siloed by disciplinary boundaries. Keywords Walking · Critical walking inquiry · Arts-based educational research · Walking as inquiry

1 Walking Through Study Our call for chapters invited contributions that critically trouble and artfully reimagine the figure of walking beyond reductive models and attributions of formal value, environmentality, and body capacity (Cutcher et al., 2015; Eddy & Moradian, 2018; Kiefer-Boyd et al., 2018; Rooney, 2019; Trafí-Prats, 2018). One of the key interventions that recent critical walking methodologies have made in relation to earlier articulations of ABER is an insistence on the primacy of movement as the basis for thought, learning, sociality, creative practice, and aesthetic experience. In A. Lasczik (B) · A. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles Southern Cross University, Southern Cross Drive, Bilinga 4225, Australia e-mail: [email protected] D. Rousell Creative Agency Lab, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_1

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some ways, this foregrounding of movement breaks away from ABER’s historical focus on representation as well as the aesthetic formalisms which have dominated discussions of walking in the history of ‘Western’1 art. While Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking may be considered a canonical entry of walking into minority world art history, the reification of such examples potentially reinscribes walking as a gesture of individual privilege abstracted from the complex political entanglements of everyday social life. We note, for instance, that for most of the world’s populations now and in the past, walking is often the only option of transport—for work, for food and water, for education. Walking is also the only way many asylum seekers and refugees have been able to migrate to escape political violence and climatological catastrophe. Referencing radical traditions of walking in Black activism, scholarship, and community building, Cervenak (2014, p. 6) describes how people “move in ways that are invisible, along the grooves of their own mind, in the motion of a rambling tongue, outside the range of an administrative and purportedly enlightened gaze”. What Cervenak terms ‘wandering’ is ultimately a radical performance of racial and sexual freedom untethered from reductive categories of identity and the neoliberal cult of the individual. The wandering body in movement is always more than one body (Manning, 2013), or as Moten (2018) puts it via Edouard Glissant, a body that “consents not to be a single being”. As that which eludes the ‘call to order’ of formal identity positions, pedagogies, and research methods that seek to categorise and measure, walking as wandering takes shape as a social practice of ‘study in movement’ (Harney & Moten, 2013). As Harney and Moten elaborate in their book The Undercommons, ‘study’ is a speculative practice located in the fecund movement of social life that is always already going on before a situation is called to order by any formal pedagogy, policy, theory, or practice. Undercommons study is always speculative, not because it’s detached from reality, but because it emerges from the improvisational process of moving through a social field of experience. As Harney notes in The Undercommons’ final chapter, “when I speak about a speculative practice… I am speaking about walking through study, and not just studying by walking with others. A speculative practice is study in movement for me” (p. 118). The work of conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper offers a touchstone for walking as ‘study in movement’ within the Black radical tradition. Piper developed a series of works in the 1960s that actively situated techniques of walking in the informal, improvisational play of social life. Her early Catalysis (1972) walking performances explored the hyper in/visibility of people of colour in everyday public spaces around Manhattan (Moten, 2003). In these works, Piper walked the streets of New York with a towel stuffed in her mouth, Mickey Mouse balloons tied to her body or wearing clothes soaked for weeks in vinegar, eggs, milk and cod liver oil. Other works from this era reflected Piper’s exploration of walking as a technique of social fabulation and improvisation. In Mythic Being (1973), Piper disguised herself as a 1

The term ‘Western’ is a colonial construct. We prefer the term ‘minority world’ to signify where the smaller percentage of the world’s population resides, but note the historical tensions of engaging this term when discussing art history.

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man and wandered the streets of Harlem while reciting verbatim snippets from her childhood diary. Her peripatetic engagements with everyday sociality also extended from wandering into dancing, as with her Funk Lessons (1983–1984), which offered workshops for learning to dance to Black funk music. Each of these bodies of work can be considered studies in movement which tap into the tacit knowledges and political intricacies of everyday sociality. As Piper writes about the Funk Lessons, “what I purported to ‘teach’ my audience was revealed to be a kind of fundamental sensory ‘knowledge’ that everyone has and can use” (1996, p. 195). Our attention to the speculative, processual, and decolonial potentials of walking as ‘study in movement’ connects this edited collection with social practices of walking as sites of political solidarity and creative re-imagining.

2 Walking with Country As editors currently living and working on unceded Aboriginal lands within the Australian continent, this introduction is not so much a beginning as a walking through and with Country which has been walked for more than 60,000 years by First Nations peoples. Walking on the unceded First Nations territories of the Yugembeh (Lex & Amy) and Wurundjeri peoples (David), we recognise that Australian Aboriginal contributions to knowledge through walking with Country are complex interwoven expressions of place, spirituality, culture, art, identity, knowledge and history (Bawaka Country et al., 2015; Rey & Harrison, 2018; Somerville et al., 2019). The term ‘Country’ is an Aboriginal English word often used to describe the homelands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. As members of the Gay’Wu group of women from Northeast Arnhem Land explain, Country is not simply a word for ‘land’ or ‘place’ but a complex and sentient confluence of more-than-human forces and agencies across deep time. Country has awareness, it is not just a backdrop. It knows and is part of us. Country is our homeland. It is home and land, but it is also more than that. It is the seas and waters, the rocks and soils, the animals and winds and people too. It is the connections between those beings, and their dreams and emotions, their languages and their Law. (Gay’Wu Group of Women, 2019, p. xxii)

We believe it is important to acknowledge the extraordinary Indigenous histories of walking practices from the continent on which we live and work, while also acknowledging that, as non-Indigenous scholars, we only speak and write about the surface layer of knowledges that have been generously shared with us by Indigenous colleagues, artworks, and texts. There are many other layers of meaning, law, value, and experience embedded in such knowledges, which we are not authorised to know, engage with, or speak (Gay’Wu Group of Women, 2019). Australian Aboriginal histories of walking Country are often expressed through ‘songlines’, ‘songspirals’, ‘strings’ or ‘Dreaming tracks,’ which maintain ancient passages, pathways, stories, songs, and cartographies of Country (Norris & Harney,

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2014). These walking lines are very different from the gridded lines which often make up minority world cities and townships, or for that matter, the straight, formal lines produced by widely celebrated walking artists such as Richard Long. As the Gay’wu Group of Women from Bawaka Country write, “our songs are not a straight line. They do not move in one direction through time and space” (2019, p. xvi). Rather, their walking and singing lines “twist and turn, they move and loop”, spiralling in and out infinitely (ibid). Aboriginal walking and singing practices are highly specific to Country and vary widely across the Australian continent. If we were to move from Bawaka Country in Northeast Arnhem Land to the Mina Mina region of the Central Tanami dessert, we would encounter quite different ways of walking and singing Country into existence. There, in Walpiri Country, women have used digging sticks to pierce the Earth as they walk for thousands of generations. Holes dug into sand, salt flat, and creek bed create a matrix for finding water and bush food under varying seasonal and climatological conditions. Accompanying the women’s walking and digging comes a dance and a Dreaming (Jukurrpa) which tells the living story of the women’s movements through Walpiri Country, of how the digging sticks (karlangurlu) emerged from the Earth at Mina Mina (Nicholls, 2003; Rousell, 2021). As an inheritor and custodian of the karlangurlu women’s Dreaming, Walpiri painter Dorothy Napangardi described her work as an invitation for the viewer to “put yourself in the movement” of women’s walking and singing across Country (Nicholls, 2003, p. 85). To “put yourself in the movement” is to become part of Country as a field of experience that is always coming newly into existence, a “mapping not of a territory but its passages, the traces it leaves in the landscapes it uncovers” (Manning, 2009, p. 155).

3 Walking Through Drawing An important insight that we have come to know through study with Indigenous colleagues, as well as through our own creative practice, is that walking is inseparable from other embodied practices of listening, voicing, writing, and drawing. This attention to the unity of movement across all creative practices connects our interest in Indigenous philosophies with Western process philosophies, which similarly take the gestural and tonal qualities of movement as pre-epistemic nodes of inception for thought, embodiment, place, and experience (Cole & Somerville, 2017). To draw the arc of a curving line with an outstretched arm is also to walk that line, which is also to think that line as a curve. This gesture does not separate its producer or ‘agent’ from the curvature of the line it produces. It is all one curving line connecting an infinitesimal calculus of singularities, each edging off into infinite potentials. In this sense, we might also think of the gestural movement and tonality of a research text taking (and making) the shape of its epistemology, as an ABER methodology of walking also asks us to do (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018). As Richardson and St Pierre (2008) remind us, “the product cannot be separated from the producer, the mode of production or the method of knowing” (p. 962). Each is part of the same gesture,

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the singular curvature of a line made by thinking, sensing, voicing, drawing, and walking. Such opportunities for transmedia creative practice are further layered when considering the artist Paul Klee’s ‘walk’ through drawing. Klee described how the “primordial movement, the agent, is a point that sets itself in motion (genesis of form). A line comes into being … it goes out for a walk, aimlessly for the sake of the walk” (Klee, 1961, p. 105). Ingold (2015, p. 161) builds upon Klee’s proposition, when asserting, “drawing freehand, I take my line for a walk. Likewise the wayfarer, in … perambulations, lays a trail on the ground in the form of footprints, paths and tracks”. These trails, these walks, recognise the process of letting go, of ambling, of a pedagogy of movement-as-thought. In her comprehensive study of walking as a contemporary art form, O’Rourke (2013) notes that “walking blurs the borders between representing the world and designating oneself as a piece of it, between live art and object-based art” (p. 13). In this way, we can think of walking as drawing and drawing as walking (Rousell et al., 2019), all in a single gesture. Both walking and drawing are techniques for modulating and expressing the movement of affect and/as thought. In this, as for other ABER methods, practice makes practice (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018). Walking and drawing are ways of issuing forth along the lines of becoming which propel bodies into flight. Abstract lines of flight will drag us into the next occasion regardless; the question is to what extent we are able to modulate the speed, intensity, force and trajectory of these vectors. It is up to us to invent the techniques necessary to ride these lines of becoming, not to control them because this is impossible, but to modulate these lines in ways that are productive of difference, collectivity, and the creative advancement of the world. (Rousell et al., 2019, p. 214)

Despite the many traditions of walking—the landscape walker, walking Country, the walking poet, the pilgrim, the artist—it is always possible to walk in new or different ways (O’Rourke, 2013, p. 247). It is useful to think of walking as a way of making lines, of making drawings, an aesthetic mode that pre-exists more conventional forms of considered mark making. In this collection, the figure of the ‘walk’ has deliberately been left open to experimentation and speculative interpretation across and through the chapters. We see walking take shape physically as the comportment of human and/or nonhuman bodies in and through multiple places and times. We witness the physical ‘walk’ becoming otherwise, variously attributable to creeping, crawling, dancing, listening, wandering, and many other modes of bodily comportment and sensitisation. And yet we also encounter less tangible accounts of ‘walking’, including contemplative, virtual, digital, dreaming, subconscious, or cosmonautical journeys in place; the peripatetic of a collective sensing body toward new forms of sociality, subjectivity and expression; and the formation of alternative concepts and theorisations of walking beyond the pale limits of normative recognition and intelligibility. In these ways, walking as critical inquiry pushes ABER forward into new territories of practice where the ‘walk’ is retheorised through a philosophy of movement—embodied movement makes time and space, a work of writing, a drawing, a painting, a photograph, a performance, and any combination of these and more.

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4 Contributions to This Volume With contributions emerging from geographically distinct places and communities across five continents, we are challenged as editors to comprehensively introduce the complexity of cultural and historical contexts through which the authors are working (and walking). As we walk our way through the montage of contexts and milieux which populate this collection, we find ourselves walking through the blasted ruins of a mine in Northeast Canada; the sonic layers of a multi-ethnic neighbourhood in Northern England; the volcanic curves of Seydisfjördur’s fjords in Iceland; the creolised mix of milieux that animate downtown New Orleans, among numerous other singular places of political encounter. Acknowledging that any genealogical account of such a plurality of contexts is by nature both provisional and partial, what we offer by way of introduction here are a series of critical movements and transitions enacted through walking as a mode of artistic practice and pedagogical experimentation. Our collection continues in “Common Worlding with Blasted Landscapes: Possibilities for Walking Research in Early Childhood Education” with Cory Jobb’s exploration of walking-with young children at Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on Tsing’s notion of ‘blasted landscapes’ Jobson shows how the ex-mining site configures as a complex set of contested histories, including violent colonial occupations of Indigenous land, scarrings of the Earth’s surface, as well as regenerative pockets of more than human life and resilience. For Jobson, it is precisely the ‘blastedness’ of the landscape that becomes pedagogical through his walks with young children, generating fluid possibilities for what it might mean for a landscape to renaturalise in the wake of imperialist extraction and expropriation. The book’s itinerary then shifts to “The Listening Body: Sound Walking, Wearable Technologies, and the Creative Potentials of a Vibrational Pedagogy” and the inner-city community of Hulme in Manchester, UK, where David Rousell, Michael Gallagher, and Mark Wright introduce a project called The Listening Body. Drawing on a series of collaborations with children at the Zion Arts community centre, the authors explore the use of wearable sensors, microphones, and cameras to map the affective dynamics of sound walks in children’s local neighbourhoods. They conceptualise these listening practices through a ‘vibrational pedagogy’ which extends beyond the limits of the human sensorium, drawing in theoretical perspectives from bioaesthetics and media ecology to inform their use of wearable sensors as creative media. Their concept of the ‘listening body’ emerges as a collective body of vibrational contours and resonances that includes human and nonhuman sensations of many kinds, generating new pedagogical possibilities at the intersect of sound art, geography, and education. From walking with sound to walking with colour, “Out of the Blue: A Pedagogy of Longing” takes us to the fjords of Seydisfjördur, Iceland where Alison Shields unfolds an artistic exploration of the colour blue. Drawing on work developing during an artist residency at Seydisfjördur which explored walking as a creative practice, Shields brings the practice of walking with blue into poetic synergy with feelings of

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longing and desire. Encouraging readers to find new ways of staying with feelings of longing, blue comes to signify a horizon of desire which is always elusive and resists attainment. For Shields, the practice of walking with blue becomes generative for embracing the deep sense of wonder and affective longing which animates the creative process. “Discovering Lostness: Wandering and Getting Lost as Research Methodology” carries a similar theme, shifting from longing to ‘lostness’ as a generative principle for walking-based art and research. Lucy Bartholomee draws on phenomenology as a theoretical touchstone in evoking experiences of getting lost while wandering the city of New Orleans, while also connecting this lostness with notions of fear in the research process. Purposefully getting lost, becomes for Bartholomee, a way of orientating toward that which is unknowable while also constructing a ‘lost’ sense of place. With a strong commitment to defamiliarisation as a creative research strategy, Bartholomee works to develop wandering and lostness as ontological tools as much as states of being, offering insights into the production and theorisation of critical and creative walking methods. The next offering, “Anecdotal Edges: Propositions from Sketching the Walk as a Posthumanist Research Method” returns us to Ontario, Canada where Sarah Hennessey takes us on a series of forest walkings and sketching with a group of young children. Drawing on theoretical and methodological perspectives from the Common Worlds research group, Hennessey works to create an ‘uncommon field guide’ which charts the more-than-human worlds encountered along these walks. Using a posthumanist approach, Hennessey argues that walking and sketching with children in the forest are deeply political acts, inseparable from an ethics and a politics of relationality. She describes practices of slowness, delicate attunement, patience, lingering, and ambivalence as key strategies within her ‘uncommon field guide’, offering a significant and evocative contribution to the theory and practice of walking research. Taking us to the forests of British Columbia on Canada’s west coast, Matthew Yanko’s chapter “Walking to Create an Environmental Arts Pedagogy of Music” focuses on children’s experiences of walking and music making. Yanko describes this as an ‘environmental arts pedagogy’ which draws on place-based experience with/as nature as the basis for musical composition and performance. Through detailed accounts of how music can take shape through the process of walking, Yanko suggests that the landscape itself generate zones of sonic relationality between the body, the senses, and place. “Entangled Subjectivities in Muslim Daughters’ Video Walks: Affective Narratives of Transitions from a Postcolonial Feminist Multisensory Ethnography” brings us to Barcelona, where Montserrat Rifà-Valls and Sara López-Ruiz use video walking to explore affective narratives of migrancy, displacement, and transition. Working with Muslim young women who recently migrated to Spain from Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, and Guinea Conakry, the authors use participatory video methods to focus on the transitional subjectivities that take shape through border crossings, along with the complex educational and social challenges that young Muslim women face during these transitions. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from mobility studies,

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affect studies, and migratory aesthetics, the authors describe their participatory use of ‘walking with video’ as a decolonising method which enables their participants to walk their own stories of ‘transnational drift’. In “Walking lutruwita/Tasmania: Navigating Place Relationships Through Moving and Making”, Antonia Aitken walks with lutruwita/Tasmania as she considers how interdisciplinary creative research methodologies that embrace walking with place have the potential to cultivate restorative intercultural relations. Aitken explores how walking can be a radical art of inquiry, moving with Country through a process of acknowledgement, witnessing and attentive embodied dialogue and in doing so, explores a performance and publishing project, Fall of the Derwent (2015–17). The latter project by artists Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward is taken into the author’s walking practice to investigate how moving the body into relation with place can yield a more authentic relationality. In “Walking in Suriashi as a Radical and Critical Art of Inquiry”, Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt walks in suriashi, which in Japanese is a practice that translates to ‘sliding foot’. Indeed, Suriashi is a specific gender codified walking technique in classical Japanese dance and theatre, and an important method for acting on stage. This project asks whether suriashi also could be a method to act, as being active, or to activate, in other spaces outside the theatre. Through a series of interventions, Dahlstedt finds ways to protest peacefully and safely, along with collaborators. This feminist public art practice seeks to challenge participants and audience alike, in this case to draw attention to how city officials of Gothenburg had failed to value work by female dance artists, and at the same time spend their budget on poorly planned and unsafe monuments. “Walking and Cultivating a Critical Community of Practice”, authored by Laura K. Reeder is a poetic exploration of ways that walking can cultivate a critical community of practice among people who may not know each other, but who have intersecting physical, functional, or intellectual goals. This visual essay documents a series of walking encounters that occurred over the space of a year in Prespes, Greece and through New York and New England during the COVID pandemic. The images and text combine and initiate Arendt’s theory of the vita active as praxis for understanding how walking or moving independently may encourage solidarity with the many. Such critical community practice engages labour, contemplation, work, and transformation, giving structure to her research on critical communities of practice among teachers, cultural partners, and learners in schools. Adi Brown, Alexandra Lasczik and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles offer a treatise on posthuman walking-with Covid-19 in “Walking-with Covid: Posthuman Walking Propositions”. This walkographic doctoral study transformed in the doing as a necessary response to the pandemic, and other more than human events in Australia. Posthuman covid and local and national bushfires impacted this project’s place-based movements, firstly in Hunan province in China, and later the Gold Coast hinterland, in Australia. In an ecology of practice, place, pedagogy, movement, process philosophy, bushfires and the unyielding creaturely presence of posthuman covid, coalesced to co-create a body of work that engaged in drawing-with through the event of the walk. In thinking and making relationally with other beings and with matter—the Chinese

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art and design students’ walks, their photographic images, the drawings-with trees— a continuous sense of becoming unfolded in the perpetual creations and perishings of actual entities and actual occasions as well as non-hierarchical approaches to pedagogy and practice. “The Wonders of Wandering Through Magical Comic Territories: Towards a Feminist-Queer-Crip Laughter” explores Melissa Lima Caminha’s fresh offering and presents a performative walking through of the Cunt Clown Show through feminist-queer-crip theory and performance. An experiment in worlding practice through sci-fi storytelling, the play and the performance roam across different comic territories: clowning, buffoonery and drag. They inquire into gender construction, sexualities, motherhood, ableism, patriarchy, capitalism, transspecies relationships, adult-centrism and post-anthropocentrism through a critical genealogy of comicality and a new materialist approach to constructions of the self. The wandering gendered clown critically deconstructs human forms and behaviours to imagine possible new worlds and relationships that go beyond self and species. Alison L Black, Catherine Manathunga, and Shelley Davidow engage a decolonial inquiry in “Walking/Writing, Sensing Side-By-Side: A Decolonial Inquiry”. Through sensory inquiry, the author/artists invite new ways of being, seeing and thinking in and beyond academe, which they present in an artful conjoining of image and text. This visual/verbal essay explores coastal walking, inquiring contemplatively and aesthetically, wandering/wondering, walking/working, and writing/representing lives/worlds/words, in relation with place. In their wonderings and wanderings, the authors thought deeply about the First Nations peoples who have walked the beaches explored since time immemorial. They assert in their tracings that walking is a radical and critical art of inquiry that opens spaces for creativity, de-familiarises bodies, and blends visual and non-visual senses, (re)creating belonging, place, feelings and relationships through movement. Engaging memoir-like writing and arts-based artefacts, they argue that they are blurring the boundaries between creative inquiry, activism, attending to issues of settler colonisation and gender, resisting commodification and quantification, and creating spaces for restorative, responsive and decolonial walking/writing expression. “Scores for Walking-with: Exploring Difference and Space Through Collective Practice” shares Catalina Hernández-Cabal’s rich chapter, engaging images, concrete poetry, scores, space and collective practice. Hernández-Cabal defines scores as creative prompts, which are pedagogical devices with political reverberations. The scores transform walking into a collective embodied exploration of tension and spacemaking, involving an active negotiation of individuality and difference. In this practice, walking is considered as a creative and pedagogical practice that enables an embodied and relational study that questions easy assumptions. Mixed arts practices, including contemporary dance and conceptual art, together with critical perspectives of education and pedagogy, feminist theory, and critical perspectives of somatics, inform the scores. The chapter is an invitation to attend to the nuanced but concrete relational and political implications of walking as a collective practice.

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5 Concluding Thoughts As the disciplinary and methodological plurality of the chapters in this collection makes clear, education is by no means the only context through which artsbased methodologies are finding new spheres of relevance and urgency. There are many artist-scholars working in other disciplines apart from education or the Fine Arts, including but not limited to health, anthropology, philosophy, and the natural sciences. And yet, as veteran ABER scholar Richard Siegesmund observes, the emergence and proliferation of arts-based research in education has often been on the front lines of introducing critical and creative methodologies into other disciplines and social contexts. In a relatively short period of time, arts-based educational research has gone from being an obscure novelty on the educational landscape, to a transdisciplinary international movement…. We see an evolving field in which the authors bring a variety of disciplines and discourses to bear, in order to forge new ways of conceptualizing the world and conducting inquiry into it. (Siegesmund, 2017, p. xi, emphasis added)

The turn to walking as a creative method for educational research offers a salient example of Siegesmund’s observation of ABER’s development, extension, and influence across multiple disciplines. Over the past decade, we have seen walking practices evolve from a formal modality of aesthetic practice in contemporary art into an empirical method of inquiry capable of yielding critical insights into complex sociopolitical entanglements. ABER has indeed played a significant role in this transition, with walking-based research in education operating as a key conduit for seeding and activating creative walking methods across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. This collection performs a similar trajectory: it launches from contemporary arts practices through and with critical social justice terrains into new zones of theoretical and praxical experimentation. Walking into such new unfoldings and new becomings through transdisciplinary, international movements is essential for growing artsbased research across and beyond disciplines, while also expanding ABER beyond its own historical boundaries. ABER scholarship has always been characterised by the appreciation of the new, the fresh, the exciting, the imaginative, the plural, the critical, the transformative, and the impactful. This collection continues the radical extension of ABER into the uncharted futures of critical social inquiry in the next century.

References Cervenak, S. J. (2014). Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom. Duke University Press. Cole, D. R., & Somerville, M. (2017). Thinking school curriculum through Country with Deleuze and Whitehead: A process-based synthesis. In Art, artists and pedagogy (pp. 71–82). Routledge.

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Country, B., Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., & Maymuru, D. (2015). Working with and learning from Country: Decentring human authority. Cultural Geographies, 22(2), 269–283. Cutcher, A., Rousell, D., & Cutter-Mackenzie, A. (2015). Findings, windings and entwinings: Cartographies of collaborative walking and encounter. International Journal of Education through Art, 11(3), 449–458. Eddy, M. H., & Moradian, A. L. (2018). Childhoodnature in motion: The ground for learning. Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research, 1–24. Gay-Wu Group of Women, Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., Ganambarr-Stubbs, M., Ganambarr, B., Maymuru, D., Wright, S., & Lloyd, K. (2019). Songspirals: Sharing women’s wisdom of Country through songlines. Allen & Unwin. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Minor Compositions. Ingold, T. (2015). Lines: A brief history. Routledge. Keifer-Boyd, K., Knochel, A. D., Patton, R. M., & Sweeny, R. W. (2018). Posthumanist movement art pedagogy: geolocative awareness and co-figurative agency with mobile learning. Studies in Art Education, 59(1), 22–38. Klee, P. (1961). Notebooks (Vol. 1). The thinking eye. Lund Humphries. Lasczik Cutcher, A. (2018). Collaboration as individual learning event: Collective consciousness and shared practice in the development of pedagogical content knowledge in visual arts pre-service teachers. In Arts-research-education (pp. 151–170). Springer. Manning, E. (2009). Relationscapes: Movement, art, philosophy. MIT Press. Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Duke University Press. Moten, F. (2003). In the break: The aesthetics of the black radical tradition. University of Minnesota Press. Moten, F. (2018). The universal machine. Duke University Press. Nicholls, C. (2003). Grounded abstraction: The work of Dorothy Napangardi. In ‘Dancing up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi’, Exhibition Catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Norris, R. P., & Harney, B. Y. (2014). Songlines and navigation in Wardaman and other Australian aboriginal cultures. arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.2361. O’Rourke, K. (2013). Walking and mapping: Artists as cartographers. MIT press. Piper, A. (1996). Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected writings in meta-art, 1968–1992 (Vol. 1). MIT Press. Rey, J., & Harrison, N. (2018). Sydney as an Indigenous place: “Goanna walking” brings people together. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 14(1), 81–89. Richardson, L., & St Pierre, E. (2008). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials. Sage. Rooney, T. (2019). Weathering time: Walking with young children in a changing climate. Children’s Geographies, 17(2), 177–189. Rousell, D. (2021). Immersive cartography and post-qualitative inquiry: A speculative adventure in research-creation. Routledge. Rousell, D., Cutcher, A., & Irwin, R. (2019). Making-Lines: Movement, affect and aesthetic causality in arts-based educational research. In K. Snepvangers & S. Davis (Eds.), Embodied and walking pedagogies engaging the visual domain: Research co-creation and practice. Common Ground Publishing. Siegesmund, R. (2017). Foreword. In L. Knight & A. Lasczik Cutcher (Eds.), Arts-researcheducation: Connections and directions. Springer. Somerville, M., Tobin, L., & Tobin, J. (2019). Walking contemporary Indigenous songlines as public pedagogies of country. Journal of Public Pedagogies, (4). Trafí-Prats, L. (2018). Mothering as a feminist aesthetics of existence. In Communities of practice: Art, play, and aesthetics in early childhood (pp. 197–211). Springer.

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Alexandra Lasczik Alexandra (Lexi) Lasczik is Professor, Arts & Education, in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University, Australia. She is currently Research co-Leader of the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research Centre [SEAE]. Lexi is an expert educator with 40 years’ experience in Visual Arts and Visual Arts education. She is also a practicing artist whose chosen mediums are painting, photography, poetry, walking and creative writing. Travel, movement and migrations are large themes in Lexi’s work, as are the Arts and Arts-based Educational Research [ABER], particularly A/r/tography. Lexi is an Artivist, committed to equity and social justice, and her spirited advocacy of a high quality Arts education for all spans across her entire career. Most recently, her research has enjoyed transdisciplinarity through a focus on climate change education, and an emphasis on the engagement of youth at risk through the Arts. David Rousell Dr. David Rousell is Artist and Social Researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Education at RMIT University, where he codirects the Creative Agency Research Lab for transdisciplinary studies of creativity. He is also Visiting Research Fellow in the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI) at Manchester Metropolitan University and Adjunct Research Fellow at Southern Cross University. His research is invested in a creative reimagining of educational cultures, theories, and environments in response to climate change and often involves artful collaborations with children, young people, and their wider ecological communities. His recent books include Immersive Cartography and Post-qualitative Inquiry (Routledge, 2021), Doing Rebellious Research (Brill, 2022, w/ Burnard, Mackinlay, Dragovic), and Posthuman Research Playspaces: Climate Child Imaginaries (Routledge, 2023, w/ Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles). Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles is a Professor of Sustainability, Environment and Education at Southern Cross University. She is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education, as well as the Research Leader of the ‘Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education’ (SEAE) Research Centre. Amy’s research centres on climate change, childhoodnature, posthuman philosophy, and child-framed research methodologies. She is particularly focussed on the pivot points between environmental education, science, philosophy, and the Arts. She has led over 40 national/international research projects and published more than 150 publications. Amy has been recognised for both her teaching and research excellence in environmental education, including an Australian Teaching Excellence Award (OLT) and an Australian Association for Environmental Education Fellowship (Life Achievement Award) for her outstanding contribution to environmental education research.

Common Worlding with Blasted Landscapes: Possibilities for Walking Research in Early Childhood Education Cory Jobb

Abstract Pedagogy and curriculum in early childhood education are increasingly accountable to contested and situated landscapes. In this chapter I draw from a study on transforming early childhood waste pedagogies to explore the possibilities for walking research and common worlding practices with young children in complex landscapes shaped by relations with waste. I think with Anna Tsing’s concept of blasted landscapes to contextualize how a researcher, educators, and young children walked-with the uniquely situated Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site—a complex site of multiple historicities: Indigenous land; former rock quarry; former municipal landfill; and now a naturalization site for public use. Two empirical vignettes highlight how children and educators encountered the site in its blastedness, first with layers of waste at the opening of a decommissioned gas well, and second with a gravel pile and water basin. The Quarry’s fluid relation to what it means for a place to be ‘natural’ requires alternate ways of thinking about what it means to be in relation with places shaped by global waste crises. I propose that speculative practices in common worlding and walking-with young children and educators makes possible creative interventions to rethink early childhood pedagogies in blasted landscapes. Keywords Early childhood education · Walking · Blasted landscapes · Environmental education · Place · Pedagogy

“Blasted landscapes are what we have, and we need to explore their life-promoting patches” (Tsing, 2014, p. 108). We are walking amidst and living within blasted landscapes, though the form and causes and what Latour (2013) names the modes of existence within their blastedness shifts across differently situated geographical and socio-ethico-political contexts. This chapter draws upon the many cross-and-interdisciplinary scholars who, following Tsing (2014), have utilized the concept of blasted landscapes (see: Kirksey et al., 2013; Malone, 2019, Nxumalo and Rubin, 2018) to explore what C. Jobb (B) University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_2

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walking-with one particular blasted landscape might offer for rethinking waste pedagogies in early childhood education. I put forward two vignettes from research at a post-landfill naturalization site in southern Ontario, Canada, where I draw on common worlding practices1 and walking scholarship to suggest walking-with blastedness as a way of attuning differently to the places and spaces of early childhood. Increasingly, as this chapter will show—from a North American perspective—we walk with and among landscapes co-constituted by the entanglements of the global waste crises, and settler-colonial logics of extractivism. Following Tsing (2014), I frame such sites as blasted landscapes which—despite differently situated geographies—share some commonalities as sites produced by destruction, degradation, and anthropogenic interferences, and which increasingly require ongoing interventions to maintain such sites as ‘usable’2 spaces. As others have argued (see: Hird, 2017; Liboiron et al., 2018) human and more-than human proximity to and relations with waste and toxicity are the ongoing consequences of life under industrial capitalism, shaped by persistent and unabating extraction, consumption, and disposal. In landscapes once used as waste management sites, municipalities are left to decide how best to utilize the space once they have reached the closure stage of the landfill life cycle. In doing so, the scope of environmental degradation is frequently obscured, and former landfills become places further blasted by anthropocentric attempts to minimize and obscure the effects of waste on land, air, and water, practices Hird (2013) names “a refusal to witness” (115). And yet, this particular mode of refusal is not a foregone conclusion, and as Taylor (2020) contends, this world can be recomposed. In the field of education, more specifically early childhood education, it is worth asking how, pedagogically, educators and young children are encountering blasted landscapes, and what possibilities exist for experimental pedagogies in such places. It matters how we walk-with and move in blasted landscapes in early childhood education, and as this edited collection reminds us, walking-based research is one possible method for experimentation. Malone (2019) argues that walking-with young children on blasted landscapes “allows for deep, relational knowing” and that this relationality is constituted, in part, by “a co-presence of beings-in-common” (157). What then, might it mean for young children to be constituted as beings-in-common with landscapes shaped by waste? What are walking practices accountable to when, following Shotwell (2016) and Nxumalo (2019a), not all children and not all communities are implicated equally in blasted landscapes? And what do such relations mean for the world to come? In this chapter “Walking as a Critical Art of Inquiry” explore how 1

The Common Worlds Research Collective is a collective of scholars and educators who work to interrogate and unsettle dominant Western, anthropocentric educational practices in early childhood education by foregrounding an orientation that attends to the complex entanglements between humans and the more-than-human world. See www.commonworlds.net. 2 There is a tension in this conception of landscapes as usable. Usability connotes relations with land oriented around property and ownership – constructs of settler colonialism that, as Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie (2014) have written, reinscribe settler futurity. Troubling a conception of land through the lens of usability is necessary for seeking more just relations with land that disrupt settler colonial logics and point toward Indigenous futurities.

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common worlding and walking practices with young children invite new possibilities for pedagogical provocations through which we might begin a conversation about what kind(s) of world(s) early childhood education might set in motion, or what may be re-composed now that we are living in blasted landscapes. I suggest walking-with and in blasted landscapes as a way of confronting and responding to their blastedness and offer some speculative provocations for thinking-and-walking-with blasted landscapes. The discussion of childhood in blasted landscapes herein is animated by research conducted during spring and summer at the Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site in what is currently known as St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada on the traditional lands of the Anishanabeg, Haudenasaunee, Ojibway, and Chippewa peoples. The participants in this walking research varied, but included, at different times, and in different configurations: One researcher, three educators, and twenty-four children ages 3–7 from a nearby childcare centre. The work that took place at the Quarry—as it will be called, henceforth—represents research from one site in a large, international study called the Climate Action Childhood Network (CAN).3 The broader study focussed on experimenting with climate change and waste pedagogies in early childhood education, with the Quarry being one of the multiple research sites oriented around young children’s relations with waste. The Quarry is a site permeated by remnants of its history as a limestone quarry and later a municipal landfill, a history that continues to figure into how the Quarry is encountered today.4 Post-closure care protocols in atcapacity landfills increasingly involve extensive transformation into places suitable for public recreation, with the Quarry being one of four post-landfill naturalization sites in the Niagara Region (Niagara Region, 2020). One of the key components of post-closure care involves the installation and maintenance of gas venting systems to manage landfill gas emissions, regulated provincially in Canada (Ministry of the Environment, Conservation, and Parks, 2019). From May to August a group of children, educators and I walked-with (Springgay & Truman, 2018; Sundberg, 2014) the Quarry in the midst of the active, iterative blasting of the site as the gas condensate wells were being decommissioned and replaced by a passive gas venting system. While the Quarry has operated as a public recreation space since 2004, its transition from a landfill is an ongoing and active process, with intense monitoring and interventions required to sustain the site. I have written elsewhere about walking-with the landscape as an active construction site in research with young children (Wintoneak and Jobb, 2022). Here, the vignettes that follow illustrate how our walking practices were always in dialogue with what the blastedness of places like the Quarry might reveal before ending with some speculative pedagogical provocations that activate common worlding orientations for walking-with blasted landscapes.

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http://www.climateactionchildhood.net/. The land where The Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site now sits was used as a limestone quarry between 1957 and 1972, after which it was converted to a municipal landfill, operational from 1976 until its closure in 2001. Re-naturalization initiatives began shortly after closure.

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1 Walking-with the Common Worlds of Early Childhood The research is framed by common worlding and experimental walking-based research methods as a way to engage in what I suggest is the necessary work of (1) pedagogical experimentation as a critical re-imagining of environmental early childhood education, and (2) speculative worlding in blasted landscapes. As a conceptual framework, common worlding and the experimental walking research I draw from share some commonalities as research practices activated by speculative, experimental orientations and interdisciplinary thought, including (but not limited to) feminist new materialism and posthumanism. Here, in the conceptual framing, as well as through the vignettes, I have opted for an interweaving of common worlding and walking practices that takes inspiration from Pierre (2014) and Manning and Massumi (2014), whose thinking reverberates throughout the living and the writing of this experimental research process. From St. Pierre, I am reminded that concepts are never acting in isolation, but are always-already in conversation with one another, while Manning and Massumi offer thought and action as co-composing, integral entities to worlding. Scholarship on both common worlding (e.g., Nelson et al., 2018; PaciniKetchabaw and Taylor, 2015; Taylor, 2017a) and walking research (e.g., Moretti, 2017; Springgay & Truman, 2018) have taken up critical re-imaginings of the possibilities for research creation, foregrounding being with (e.g., walking-with, thinkingwith) as a mode of ethical relationality with the more-than-human world (Abram, 2012). Bates and Rhys-Taylor (2017) have put forward walking methodologies as a means for research to be understood and enacted as a co-constitutive experience between participants and landscapes. One of the ways in which critical scholars have engaged with reconceptualizing walking-based research is to situate it within a decolonial attunement to place (e.g., Hamm, 2015; Nxumalo, 2019a, 2019b). Sundberg (2014) draws on Zapatista teachings to frame “walking the world into being” (39) as an explicitly decolonial orientation to walking. For Sundberg, walking-with requires disrupting research practices that reinscribe Western hegemonic notions of human supremacy and dominance over nature and takes seriously engaging with walking as decolonial praxis. This matters, particularly in a North American context, where this research took place, where the ongoing legacy and present-day reality of settler-colonialism cannot be disentangled from how we encounter landscapes. The move toward engaging with the socio-ethico-political realities of places and spaces in early childhood education represents a marked shift away from developmental logics that undergird much of the prevalent ways of thinking and being with young children. Attending to common worlding practices matters for early childhood pedagogies because young children stand to inherit the world as it is presently being made, in all its complexities (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015). There are challenges to working with research practices that foreground speculative uncertainty, while also retaining an ethical commitment or a Harawayian response-ability (Haraway, 2008; Haraway and Goodeve, 2018; Blaise et al., 2017) to the places with which we research. Some of the recent scholarship on

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walking has centered research creation practices that have increasingly looked to non-traditional modes of researching for engaging with the complex entanglements of ethics and place. Sheller (2014) offers that walking is one possible mode for nonrepresentational research, wherein the practice of walking foregrounds embodied and emergent encounters with materiality, ones that are “oriented towards histories as much as futures” (141). Common worlding and walking can and does call attention to the significance and the complexity of making decisions that set certain worlds in motion, but not others. To that end, the engagements with common worlding and walking in this research are not “relativist, anything goes” practices (Land & Montpetit, 2018, 94). As Shotwell (2016) reminds us, a relational engagement with the world does not rely on relativism, but “practices of responsibility” (117). Springgay and Truman () have argued for speculative modes of being for walking-based research that attune to an unknowable future. Springgay and Truman call attention to the frictions that arise between speculative walking practices and the possible futures they set in motion and name them (in)tensions. Elsewhere, Taylor (2020) has called for walking as a speculative practice that moves “as an embodied and embedded activity taken up in relation to particular locations, times, and geographies” (5). These orientations to walking help shape common worlding and walking practices that make possible speculative pedagogies in ecologically precarious places such as the Quarry.

2 Putting Blasted Landscapes to Work The concepts researchers and educators think alongside matter for reimagining research with young children; orienting around practices of common worlding and walking methods demands an ontic break from the dominant ways of thinking and doing early childhood education. I draw on blasted landscapes as a way to shift the focus away from the figure of the child-individual, one which has been characterized by what Taylor (2014) calls “protectionist childhood imaginaries” (121), in which children are perceived as innocent and separate from the socio-ethicopolitical fabric of everyday life. Developmentalist orientations are inadequate for re-composing the world because they locate the focal point of education at the level of the individual. When bounded by the logics of child development, early childhood education presumes that there is a particular trajectory with particular outcomes and that the role of educators is to respond by enacting practices that will ensure each child reaches each developmental milestone. Speculative common worlding and walking methods demand otherwise. As a practice of activating concepts and seeing what unfolds, walking-with blasted landscapes in research with young children makes attending to otherwise ways of being in the world possible (Malone, 2019). As Thiele (2014) suggests, enacting difference requires “a thought-practice in which concepts are not abstraction from the world, but an active force of this world” (203). Blasted landscapes figure heavily into the common worlds of early childhood because, as Clary-Lemon (2019) has argued, we are living through times in which there has been an erosion of the nature/culture binary, and in many instances, there is

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little distinction between the natural and built environment. In tracing the material and conceptual figures of blasted landscapes, Tsing (2014, 2015) points to the entanglements between forestry, capitalism, and the matsutake mushroom commodity chain to think with the ways in which blasted landscapes make space for experimentation at the margins of capitalist ruins. Humans and more-than-human others alike now contend with post-industrial landscapes, places Lorimer (2016) and Edensor (2005) have described as replete with rot, despite the best attempts of some to cover up and banish them from public thought. But what might tracing the material and conceptual figures of blasted landscapes make visible in walking-based research with young children? The concept of blasted landscapes is useful to think-with because the common worlds of early childhood and their inhabitants—human and the more-than-human— are co-constituted in and by places marked by their irreparable blastedness. Young children are not separate from the blastedness of the places and spaces they live, yet how blastedness might come to matter for early childhood education is dependent on experimental pedagogical practices that attune differently to blasted landscapes.

3 Pedagogical Experimentation In the following vignettes I highlight pedagogical encounters with particular spaces at the Quarry, where repeated walking-with these areas offered new ways of thinking about our relations with place and waste. Making these particular spaces the focus of our waste pedagogies allowed for common worlding and speculative walking practices to emerge in dialogue with the specificity of these places in these times. As I have done in the conceptual framing in this chapter, common worlding and speculative walking practices are woven together through these vignettes. Similarly, I offer these vignettes as composite sketches of a collection of small moments over multiple walks. The weaving of concepts and moments helps illustrate some of the ways in which the conceptual and material possibilities are bound together and worked to orient our thinking-with around the complexity of the Quarry. Walking-with gas wells Prior to the construction that took place over the summer, the trailways—specifically those which lead to the summit of the large hill at the centre of the Quarry—were speckled with landfill gas recovery wells. During the decommissioning process the Quarry was an active construction site, but remained open to the public, and as I have written elsewhere (Wintoneak and Jobb, 2022) our walking practices, at times, intersected with construction equipment and labourers. The wells were often left as open pits for several days, just steps from the main pathway(s) after the initial removal step of the decommissioning process. The decommissioned wells (Figs. 1 and 2) became a place to return to over the course of several days in mid-August. Our pedagogical intent while walking-with the decommissioned gas well was to decenter and disrupt traditional modes of researching with young children—practices that would otherwise place emphasis on what kinds of knowledges children

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We have walked up the hill today, following the path along the southern side. From afar we can see something has changed since our last walk along this familiar path. Ahead in the tall grass the children have spotted a large, black cylinder, and continue toward it. As we draw nearer, we notice the lid which previously capped the gas well is lying in the grass just off the path. On the other side of the path a pit has been opened up by the removal of the gas well. The children gather by its edge and peer into the hole.

Fig. 1 Encountering decommissioned gas well components, Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site. © Cory Jobb

may extract from being in proximity to the well. The intent for our project was to unsettle and re-invent waste pedagogies in ways that subvert what Hird (2013) points to as practices of forgetting in how waste is usually encountered. Instead, we wondered, how might we resist tidy narratives of human-centric redemption and stewardship (Taylor, 2017b) and just be in relation with waste? What did our insistence on returning to the open pit make visible? As we continued to walk-with the decommissioned gas well we turned our attention toward the ways in which we are implicated in the production of waste. The waste we encountered had been invisible for at least eighteen years if we trace back to the time when the Quarry was still a landfill. How might we encounter the imbricated layers of land and waste as conduits for thinking-with the ways in which we are implicated in waste’s futurity—both at the Quarry and in places like the Quarry?

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“What do you notice?” “Garbage” “How did it get there?” “Can we climb in and get the garbage?” “The lid says warning, do you think we should walk on it?” We have walked by this space many times before this week. In its prior form, before the decommissioning, we were often confronted by the stench of methane, barely contained by the gas well, especially in the heat of the summer. Now, the smell has lessened, but as the open pit stares back at us we can see the layers of soil and waste that laid beneath the well and the way we are encountering this space in the Quarry has shifted. We have often wondered about the waste below the trailways; we have been discussing the Quarry’s history with the children since we began our walks in spring, but we have never been confronted with its presence in this way. It feels far more immediate. Some of the children walk through the tall grass to the other side of the well for a different perspective. Piping Plastics Labels of indeterminate origins All made visible in the upturning of the earth.

Fig. 2 Layers of exposed waste in a decommissioned gas condensate well, Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site. © Cory Jobb

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Common worlding At the southern edge of the Quarry, before the dirt-and-gravel trail slips away and blends into the forested footpath of the Bruce Trail5 we encountered a large, industrial plastic basin. Next to the basin lay a pile of gravel (Fig. 3), brought in by the municipality in mid-June to smooth out the area where, until early summer, the small, square building where the enclosed gas flare stack stood. Our questions as we walked were not easily resolvable, and they remained, even after leaving the gravel pile for the morning. We needed to return to the basin and gravel pile repeatedly to think about how we might encounter it otherwise. If experimental pedagogies are the focus of our walking, what future worlds are we willing to set in motion? To take the children’s question of climbing on the gravel pile seriously required serious consideration as to what future worlds we want to close off, and what future worlds we might want to set in motion. How are we enacting a pedagogical space where not everything goes? If our walking and common worlding practices invite us to think about how we are implicated in the Quarry’s existence as a blasted landscape, how might we animate the gravel pile not as an inviting space for play, but as a space to engage pedagogically with the Quarry’s ongoing state of blastedness? How might this shift how we encounter the basin and gravel pile? Our walking practices were intentional in that they were always in response to a particular invitation from the Quarry, but we did not follow pre-determined routes. Instead, our walks emerged in-the-moment and frequently in conversation with prior happenings, ongoing pedagogical documentation, and reflections between the researcher, children, and educators. In retracing both of the above encounters, it was important to make the gas well and the basin and gravel pile regular stops on our walks even if we did not know what would emerge when encountering these places, precisely because we were attuning to pedagogical decision-making in blasted landscapes that resist quick and easy answers. In both vignettes walking-with blastedness is the focal point of how we engaged with common worlding. The focus had to shift away from the dominant mode of teaching and learning with young children, where individual children are observed and assessed within the context of their individual experiences. Similarly, this work represented a series of moves to disrupt traditional modes of research. As with the gas well, our pedagogies while walking-with the basin and gravel pile worked to decenter an individualist, anthropocentric perspective, and instead oriented around common worlding and walking practices that activated a collective being-with this landscape. Humans have been the cause of the Quarry’s blastedness and it required difficult and repeated dialogue with children and educators to resist the easy answer (i.e., clean up the waste) because doing so would reinscribe an anthropocentric saviour narrative that we worked hard to rebuke. Walking-with blastedness became integral to our common worlding—our “exploratory, active methods” (Hodgins, 2019) for thinking through our collective accountabilities to a place like the Quarry, where pathways (or detours from the main

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“Why is it here?” “It’s big!” Some of the children peer inside, or holler into the big, echoey basin. “I think I see water!” “I think it’s empty” “Can we move it?” “Can we climb on it?” “Do you think we should move it?” Similarly, some children wondered about the gravel pile. “Can we climb it?” Throughout the summer the educators and researcher have struggled with which possibilities to presence and which to refuse. Some of the children run up one side of the pile and slide down the other, displacing some of the gravel as they move through it. Is it acceptable for the children to climb on the gravel pile? Is it ok to push and rock the basin? How might disrupting the gravel pile implicate us in the ongoing blastedness of the quarry? What does the gravel pile obscure, and how might we engage with prescencing what we cannot see? These are some of the questions that guided our decisions on how to walk-with this particular space at the Quarry.

Fig. 3 Large basin and gravel pile, Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site. © Cory Jobb

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pathways) are always-already shaped by their relation to the history of this landscape as a quarry and a landfill.

4 Conclusion To attune differently while walking-with and in blasted landscapes is to take into account that which has contributed to the erosion into a state of blastedness, and to take seriously what futures waste pedagogies may set in motion. This is not to say that there is or has ever been a state of purity to which we can return, and following Shotwell (2016), common worlding pedagogies reject such a redemptive and anthropogenic proposition. This is a significant shift within the context of early childhood education, which, as noted earlier, has struggled to shed a developmentalist discourse rooted in projections of childhood innocence (Taylor, 2013; Taylor and Blaise, 2014). Particularly in environmental early childhood education, the grip of developmentalism frequently means practices that align with logics of children growing into individual responsibility, and centering an anthropocentric, heroic narrative. Paying attention to the ways in which places like the Quarry have been and continue to be constituted by blastedness is one way for thinking outside of these human-centric logics. We did not walk-with the Quarry to propose fixing the Quarry, but rather, to explore how speculative common worlding practices of becoming implicated with the Quarry as it exists now might point toward alternative futures. What alternative futures are possible for sites like the Quarry? I conclude with some speculative questions that have been crafted in careful response to the pedagogical decisions we enacted while walking-with the Quarry as a blasted landscape. The unresolved tension herein is that the pedagogies we engaged with at the Quarry are not necessarily mappable onto other locales, because they emerge from situated dialogues and material encounters with places that have come into being under specific conditions. To return to Karen Malone’s work (2019) as one example, landscapes blasted by relations with radiation are likely to require different provocations than landscapes blasted by relations with waste, as we encountered while walkingwith the Quarry. In crafting these openings for thinking otherwise, I want to take care to situate these questions as speculative possibilities for future walking-with particular blasted landscapes in particular times. How might decolonial orientations to child-waste relations help compose differently-accountable walking practices? What onto-epistemologies are privileged while walking, and what openings exist for bringing in different ways of being and knowing? How might researchers and educators decenter the figure of the individual child in common worlding with blasted landscapes? What are the possibilities for resisting modes of researching that fosters exploitative knowledge-extraction rooted in settler-colonialism? What imbrications between pasts-presents-futures are made visible when walkingwith blasted landscapes?

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These speculative wonderings point toward futures which we cannot predict, but may incite common worlding and walking practices that, with any hope, bring us closer to a re-composition of the world grounded in ethical relationality and accountability to co-constitutive blasted landscapes. Acknowledgements This chapter draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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Nelson, N., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Nxumalo, F. (2018). Rethinking nature-based approaches in early childhood education: Common worlding practices. Journal of Childhood Studies, 43, 4–14. Niagara Region. (2020). Parks, naturalization sites. Accessed Dec 03, 2020. https://www.niagarare gion.ca/living/naturalization/default.aspx. Nxumalo, F. (2019a). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. Routledge. Nxumalo, F. (2019b). Presencing: Decolonial attunements to children’s place relations. In D. Hodgins (Ed.), Feminist research for 21st-century childhoods: Common worlds methods (pp. 159–168). Bloombury. Nxumalo, F. & Rubin J. C. (2018). Encountering waste landscapes: More-than-human place literacies in early childhood education. In C. R. Kuby, K. Spector & J. J. Thiel (Eds.), Posthumanism and literacy education (pp. 201–213). Routledge. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. & Taylor, A. (Eds.). (2015). Unsettling the colonial places and spaces of early childhood education. Routledge. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Taylor, A., Blaise, M., & de Finney, S. (2015). Learning how to inherit in colonized and ecologically challenged life worlds in early childhood education. Education Publications., 21, 1–6. Pierre, St. E. A. (2014). An always already absent collaboration. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 14, 374–379. Sheller, M. (2014). Vital methodologies: Live methods, mobile art, and research-creation. In P. Vannini (Ed.), Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research (pp. 130–145). Routledge. Shotwell, A. (2016). Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. University of Minnesota Press. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). Walking-with place through geological forces and Landcentred knowledges. In S. Springgay & S. E. Truman (Eds.), Walking Methodologies in a Morethan-Human World: WalkingLab (pp. 16–33). Routledge. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2019). Counterfuturisms and speculative temporalities: Walking research-creation in school. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32, 547– 559. Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21, 33–47. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Routledge. Taylor, A. (2014). Situated and entangled childhoods: Imagining and materializing children’s common world relations. In M. N. Bloch, B. B. Swadener, & G. S. Cannella (Eds.), Reconceptualizing early childhood care and education: Critical questions, new imaginaries and social activism (pp. 121–130). Peter Lang Publishing. Taylor, A. (2017a). Romancing or re-configuring nature in the Anthropocene? Towards common worlding pedagogies. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 61–75). Springer. Taylor, A. (2017b). Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23, 1448–1461. Taylor, A. (2020). Countering the conceits of the anthropos: Scaling down and researching with minor players. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41, 340–358. Taylor, A., & Blaise, M. (2014). Queer worlding childhood. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35, 377–392. Taylor, C. (2020). Walking as trans (disciplinary) mattering: A speculative musing on acts of feminist indiscipline. In C. Taylor, C. Hughes, & J. B. Ulmer (Eds.), Transdisciplinary Feminist Research: Innovations in Theory, Method and Practice (pp. 4–15). Routledge. Thiele, K. (2014). Ethos of diffraction: New paradigms for a (post)humanist ethics. Parallax, 20, 202–216. Tsing, A. L. (2014). Blasted landscapes (and the gentle arts of mushroom picking). In E. Kirksey (Ed.), The Multispecies Salon (pp. 87–109). Duke University Press. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

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Cory Jobb Cory Jobb is an assistant professor in the early childhood education program at Thompson Rivers University and a PhD candidate in curriculum studies at the University of Western Ontario. His work is grounded in early childhood education and thinks with pedagogies of place to explore how young children and educators encounter landscapes that disrupt the nature/culture divide. His current research employs an interdisciplinary approach to re-thinking environmental early childhood education, activating critical questions for curriculum and pedagogy that are responsive to children and childhood(s) in the 21st century.

The Listening Body: Sound Walking, Wearable Technologies, and the Creative Potentials of a Vibrational Pedagogy David Rousell, Michael Gallagher, and Mark P. Wright

Abstract Wearable biosensors are becoming increasingly prevalent and agentic social technologies, used primarily to serve dominant medical, health, and commercial agendas. This chapter explores alternative possibilities of wearable sensory technologies as creative media for walking-based research and pedagogy with young children. Drawing on experimental practices of urban sound walking developed in a project called the Listening Body, we describe a series of walks that explore the use of wearable technologies as devices for collectively attuning to the more-than-human environment. In these sound walks, wearable technologies augmented our collective capacity to sense the urban environments we encountered with children, while also generating data related to the vibratory relations between bodies and environments in movement. Bringing together theoretical perspectives from bioaesthetics, posthuman media ecology, and biosocial studies in education, we outline some of the implications of wearable technologies as creative media for a vibrational pedagogy that extends beyond the limits of the human sensorium. Keywords Wearable technologies · Walking · Sound art · Affect · Pedagogy · Biosensing · Media ecology

1 Introduction This chapter explores the creative potentials of biosensing technologies in the construction of new methods and conceptualisations of sound walking in arts-based research and pedagogy. We draw on our collaborative research project the Listening D. Rousell (B) Creative Agency Lab, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Gallagher Manifold Lab, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK M. P. Wright Centre for Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice, University of the Arts, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_3

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Body, which involved a series of sound walks with children (aged 5–10) attending an after-school visual arts program in the inner city neighbourhood of Hulme, Manchester, UK. The sound walks enabled children to develop creative listening practices through playful experiments and sonic interventions within a range of local environments and spaces. In order to research the affective and embodied dimensions of the soundwalks with children, we collected data from wearable biosensors (Empatica E4), body-mounted GoPro cameras, and high fidelity sound recording equipment. Breaking with clinical and reductive uses of these technologies, our approach is aligned with creative, critical, and socially engaged applications of wearable biosensors in the fields of contemporary art (Nold, 2009; Umbrellium, 2017), participatory design (Coenen et al., 2015) and human–computer interaction (Schnadelbach et al., 2014). We believe that the Listening Body is one of the first projects to explore the creative and pedagogical potentials of biosensing technologies through collaborative sound walks with children in public spaces. Increasing attention has been given to sound in critical studies of childhood and education (c.f. Mills, 2017; Philo, 2016), including research into the political, aesthetic, and cultural implications of the sonic in children’s everyday lives and educational environments (c.f. Gershon, 2017; 2019). Much of this new work has developed in conversation with philosophical movements associated with critical posthumanism, decolonial theory, and the new materialisms, leading to emerging analyses of sound in terms of more-than-human listening practices (Brigstocke & Noorani, 2016; Engelmann, 2015), vibrational affect (Gallagher, 2016; Gershon, 2013; Thompson & Biddle, 2013), queer ecologies (Truman & Shannon, 2018), racialisation (Henriques, 2011; Stoever, 2016; Wozolek, 2023), resonance (Wargo, 2018), indigeneity (Robinson, 2020), justice (LaBelle, 2021), and performativity (Powell et al., 2017). This chapter contributes to this wider field of critical sound studies by exploring how speculative acts of walking and listening can generate multi-sensory, more-than-sonic sensations and affects, and how the use of wearable sensory technologies can effectively augment these speculative listening practices beyond the thresholds of human perception and consciousness (de Freitas & Rousell, 2021). In the following sections, we begin by contextualising the Listening Body project within posthumanist approaches to sound art, listening, and sound studies, while also making connections with recent developments in bioaesthetics (Mitchell, 2010), media studies (Hansen, 2015), and biosocial research in the social sciences (de Freitas et al., 2020). We conceptualise our use of biosensing technologies as creative media for sound walks that contribute to an expanded environmental awareness and affective sensibility. In conversation with Mark Hansen’s (2015) “radically environmental” theorisation of twenty-first century media ecologies, we suggest that biosensing technologies provide access to sensory data beyond the narrow bandwidth of human sense perception and consciousness. In this respect, the Listening Body can be understood as an adventure into “expanded listening” practices that extend the affective dimensions of listening across a “spectrum of different kinds of responsiveness that includes but also goes beyond active human audition” (Gallagher et al., 2017, p. 622). We develop these ideas through the analysis of a “micro-event” from the Listening

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Body project, drawing on synchronised biological, audio, visual, and geographical data collected during the sound walks. This micro-event forms the basis for a discussion of the pedagogical implications of biosensing technologies, with a specific focus on how these technologies might contribute to an understanding of sound walking as a “vibratory pedagogy”.

2 The Art and Science of Listening The Listening Body project emerged from a series of experimental research initiatives in the Manifold Lab, a transdisciplinary research hub housed within the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. The Listening Body was co-funded by a Leverhulme Artist in Residence grant (Gallagher and Wright) and by the Manifold Lab (Rousell). The Manifold Lab provides a creative space for developing new research methods and theories of learning through projects that work across the arts, social sciences, life sciences, computer sciences, and (post)humanities. As founding and affiliated members of the Lab, we have a shared interest in sound walking as a method for arts-based research and pedagogy. This method brings together our varied experiences in the fields of sound art (Wright, 2017), sound studies and sonic geographies (Gallagher, 2016), and post-qualitative inquiry and speculative pedagogies in educational research (Rousell, 2015, 2017, 2020). Sound walking is a practice often used by artists, geographers, and anthropologists to explore the sonic aspects of environments (Gallagher & Prior, 2017). In its simplest form, it involves a group of people walking along a pre-planned route through an environment, paying close attention to whatever sounds can be heard along the way (Gallagher et al, 2018). Sometimes sound walks include additional instructions, protocols, interventions or technologies designed to elicit responses from participants, or bring attention to particular aspects of sonic environments. These methods have been in use since the 1960s (Drever, 2009), but there is little research into how soundwalks operate, and more specifically, how they affect learning and behaviour. It is often claimed that sound walks develop people’s listening skills, enable them to hear noises that they would ordinarily filter out, and give them a new appreciation of the diversity of beings and processes in everyday environments. Such claims tend to be based more on anecdotal “reflections” and language-based evaluations, however, and there has been little investigation of the non-conscious, affective, and somatic dimensions of sound walks (for example, Berglund & Nilssen, 2006; Jeon et al, 2013). The Listening Body took a different approach by bringing sound walking into conversation with bioaesthetics (Mitchell, 2010), media ecology (Gallagher, 2020; Hansen, 2015), and biosocial research in education (de Freitas, 2017; Youdell, 2016, 2017). Mitchell (2010, p. 11) describes how the fields of bioart and bioaesthetics have linked “artistic goals and techniques with biological technologies”, while also framing participants in arts-based events “as themselves media for transformative

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powers of life”. Bioartists often experiment with the ethical, aesthetic, political, and social implications of biotechnologies by reconfiguring the “ecology of innovation” that surrounds these developments (p. 61), while also posing broader philosophical questions regarding the shifting agencies and relations between media, technology, life, the human, and the more-than-human (p. 11). Biosocial research has also been explored within education and the social sciences, but with a focus on how biotechnologies, life sciences, and social discourses are all implicated in the emergent phenomena of learning (Youdell, 2017, p. 12). This biosocial turn in education has blurred traditional boundaries between qualitative and quantitative research paradigms, establishing new empirical methods and posthuman theorisations of learning as a dynamic, multi-sensorial and environmentally distributed process (de Freitas, 2017; de Freitas et al., 2020). The Listening Body project aimed to make new connections between sound art and biosocial research through a series of experimental sound walks in collaboration with children attending an after-school arts program (see Fig. 1). Rather than framing the project in terms of specific research goals or objectives, we allowed the project to be guided by an open-ended series of interests that informed the co-production of sound walks through collaborative research with children. Our first interest has revolved around the exploration of wearable biosensors as creative media in the production of sound walking events with young children. We are interested in developing and testing new methods of co-production that combine walking, listening, and biosensing as ways of making art, learning, and doing research with children. Our second interest is in the use of biosensing technologies to “plug into” and “crack open” the affective dimensions of the sound walk as a pedagogical event that produces new potentials for learning. This interest is aligned with biosocial research in education, as it questions the nature of sound walking as a sensational pedagogy that coimplicates somatic, social, and environmental milieus. Our third interest is in how sound walks might give children new ways of expressing what could be called the “sonic imaginary”—the playful and creative potential of sound to spark the imagination, as compared to the traditional orientation of sound walks to what actually exists within a location. We are interested to explore how this sonic imaginary might affect children’s sensorial engagement with their everyday environments. This interest leads us to explore how sound walking can open up a more nuanced understanding of children’s sonic worlds, including an awareness of the nonhuman agencies, elements, and forces that populate children’s urban environments and communities.

3 More-than-Human Senses and Sensors The Listening Body project explored these three interests through a series of sound walks that integrated the use of biosensing wristbands with GoPro body cameras and high-fidelity sound recording equipment. The recent development of clinical-grade wearable biosensors offers unprecedented potentials for plugging into site-specific patterns of affective, sensory, and somatic interactions as children move through

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Fig. 1 Listening to the more-than-human environment through earplugs and paper tubes

time and space. To date our project has focused on exploring the potentials of the Empatica E4 wristband, a product developed by MIT’s Affective Computing Lab in conjunction with the companies Empatica and Affectiva. The E4 uses unobtrusive wearable sensors to collect and transmit biological data in real time, including electro-dermal skin activity (EDA), heart rate, body temperature, and rates of motion, acceleration, and activity that are associated with changes in affective responses and emotional intensity (Pijeira-Diaz et al., 2016; Sano & Picard, 2013). The mobile and non-invasive nature of the E4 wristbands means that they can be seamlessly integrated into walking-based artworks, fieldwork and learning environments, opening up new possibilities for participatory art and research events that are responsive to the sensory and affective experiences of bodies in movement. Drawing on ideas from Hansen (2015) and de Freitas (2017), we are interested in how biosensing devices like the E4 operate at microtemporal processing speeds that exceed the thresholds of human sense perception. Rather than seeing the wristbands as prosthetic extensions of human perception and consciousness, we are interested in how these technologies physically and directly mediate and reconfigure the “sensory continuum” of the environment by altering the “concrete texture of experience” (Hansen, 2015, p. 48). By rendering access to sensory data beyond the limits of human language and cognition, biosensing technologies like the Empatica E4 can be seen to operate within a vibratory continuum of “worldly sensibility” that is, quite literally, more than human (Hansen, 2015, p. 2). Electro-dermal skin activity (EDA) sensors are particularly interesting in this context, as they register unconscious changes in the electrical conductivity of the skin that are associated with affective engagement, attention, and arousal of the sympathetic nervous system (Pijeira-Diaz et al, 2016). As de Freitas (2017, pp. 297–298) argues:

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D. Rousell et al. Skin conductance is a way of attending to the neurological periphery – the far-flung electrical activity of the body- rather than what is assumed to be the centre and administrator of that system- the brain… The EDA skin data is thus perfect for showing how the bounded individual is always being broken down, dissembled, remade, intensified, and charged… The EDA data points to our biochemical relationality, our bioaffective dispersal.

In advancing sensory data as an indicator of the “dispersed nature of affect and thought” (p. 298), de Freitas calls for researchers to experiment creatively with biodata in order to study and participate in “the distribution of more than human sensation” (p. 284). Our work on the Listening Body project took up this call, as we endeavoured to explore the use of biosensing wristbands as creative media in conjunction with other sensory technologies, including wearable GoPro video cameras and sound recording devices.

4 Biosensing Practices The use of clinical-grade biosensing wristbands has recently received critical attention from education scholars. Researchers have questioned the bio-ethical and biopolitical implications of capturing data from children’s bodies (de Freitas et al., 2020; Webb et al., 2020), and the normative utilisation of this data to reinforce pathologising discourses of childhood (de Freitas, 2017). In decoupling biometric data from a pathologised and clinical view of the bounded individual subject, we have used wearable biosensors as vital media that operate within a vibratory ecology that is distributed across multiple scales, degrees, and intensities of experience. Rather than attributing biosensory data to the individual body or child, we attribute this data to the sensory environment, or “atmosphere”, which is always a collective achievement (de Freitas & Rousell, 2021). In doing so, we have adopted an expanded understanding of the term “biosensing” to describe “any practice that uses information technology to understand something about bodies or the environments in which they live” (Nafus, 2016, p. xiv, emphasis in original). Thinking about biosensing as a practice allows us to approach the event of a sound walk as a network of “listening bodies in movement” that mutually affect one another within a vibratory ecology of sensation (Rousell et al., 2022). We understand this ecology of listening to propagate through an economy of vibrational affects, in the Spinozan sense of bodies simultaneously affecting and being affected by one another. “A focus on sonic affect and atmospheres then expands listening beyond human perception, cochlear listening, and consciousness, to how sound impinges on bodies, including (but not limited to) human bodies” (Gallagher et al., 2017, p. 632). This orientation allows us to think about E4 wristbands, GoPro cameras, children, and ourselves as listening bodies, each capable of registering, mediating, and affecting one another through practices that both include and exceed human perception and consciousness. Even a sensing body as ubiquitous as a digital camera is capable of capturing and rendering the sensory data of a sound walk in ways that elude conscious, human perception. Similarly, we found that extremely sensitive microphones were

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able to pick up sonic layers and elements of the walks that exceeded our human capacities to hear at the time. We can of course expand this analysis further and imagine the vast and teeming networks of sensing bodies that both surround and intermediate one another as they go about their lives. As perceived through the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1978), we begin to encounter the “world as medium”; in other words, a world that is quite literally made of sensations (what Whitehead terms “prehensions” or “feelings”) which comprise the universe as a vibratory continuum. It is in this sense that we see biosensing practices contributing to an expanded environmental awareness and sensibility that both exceeds and includes the human senses within a vibratory continuum of affective resonances, attenuations, and reverberations (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie, 2020). This “radically environmental” (Hansen, 2015) theoretical approach has been a touchstone for our collaborative work with children, as well as our emerging understanding of sound walking as a vibratory pedagogy that connects visceral sensations and speculative concepts within the matrix of a “sonic imaginary”. The following section describes the Listening Body project in more detail, including the analysis of a “micro-event” which provides small windows into the layers of sensory data and mediation that were fielded over the course of project.

5 Becoming Listening Bodies The Listening Body project took place over six months in collaboration with 30 children and 3 arts educators at a community arts facility in Hulme. Hulme has a distinctive history as home to a working class, multi-ethnic and racially diverse community notable for its social activism, subversive music and art cultures, and anarchic political movements. The area has also been a site of continuous waves of urban demolition, mass clearance, and rehousing, through large-scale governmental attempts at social housing and urban renewal. The arts centre occupies one of the few remaining historic buildings in Hulme only four blocks from the Manifold Lab at Manchester Metropolitan University, and has provided a diverse and inclusive program of multi-arts education for children and young people for over 25 years. In 2014, Manchester Metropolitan University’s new campus was constructed on what had previously been public space in the middle of Hulme. This contested campus infrastructure, and associated influx of university staff and students, can be seen as part of the ongoing transformation of Hulme’s urban fabric, arguably contributing to attempts at gentrification. The Listening Body was the first in a series of small projects that brought local children together with artist-researchers from the university to collaboratively explore the shifting sensory dynamics of this local urban ecology. The project involved four phases of artistic co-production and participatory research with children from the community centre in Hulme. In the first phase we introduced children to the process of sound walking as an art form, and worked with them to develop different ways

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of listening through the body in conjunction with various materials, objects, and spaces. The children were excited by the GoPro body cameras and E4 wristbands; we explained how they worked, and discussed with the children how these biosensing technologies could be used as creative media for making art over the course of the sound walks. In the second phase, the children, led by the artist, explored the sonic properties and qualities of their everyday environments around Hulme, including the sonic geographies of schools, parks, and neighbourhoods. They also worked closely with us to analyse the data collected from the initial series of sound walks, including biodata from the E4 wristbands, GoPro video, photographs, and sound recordings. This work served as the basis for the third phase of the project, which involved children designing their own sound walks around Hulme using a variety of media and performative interventions. These walks included child-generated activities such as rattling the metal fences surrounding a nearby school, listening to the sounds of the arts centre through a bowl of jelly, and disrupting the sonic texture of the university building with balloons (see Fig. 2). Then, in the fourth phase of the project, we created a series of multi-sensory cartographies with the children, which included layers of video, sound, biodata, and geographical data collected from satellite images of places in Hulme we had visited. This involved the creation of multi-sensory maps by projecting satellite images of the area onto paper attached to a wall, and inviting children to use drawing, collage, and

Fig. 2 Montage of still frames from GoPro videos created by children during sonic disruptions in the local university building

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annotation to map their sonic encounters and experiences (Fig. 3). This final phase also involved discussions with children regarding their experiences of connecting with the sonic imaginary, and how their engagement with the project had affected their understandings of sound, art, technology, learning, movement, environment, and place. In our ongoing analysis of sensory data and artistic material generated over the four phases of the project, we have teased out certain “micro-events” that emerged through the layering and synchronisation of multiple data types. This approach involves a speculative and relational approach to data analysis, that focuses on identifying particular blocs of data with multiple layers and dimensions that are mutually affecting, drawing on post qualitative approaches associated with “immersive cartography” (Rousell, 2017, 2019, 2020) and “biosensory ethnography” (Rousell & Diddams, 2020). In the following vignette, we analyse a micro-event that illustrates some of the vibratory properties and intensive qualities of sound as a sensory and affective force of mediation. Micro-event: Sound as Vibratory Affect The micro-event we have chosen to focus on here emerged within an initial series of environmental sound walks that introduced children to the idea of thinking and making art through creative listening practices. These walks began by exploring

Fig. 3 Children layering multimodal data onto a projected image of Hulme

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the historic inner architecture of the community arts building, which has numerous galleries, performance spaces, meeting rooms, spiral staircases, cinemas, theatres, and a café. We used one of the gallery spaces to explore the nature of sound as vibration as it passes through different bodies, materials, and acoustic spaces, and discussed how children experienced these vibrational qualities of sound in their everyday lives. Children were invited to place the ends of a length of cotton string into their ears, hang a metal coat hanger on the string, and then explore the vibrational qualities of the room and each other through playful interactions. One of the interesting renderings to emerge from this micro-event was the sense of vibrations conveyed by the photographs that were produced as children experimented with the coat hangers and string (see Fig. 4). These images reveal a blurred “technicity” of the sensing body in motion (Manning, 2009), a process of becoming-vibrational that almost seems to transduce the sensation of sound as it passes through, and re-arranges, the vibratory

Fig. 4 Children experimenting with coat hangers in the Z-Arts gallery space

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Fig. 5 Screenshot showing annotated GoPro video data synchronised with EDA data from the Empatica E4 wristband

structures and potentials of bodies. These photos alerted us to the ways that a sound walk could become multi-sensory and performative, with children’s bodies, gestures, and expressions becoming vital media for the production of sonic works of art and pedagogy. Rather than viewing these photographs as a visual documentation and discursive representation of the walks, we see the images drawing out unexpected sensory and aesthetic potentials from a vibrational field of environmental sensibility. These images gesture towards the process of becoming a new kind of listening body, more attuned to the visceral dimension of sound as a vibratory medium (Duffy & Waitt, 2013). We also analysed this micro-event from the perspective of EDA data collected from the E4 wristbands, in conjunction with GoPro video data from cameras worn by children during the walk. By synchronising the EDA data with video data using a software package called Chronovis, we can witness the fluctuations of skin conductance as children engage with various phases of the sound walk event. Figure 5 shows a 5-minute section of biodata collected from one of the E4 wristbands which obtained a clean and uninterrupted signal.1 We have annotated and narrated several phases in the data as it proceeded in order to demonstrate our present thinking about this data in relation to the sound walk event.

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There are a number of technical issues associated with the collection of EDA data, including “noise artefacts” generated by excessive movement or an irregular fit of the bracelet around the wrist of the child.

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Figure 5 exhibits a number of resonances and contrasts between the sound walk activities and the EDA data collected from the wristbands. If we follow the movement of the EDA data from left to right, we can see a steady and relaxed increase in bodily engagement as Mark engages the children in an initial discussion of sound’s vibrational qualities. We also see minor fluctuations in the EDA signal when the children offer their own examples of sounds that they had heard during the day, and collectively voice the sounds of wind. When Mark asks them to pick up the string and coat hangers there is a further increase in the intensity of the EDA signal. This is followed by a distinct shift to a much more dynamic and fluctuating vibrational reading from the EDA signal as the children place the string in their ears, begin to explore the sonic potentials of their bodies and the space. We also note a particular “burst” of EDA intensity when the children discover an improvised practice that involves rhythmically bouncing the coat hanger against the walls of the gallery. This practice generated what the children described as a “weird” sensation, which they variously articulated as “vibrational”, “like a drum”, “a clock”, “a bell”, “a body”, and “a heartbeat”.

6 Discussion: Sound Walking as Vibrational Pedagogy What becomes apparent through this brief micro-analysis of the EDA data is the embodied and affective nature of sound walking as a pedagogical event that registers, quite literally, on the surface of the skin. We would like to avoid making reductive readings of such data, which would figure these fluctuations as individual somatic responses to external environmental stimuli, inferring a cause and effect model of bodily affect. Rather, we find it more generative to read this data as fundamentally biosocial and bioaesthetic in its connection with the distributed pedagogical force of the event as it unfolded. Our aim in engaging with this biosensory data is not to make causal claims about this micro-event, but to add additional empirical layers of thick description to what might be termed a ‘biosensory ethnography’ (de Freitas & Rousell, 2021). In conversation with recent work by Rousell and Diddams (2020, p. 432), our aim is “to use EDA data to help render the qualitative sense of an affective atmosphere that is environmentally dispersed within events”, where biodata helps to “tell speculative ethnographic stories that reveal otherwise invisible movements and intensities”. In the micro-event discussed above, biodata helps tell the story of how listening participates in an event in ways that are imperceptible and yet sensible at the “quivering periphery” of the “electric body” (de Freitas, 2017, p. 298), at the surface of the skin where sound registers as vibrational affect. This theoretical focus on the environmentally distributed and vibratory nature of sensation also carries implications for rethinking the role of pedagogy in sound walking events, and creative learning events more broadly. Our work in this chapter turns away from cognitive and phenomenological orientations towards learning and pedagogy that rely on positing a cohesive individual subject and its representations

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as the units of analysis. As Ellsworth (2005, p. 7) argues, “such notions are underwritten by assumptions that there is an identifiable self, a locatable point of view or subject position from which meanings are made and through which experience is organised and held together”. It is certainly possible to view the sound walk participants (the children, ourselves and the workers from their arts group) as bounded individuals in this way, but to do so neglects something that seemed far more salient to us as the walks unfolded: a sense that these events involved bodies resonating together in sound, in ways that seemed to create new vibrational relations between bodies, objects and spaces. Rather than reducing teaching and learning to personal experiences driven by the intentionality of bounded subjects, we are interested in developing new concepts of pedagogy as an environmental process that takes shape within a vibratory ecology of sensation. The EDA data, for instance, suggests that children are “learning” on the surface of the skin in ways that are unconscious, imperceptible, and yet sensible through wearable technologies. Our focus on the sensibility of learning also raises questions about how sensation comes to be pedagogically choreographed, composed, and, in certain ways, orchestrated through practices of sound walking. One of the implications of this line of thinking is that pedagogy is decoupled from the intentionality of the teacher, artist, or other facilitator of learning, and realigned with the distributed environments through which learning emerges. Ellsworth (2005) describes this in terms of “sensational pedagogies” which operate through embodied and affective attunements with works of art, media, and architecture. For Ellsworth, a sensational pedagogy is nothing less than the “orchestration of forces, sensations, stories, invitations, habits, media, time, space, ideas, language, objects, images, and sounds [that] move the materiality of our minds/brains and bodies into relation with the other material elements of our world” (p. 24). Sensational pedagogies are defined by their capacity to disrupt and reconfigure the sensorial relations between body and environment, individual and collective, feeling and thought, matter and meaning. They do so by operating through a logic of sensation that redistributes the possibilities for participation, process and affective engagement. As Ellsworth (2005, p. 7) further explains: Pedagogy, like painting, sculpture, or music, can be magical in its artful manipulation of inner ways of knowing into a mutually transforming relationship with outer events, selves, objects, and ideas. Or, it can used to simply manipulate, through congealed forms, unresponsive shapes, and derivative logics.

To the extent that sensation can be located within a vibratory continuum that extends well beyond human cognition and perception, sound walking can be considered a “vibratory pedagogy” when it attends to the environmentally distributed nature of this “worldly” sensation or sensibility (Fig. 6). Sound walking comes to operate as a vibratory pedagogy when it foregrounds bodily participation in ecologies of movement, sensation, and affective resonance that extend beyond the human senses. An openness to sensory difference and noncompliance with expectation is crucial to understanding sound walking as having this potential to resonate as an ecological, aesthetic and multi-sensory pedagogic process. This also means that the pedagogical

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Fig. 6 Attuning to worldly sensibility through the Listening Body as sensational pedagogy

value of a sound walk can never be specified or even knowable in advance, but must be left open, pragmatically, to the vibratory play of affectivity and movement as it takes shape in and through events. Our use of wearable technologies in this project is aligned with this vibratory pedagogical approach, demonstrating how biosensing technologies can expand the “sensory confound” (Hansen, 2015) of sound walking through the event of its vibrational occurring.

7 Conclusion: Toward a Vibratory Pedagogy In this chapter we have described a sound art project called the Listening Body which involved a series of experimental sound walks with young children in urban environments. We have focused on the artful use of wearable sensory technologies as vital media for registering the otherwise invisible play of vibrational affect and intensity through these walks. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from media ecology, bioaesthetics, and biosocial research in education, we have analysed data generated by a micro-event within an experimental sound walk. Based on that analysis, we have developed the idea of a “vibratory pedagogy” which places human sensation (including listening) within a vibratory continuum of “worldly sensibility” (Hansen, 2015). This chapter therefore proposes a shift in the emphasis and enactment of sound walking. Rather than understanding such walks phenomenologically, as walking subjects listening to an environment, we suggest that sound walks

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involve more-than-human vibrational processes that cut across and mutually envelop bodies, environments, discourses, feelings, sensations and ideas. This is necessarily a political as much as an aesthetic shift, as it disrupts the normative distinctions between teacher and student, researcher and participant, artist and audience, body and environment. Our proposition for a vibratory pedagogy shifts attention to how learning arises through the orchestration of a much wider range of affective forces, tonalities, and events. While we maintain that this orchestration of affectivity cannot be controlled or predicted, we believe it can be more modestly intervened in, played with, choreographed, and pedagogically attuned through ethically responsive modes of creative experimentation. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the children who took part in the project, and the staff at the arts centre who facilitated their involvement. We also acknowledge valuable contributions to the ideas in this chapter from Elizabeth de Freitas and Maggie Maclure, co-directors of the Manifold Lab for Biosocial, Eco-Sensory, and Digital Studies of Learning (Manchester Metropolitan University).

References Berglund, B., & Nilsson, M. E. (2006). On a tool for measuring soundscape quality in urban residential areas. Acta Acustica United with Acustica, 92, 938–944. Brigstocke, J., & Noorani, T. (2016). Posthuman attunements: Aesthetics, authority and the arts of creative listening. GeoHumanities, 2(1), 1–7. Coenen, T., Coorevits, L., & Lievens, B. (2015). The wearable living lab: how wearables could support living lab projects. In Presented at the open living lab days 2015. de Freitas, E. (2017). The biosocial subject: Sensor technologies and worldly sensibility. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2018.1404199 de Freitas, E., Rousell, D., & Jager, N. (2020). Relational architectures and wearable space: Smart schools and the politics of ubiquitous sensation. Research in Education, 107(1), 10–32. de Freitas, E., & Rousell, D. (2021). Atmospheric intensities: Skin conductance and the collective sensing body. In B. M. Stavning Thomsen, J. Kofoed, & J. Fritsch (Eds.), Affects, interfaces, events. Imbricate! Press. Drever, J. L. (2009). ‘Soundwalking: Aural excursions into the everyday’. In J. Saunders (Ed.), The Ashgate research companion to experimental music. Ashgate. Duffy, M., & Waitt, G. (2013). Home sounds: Experiential practices and performativities of hearing and listening. Social and Cultural Geography, 14(4), 466–481. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. Routledge. Engelmann, S. (2015). More-than-human affinitive listening. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5(1), 76–79. Gallagher, M. & Prior, J. (2017). Listening walks: A method of multiplicity. In C. Bates, & A. Rhys-Taylor (Eds.), Walking through social research. Routledge. Gallagher, M. (2020). Childhood and the geology of media. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41(3), 372–390. Gallagher, M. (2016). Sound as affect: Difference, power and spatiality. Emotion, Space and Society, 20, 42–48. Gallagher, M., Hackett, A., Procter, L., & Scott, F. (2018). Vibrations in place: Sound and language in early childhood literacy practices. Educational Studies, 54(4), 465–482. Gallagher, M., Kanngieser, A., & Prior, J. (2017). Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies. Progress in Human Geography, 41(5), 618–637.

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Thompson, M., & Biddle, I. (Eds.). (2013). Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. Bloomsbury. Truman, S. E., & Shannon, D. B. (2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3), 58–77. Umbrellium. (2017). Umbrellium Initiatives. Retrieved January 15th, 2018, from http://umbrellium. co.uk/. Wargo, J. M. (2018). Earwitnessing (in)equity: Tracing the intra-active encounters of ‘being-inresonance-with’ sound and the social contexts of education. Educational Studies, 54(4), 382– 395. Webb, P. T., Sellar, S., & Gulson, K. N. (2020). Anticipating education: Governing habits, memories and policy-futures. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(3), 284–297. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality. The Free Press. Wozolek, B. (2023). Educational necropolitics: A sonic ethnography of everyday racisms in US Schools. Routledge. Wright, M. P. (2017). Post-natural sound arts. Journal of Sonic Studies, (14). Youdell, D. (2017). Bioscience and the sociology of education: The case for biosocial education. British Journal of Sociology of Education. Youdell, D. (2016). New biological sciences, sociology and education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(5), 788–800.

David Rousell Dr. David Rousell is Artist and Social Researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Education at RMIT University, where he codirects the Creative Agency Research Lab for transdisciplinary studies of creativity. He is also Visiting Research Fellow in the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI) at Manchester Metropolitan University and Adjunct Research Fellow at Southern Cross University. His research is invested in a creative reimagining of educational cultures, theories, and environments in response to climate change and often involves artful collaborations with children, young people, and their wider ecological communities. His recent books include Immersive Cartography and Post-qualitative Inquiry (Routledge, 2021), Doing Rebellious Research (Brill, 2022, w/ Burnard, Mackinlay, Dragovic), and Posthuman Research Playspaces: Climate Child Imaginaries (Routledge, 2023, w/ Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles). Michael Gallagher Dr Michael Gallagher is a Reader in the School of Childhood, Youth and Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in human geography, with research interests including children and young people, schooling, sonic environments, space and power, methods and media. Mark Peter Wright Dr. Mark Peter Wright is an artist, researcher and Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication. As an artist-researcher working at the intersection of sound, ecology and contemporary art, his practice investigates relations of capture and mediation between humans and nonhumans, sites and technologies, observers and subjects.

Out of the Blue: A Pedagogy of Longing Alison Shields

Abstract This chapter examines an artistic research project that I engaged with over the course of the past two years. Through walking, sensing, painting, experiencing and reconfiguring, I discuss my journey as I fell in love with the colour blue. This work began while on an artist residency in Seydisfjördur, Iceland in 2019 where eight artists were brought together to consider walking as an aesthetic practice. Through ongoing conversations about walking, thinking and art-making, we explored how artists experience place through the act of walking. Through this journey, captivated by the blues in the surrounding landscape, I began to collect these blue moments through photography which I then re-captured through my painting process in the studio. This work continued to evolve and take on new directions over the course of the following year in my home town as I explored the never-ending possibilities of blue. Through the lens of Rebecca (Solnit, A field guide to getting lost, Penguin Books, 2006) discussion of how blue is always in the distance of the landscape, I explore the relationship between longing, desire, art-making and walking. Throughout this inquiry, blue became an analogy for my artistic research process. Through this work, I propose that by dwelling within this sense of longing we may embrace curiosity and the affective experience within artistic research. Keywords Artistic research · Walking · Colour · Longing · Painting

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world. (Solnit, 2006, p. 30). And so I fell in love with a color – in this case, the color blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns. (Nelson, 2009, p. 1).

A. Shields (B) University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_4

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1 Walking with Blue In an essay titled “On Color,” American painter, Amy Sillman (2016) describes the materiality of working with pigment. She explores with vivid descriptions how one learns to feel and understand colour through the time and practice spent working with it: Color as object is earthly material stuff. Color as subject arches over everything like a rainbow, from cosmic rays to the minerals in the earth to what happens inside your eyes, from religious symbology to philosophical problems, from phenomena to noumena… To deal with color as a painter is to render these overarching problems as physical propositions, as sensuous experiences synesthetically merged under the sign of the hand. (p. 105)

In this essay, Sillman captures the complexities of how we experience colour. Working with colour embodies a web of connections, meanings and sensations. Further, she captures how meanings of colour are always in movement as she states: “I am more interested in color as an engine of ongoing change and metamorphosis than as a static theory… let us welcome the collision of mistakes, accidents, desires, contradictions, destruction, and possible disasters that color embodies” (p. 115–116). Throughout the artistic research discussed in this chapter, I too view colour, in this case blue, as a site of change, desire, contradiction, and as a prompt for sensory and affective experiences. This chapter explores how I fell in love with the colour blue throughout the past year as I walked with blue, yearned for blue, read about blue, painted with blue and continuously reconfigured my experiences with blue. This love affair began through a series of walks. In June of 2019, I participated in an artist residency with seven other artists in Seydisfjördur, Iceland. The “Wanderlust” residency, titled after Rebecca Solnit’s (2001) book Wanderlust and held at Strondon Studios and the Skaftfell Art Centre, brought together artists who consider walking as an aesthetic practice. Through ongoing conversations about walking, thinking and art-making, we explored how artists experience place through the act of walking. Through wandering the trails in the fjord in Seydisfjördur we discussed questions about space, time, memory and subjectivity. Each artist pursued their own independent artistic explorations including photography, painting, sound art, conceptual art, public installations, collecting and video art. However, through ongoing dialogue about our work, art-making, thinking and walking, we found connections between our practices. Further these conversations extended and deepened my own artistic research. The residency culminated in an exhibition titled At 3 Miles Per Hour. Throughout this chapter, I present my exploration of the colour blue that began with these walks in Iceland and continued throughout the year in my hometown of Victoria, Canada. I draw from Rebecca Solnit’s (2006) A Field Guide to Getting Lost in which she describes how blue always exists in the distance. Through this lens, in Iceland I explored blue as a metaphor for longing and desire as I collected blue moments along my journey. I then discuss how this work evolved over the course of the following year, through a sensory, affective and curiosity-driven exploration of the colour blue. Through this artistic research, the distance of blue becomes an

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analogy for my artistic process, one that is driven by a sense of getting lost and not knowing. I connect this work to a larger body of work which I title ‘A never-ending painting’ (Shields, 2019, 2020) that situates art making as a performative practice (Bolt, 2004, 2016) and an ongoing generative process of being and learning through making. Further through this work, I examine the relationship between my walking experiences outside the studio and my painting experiences within the studio.

2 Affected by Blue The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. (Solnit, 2006, p. 29)

When I went to Iceland in mid-June 2019, for a month-long artist residency in the small town of Seydisfjördur, it was cold and grey. While it was almost 24 h of lightness, I spent my first week longing to see the colour blue; the blue of the sky and the blue of the ocean. One week into the trip, we hiked for six hours along the coast. The blue skies had finally emerged and at the end of the hike we arrived at the open ocean where blue waves crashed against cliffs. I sat on the edge and was overcome with a sense of exhilaration. However, as with any fleeting moment, I knew it would not last. As exhilarated as I felt in that moment, I was also overcome by a sense of sadness. I was overcome by the sense that once I left, I would never experience that moment again. Thiel (2016, 2018) uses the term ‘muchness’ to describe a feeling of liveliness as our bodies turn toward particular moments. ‘Muchness’ occurs as we turn our bodies toward things, as a force that emerges through an affective encounter. ‘Muchness’ is the most fitting way to describe the feeling I experienced that day, and as I left that day I was determined to stay in the ‘muchness’ of that moment. Thus began a year-long rabbit hole of artistic research as I explored the depths of the colour blue and continuously worked to re-experience that sense of ‘muchness.’ Through this work, I came to more thoroughly understand the ways that senses, affect and curiosity drives artistic research. Describing blue as existing at the edges and depths of the world, Solnit (2006) examines the relationship between longing and the ways that blue as a colour does not travel the full distance from the sun, but rather gets dispersed in the distance of the water and air. This blue that always exists in the distance Solnit relates to desire, but not a desire to be acquired and overcome, but rather lived, sense and embraced. Throughout this research, I too came to understand blue as a metaphor for desire

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and longing. It is a longing for a sense of discovery and a desire to be affected by a moment just as I was looking over the cliff at the blueness of the ocean. As did Solnit, I came to view the process of longing as generative. It is within these moments as I searched for the blues, that I was driven by curiosity and an affective response to my surroundings. I didn’t come into the residency with the intention of painting blue. That moment that I experienced during that one walk necessitated a shift in my practice. This shift was further reinforced through conversations while walking with other residency participants. One day following that influential walk, our artist group held a public event at the local library. To stimulate conversation about the significance of walking, each participant wrote a single word on a paper addressing what walking does for them. I wrote down the word blue. And from then on, I was consumed. The other artists referred me to books and artists who explore the colour blue, and presented me with ‘offerings,’ blue objects they discovered on our daily walks. And I began seeking out moments with the colour blue as I walked through the hills, volcanoes and fjord around Seydisfjördur. Through these explorations, I seek out moments of ‘muchness’ through the blues in the distance of the landscape. Walking became a journey driven by curiosity and longing for the unexpected. Out of the blue, an expression used to describe when something happens unexpectedly without warning, aptly describes these moments when I was caught off guard by a bodily and sensory moment where I am filled with awe toward my surroundings. It is only fitting that these magical moments happened on this journey when I succumbed to the colour blue. Thus, began my journey of collecting the blues. Springgay and Truman’s (2016) examine how walking is an embodied and sensory form of research that continuously allows for new potentials to emerge. They offer propositions for walking that are both actual and speculative that allow one to move through space with curiosity. They suggest: “Walking sets in motion a variety of bodily movements, intensities, and affects that unfold and extend new variations” (p. 266). They use a series of propositions to discuss walking as a form research that encourages researchers to experience space and movement in a way that is not predetermined, but instead creates the conditions for experiences to occur. Throughout my daily walks in Iceland, I had one proposition, that prompted a curious way of looking with the potential to produce endless possibilities: Experience the blue. I began to take photographs as I walked where various shades and hues of blue formed interesting shapes and forms within the landscape. Discovering these blues offered me that sensation of awe and a feeling of ‘muchness’ that I so longed for, further perpetuating my sense of curiosity toward the land that surrounded me. I then went back to the studio where I further experienced this sensation through capturing only the blues from those images. Figure 1 shows a collection of my blue moments. I view it as an archive, a collection of affective moments. Figures 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 capture the relationship between my walks and the studio painting as I isolate the blues within the paintings.

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Fig. 1 Alison Shields, Blue, Oil on paper. © Alison Shields

Fig. 2 Alison Shields, Blue, Oil on paper. © Alison Shields

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Fig. 3 Alison Shields, Blue, Oil on paper. © Alison Shields

Fig. 4 Alison Shields, Blue, Oil on paper. © Alison Shields

Fig. 5 Alison Shields, Blue, Oil on paper. © Alison Shields

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Fig. 6 Alison Shields, Blue, Oil on paper. © Alison Shields

Fig. 7 Alison Shields, Blue, Oil on paper. © Alison Shields

Fig. 8 Alison Shields, Blue, Oil on paper. © Alison Shields

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3 Staying in the Blue: Not Knowing in Artistic Research Blue mythologies uncloaks blue as a particularly paradoxical colour. The conflicting temperaments of the blue unravel easily. For instance, blue is the purity of the Virgin Mary, yet blue names a movie as obscene. Or, blue is the colour of eternity, yet blue lips are a sign of approaching death. The yarn of this book takes up many hues of the colour, yet its pattern remains faithful to one ‘over and one with’ thread: blue is paradoxical; it is self-contradictory, yet true. (Mavor, 2013, p. 10)

Following the artist residency in Iceland, I researched further into the colour blue. Art historian Carol Mavor (2013) takes readers on a fantastical journey into the paradoxes of blue through its multiple meanings within history, geography, nature and art. I am struck by the ways that blue always surrounds us in the distance of the landscape through the atmospheric effects, yet it is a rarity in nature. I am reminded of the rich blues of Modernist painter Yves Klein’s paintings, and of the intensity of the blues in Giotto’s fresco. I consider how in pre-Modern paintings the rare blue pigment was a sign of wealth as it was imported crushed lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. And I learn of the satin bowerbird that fills his nest with blue objects to attract a mate. Throughout this journey I become drawn into the mystery of the blue. I connect this work to my ongoing examination of my artistic research process. Through this work, I seek to contribute to understandings of the emergent, affective and embodied process of art making. I draw from Barbara Bolt and Estelle Barrett (2007, 2013) who examine artistic approaches to research as material, embodied and performative. Bolt (2016) argues that a performative paradigm recognizes that artistic research is distinctly different from qualitative and quantitative research, as art is ontologically performative in its capacity to provoke and generate experiences. A performative lens of artistic practice emphasizes engagement with artistic research as an embodied, affective, sensory, experiential and emergent learning process. A performative view of art recognizes that making art or viewing art is a generative process that has particular effects on each person within a particular time and place. Barrett (2013) similarly addresses the active and experiential quality of art making as performative: “Unlike images that operate via established symbolic codes and that serve to communicate information, the aesthetic image is ‘performative’: it emerges through sensory processes and gives rise to multiplicity, ambiguity and indeterminacy” (p. 63). Barrett questions the privileging of distant, impersonal observation of the world and argues that knowledge gained through everyday experience in the world is recreated through artistic practice and transferred to the work. Through this work, I seek to provoke deeper understandings of the affective nature of artistic research as I discuss how these moments prompt a curiosity that is at the necessity of artistic research. As I am affected by these blue moments, I am reminded of art theorist Simon O’Sullivan (2006) who states that “life when it is truly lived, is a history of these encounters” (p. 1). The next phase of this artistic research extended on work I began over a decade ago that I have described as a ‘never-ending painting’ (Shields, 2019, 2020). In this initial work, I set up a system of tracing, projecting, painting and re-forming that allowed

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my paintings to theoretically never end. They stay in a process of becoming. I’ve compared these paintings to organisms constantly evolving, producing offspring, all evolving in relation to each other. This became a way to speak of the painting process and artistic research, not as a series of isolated works, but instead as relational and connected. It also became a way to discuss artistic research and artistic pedagogies as active and open, rather than static and fixed. This never-ending painting became an analogy for how I understand and continue to examine artistic research as an ongoing process of questioning, creating, feeling and understanding. This pursuit of the never-ending painting is connected to my understandings of pedagogy as a never-ending process. This lens of learning embraces the act of ‘not knowing’ as a generative way of being in the world and is connected to how curriculum theorist Elizabeth Ellsworth (2004) challenges us to think of knowledge as active and in continual movement: “Knowledge, once it is defined, taught and used as a ‘thing made,’ is dead. It has been forced to give up that which ‘really exists:’ its nature when it is a thing in the making, continuously evolving through our understanding and our own bodies’ experience of and participation in that world” (p. 1). Through a research project that involved interviewing artists about their processes, artists Fisher and Fortnum (2013) similarly embrace ‘not knowing’ as a sought-after space within art making. From their interviews, they came to embrace ‘not knowing’ as a generative state of being: Where knowledge is positive, the unknown is often simply the opposite: it is uncertain, invisible, incomprehensible. Not knowing represents a lack or absence, inadequacy to be overcome. However the essays, conversations and case studies gathered together here describe a kind of liminal space where not knowing is not only not overcome, but sought, explored and savoured; where failure, boredom, frustration and getting lost are constructively deployed alongside wonder, secrets and play. (p. 7)

Through my never-ending painting, I similarly seek to dwell in this space of ‘not knowing.’ As I continue to examine my artistic research process, I seek to further understand what happens in space of ‘not knowing.’ I have come to realize that within this space of ‘not knowing’ I experience the sense of longing as described by Solnit (2006). Considering that relationship between ‘not knowing’ and ‘longing’ prompted me to understand why I seek out this space of ‘not knowing.’ The process of longing allows me to understand the affect, the sensation and the connections I seek out through my artistic process. This state of longing for those moments of ‘muchness’ (Thiel, 2016, 2018) drives my sense of curiosity. I long for the moments that emerge out of the blue. I draw from Fisher and Fortnum’s (2013) examination of ‘not knowing,’ as I recognize that this longing and desire is something sought after, not to be overcome, but savoured. Through embracing this sense of longing, I recognize the value of being in a moment, dwelling in the process of artmaking and walking without a destination. The small paintings I created in Iceland sat for a while in my studio as I thought they maybe just needed to exist in that particular time and place. However, I always knew they would re-emerge. In the spring of 2020 as the world closed down with the Covid-19 pandemic, I began to re-visit the work, drawing from my previous never-ending painting process. I began to paint the imagery from the small paintings

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Fig. 9 Alison Shields, Blue Never-Ending Painting, Oil on Canvas. © Alison Shields

(Fig. 1) from the previous summer onto large canvases, layering one on top of the other. Through this process, the paintings continued to change and evolve over the course of several months (Figs. 9 and 10). Art Educator, Donal O’Donoghue (2015) states: “The act of representing an experience experienced at another time is of course, the living of an entirely new experience” (p. 102). Through my never-ending painting as I continuously paint and re-paint, the blue continuously generates new experiences.

4 Longing for Blue: A Pedagogy of Curiosity Could we not say, therefore, that with the color walk we are alerted to the singular and beautiful fact that color itself walks? (Taussig, 2009, p. 28).

This project came full circle in the summer 2020 when I participated in an artist residency at the Ministry of Casual Living artist-run-centre in my home town. Similar to my first week in Iceland, these 2 weeks were once again void of blue. The city had become enveloped in smoke from wildfires in the United States and Canada. Throughout those two weeks and as I once again longed for the blue, I continued to reconfigure the trails that I walked the previous year. During those two weeks, these layered paintings began to take on a life of their own as they began to demand to be consumed with blue. They wanted to devour

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Fig. 10 Alison Shields, Blue Never-Ending Painting, Oil on Canvas. © Alison Shields

the colour blue, while allowing the blue to remain in the distance. As I painted over the works from the previous several months (Figs. 9 and 10) with Prussian blue, the colour simultaneously worked as a veil over the paintings, while also as a transparent window that allows one to gaze deeply into the distance within the painting. Thus, they simultaneously cover and reveal the histories of this painting. Overtop, I painted the imagery from the original Icelandic blue paintings, but using only a white line to create a reference to walking trails. Eventually, as with all of my never-ending paintings, these works demanded to become something else, to be set free from their original references. I cut up the blue painting and allowed it to form different configurations, different trails each day of the residency, thus inhabiting the multiple possibilities of the blue and re-immersing myself in that process. Figure 11 shows the gallery installation of these two paintings and Fig. 12 shows one version of the cut-up re-configuration. Through their pedagogical invitation through a/r/tography, Triggs and Irwin (2019) discuss how the creation of images is a way of learning in relation to the world. They describe how images are expressions of both certainty and uncertainty as they discuss pedagogy as a process of moving, sensing and being affected. This understanding of pedagogy embraces the process of becoming. For them, the process

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Fig. 11 Alison Shields, Blue Never-Ending Paintings, Installation, Oil on Canvas. © Alison Shields

Fig. 12 Alison Shields, Blue Never-Ending Paintings Reconfiguration, Installation, Oil on Canvas. © Alison Shields

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of creating images is not a representation of the world but rather a process of learning with the world. My process of making is similarly a way of generating sensation, affect and movement as I relate to the world. In this project, the draw toward the colour blue began throughout my walks in Iceland, however those provocations prompted an ongoing pursuit of that sensory and affective experience. This sense of awe is continuously generated through the work. Thus, rather than viewing the studio work as isolated and distinct from my walks, this work reinforced the ongoing relationship between the two processes as both impact how my body moves through the world. Triggs and Irwin describe this process: “A performative process generates an image that is an abstraction of the body to assist or to teach the body and other bodies, in their forward movement. Making art images is a way of reminding ourselves of this work already underway in the world” (p. 4). I have barely scratched the surface on my never-ending exploration of the colour blue. Thus, as I complete this examination of the colour blue, I am left with a feeling of desire, a longing for what exists in the distance. I revel in this moment as I am alive with the feeling of curiosity and muchness that emerges with the sense of longing. Through this work, I have come to view artmaking as a process of dwelling within a feeling of longing, within an exhilarating state of desire and welcoming the feeling of being affected in the moment. It is a way of being that embraces imaginative possibilities, in the same way as walking with a sense of curiosity and longing. I end this exploration, therefore with the words of Solnit (2006) who empowers readers to dwell in the moment. We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. (Solnit, 2006, p. 30)

Through this artistic research, I have come to view this state of longing for blue as living in the space of curiosity.

References Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (Eds) (2007). Practice as research: Approaches to creative arts enquiry. I.B. Tauris. Barrett, E., & Bolt, B. (Eds.) (2013). Carnal knowledge: Towards a ‘new materialism’ through the arts. I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Barrett, E. (2013). Materiality, affect, and the aesthetic image. In E. Barrett & B. Bolt (Eds.), Carnal knowledge: Towards a ‘new materialism’ through the arts (pp. 63–72). I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Bolt, B. (2016). Artistic research: A performative paradigm? Parse Journal, 3, 129–142. Bolt, B. (2004). Art beyond representation: The performative Power of the image. I.B. Tauris and Co. Ellsworth, E. (2004). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. Routledge. Fisher, E. & Fortnum, R. (2013). On not knowing: How artists think. Black Dog Publishing. Mavor, C. (2013). Blue mythologies: Reflections on a colour. Reaktion Books Ltd. Nelson, M. (2009). Bluets. Wave Books.

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O’Donoghue, D. (2015). The turn to experience in contemporary art: A potentiality for thinking art education differently. Studies in Art Education, 56(2), 103–113. O’Sullivan, S (2006). Art encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond representation. Palgrave MacMillan. Shields, A. (2019). The generosity of time spent making and learning with others through artistic research. International Journal of Art and Design Education, 38(3), 659–669. Shields, A. (2020). The evolution of a never-ending painting. Canadian Art Teacher, 17(1), 56–57. Sillman, A. (2016). On Colour. In I. Graw, & E. Lajer-Burcharth, E. (Eds.), Painting beyond itself: The medium in the post-medium condition, (pp. 103–118). Sternberg Press. Solnit, R. (2006). A field guide to getting lost. Penguin Books. Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin Books. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. (2016). Propositions for walking research. In K. Powell, P. Burnard, & L. Mackinlay (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Intercultural Arts (pp. 259–267). Routledge. Taussig, M. (2009). What color is the sacred? The University of Chicago Press. Thiel, J. (2016). Working-class women in academic spaces: Finding our muchness. Gender and Education, 28(5), 662–673. Thiel, J. (2018). A cool place where we make stuff’: Co-curating Relational Spaces of Muchness. In C. Schulte & M. Thompson (Eds.), Communities of Practice: Art (pp. 23–37). Springer. Triggs, V., & Irwin, R. L. (2019). Pedagogy and the A/r/tographic Invitation. In H. Richard, B. John, F. Kerry, H. Emese & M. Nigel (Eds). The International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education (pp. 1–16). John Wiley & Sons.

Alison Shields is an Assistant Professor in Art Education at the University of Victoria, Canada. She received a PhD in Art Education from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the University of Waterloo. Her art practice and research focus on painting, artistic inquiry, studio practices and artist residencies.

Discovering Lostness: Wandering and Getting Lost as Research Methodology Lucy Bartholomee

Abstract This chapter proposes embodied wandering and lostness as powerful enhancements to walking methodologies and as insightful tools for data collection for any researcher seeking to glean from human and material landscapes. Building upon a human sense of bipedal knowledge—being on foot—the value of wandering and lostness as phenomenological experiences are examined as a research methodology that departs from a traditional linear path. Inquiry is so often unmarked terrain, the experience of seeking what is not known in uncharted territory. Here the reader is invited to explore notions of fear in the research process, including the author’s lived experience with lostness while researching the phenomenology of being creative through the unique visual and material culture in New Orleans. Phenomenological research into nuanced lived experiences welcomes a flexible methodology that is explored in this ontological study. Wandering and lostness offer rich experiential sensations, the opportunity to discover a sense of place, and to attune oneself to the environment with childlike wonder that would be overlooked in a racing vehicle, veiled by inattention that is the luxury of the familiar. Keywords Creativity · Wander · Lost · Research · Phenomenology · New Orleans

Lostness need not be an emergency, for to be comfortable with lostness allows wandering, noticing, and pondering. To seek lostness is a call to adventure, to move courageously into the unknown. This chapter proposes embodied wandering and lostness as powerful enhancements to walking methodologies and as insightful tools for data collection. Building upon a human sense of bipedal knowledge—being on foot—the value of lostness as a phenomenological experience that departs from a linear methodological path. Author Rebecca Solnit observes, “To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery” (Solnit, 2005: 6). Inquiry is so often unmarked terrain, the experience of seeking what is not known in uncharted territory. Here the reader will be invited to L. Bartholomee (B) University of Texas, Austin, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_5

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explore memory and lostness, along with notions of fear in the research process. My research into nuanced lived experiences, specifically the phenomenology of being creative and creative places, led me to public spaces in New Orleans ripe with unique visual and material culture. I discovered and developed a flexible methodology that is described in this ontological exploration. Such methodologies can be a generative tool for challenging traditional academic structures and research methodologies that may be colonial or Western-centric relics. Wandering and lostness offer rich experiential sensations, the opportunity to discover a sense of place, and to attune oneself to the environment with childlike wonder that would be overlooked in a racing vehicle, veiled by inattention that is the luxury of the familiar.

1 Embodied Bipedal Knowledge For those who walk, it is an existential part of daily life: feet treading upon the earth, movement from heel to toe. Our first sense of being upright, verticality in contrast to being passively placed in the cradle, produces understandings of being in our bodies and introduces the concept of others (Tuan, 2014: 20–22). Yearning to walk, the toddler celebrates bipedal freedom and mobility with euphoric joy. The world becomes space through which we vertically walk, dance, run, and ride: we move. We are introduced to a local universe as our young bodies experience and record millions of details over our early years. Philosopher and phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard writes beautifully about the phenomenology of these powerful memories: “For our house is our corner of the world…it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word” (Bachelard, 1994: 4). Such imprints are potent and enduring. The smooth glass windows, the scratch of a wool coat, a splinter in a bare foot, the creak of a wooden step—each encounter constructs our known world and forms a framework for all future encounters (Bachelard, 1994, pp. 1–10). My first childhood home stands out with a clarity that belies the passage of time. This clarity was gleaned from data collected by a child’s body, a search engine in a polka dot dress. My feet remember the damp cement of the cellar, the chipped Formica stairs, the chill of pinewood floors in winter, and the moist earth of early spring. Perched atop an Appalachian hill our view stretched out for miles across rolling aquatint mountains preceded by a neglected stretch of woods between my neighborhood and the university. I often wandered through these woods alone or with friends, running barefoot over ferns and generations of fallen leaves while collecting my share of bruises and scratches. First impressions cast a lasting shape, and my first encounter with lostness was no exception. Playtime began as usual. My feet, a mere four years old, seized upon the bipedal freedom of racing alone into the forest. Suddenly, I realized I had run past all familiar views. My ears registered the sound of traffic. A few steps in that direction revealed a busy road that I recognized only as dangerous. Terrified, I raced back up the ravine to discover an endless expanse of trees. A leafy green roof overhead, not a house or landmark in sight. I turned and turned. I was lost and completely alone.

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Into this wilderness I finally moved. With each step I listened but heard only the crackle of dry leaves underfoot. Walk and listen, intensely scan every direction, repeat. The road noise was replaced by the hum of insects. My feet and knees detected the incline going downhill to the right, so I shifted direction to the left. I imagined the space around me, the busy road now to my left, I was facing uphill, the university behind me. My body took over, picking up the pace despite stubbed toes, eager to leave fear in the musty leaves. I heard my dog barking, and then my father calmly calling me in for dinner. I was home.

2 Gleaning the Benefits of Lostness “It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods anytime” (Thoreau, 2014: 235). Immersed in the natural world, Henry David Thoreau discovered the tremendous value of bipedal wandering and shared detailed observations and insights through iconic verse and prose. He did not fear lostness. The word ‘lost’ is related to ‘lose,’ words that are used as noun, verb, and adjective in a range of ways all connected to ideas of separation. The verb ‘lose’ is derived from the Old English losian meaning to perish or los related to destruction, or l¯eosan referring to inability to find, to lose. Lostness focuses on the experience of being lost, the sensations of fear and uncertainty, surrounded by the unknown. In the context of walking as a research methodology, let us unpack the concept of a sensory lack of recognition for one’s physical location in the context of lostness in the research process. Thoreau’s comfort with lostness shines a remarkable light on this approach. If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, he is not beside himself, but standing in his own old shoes on the very spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there; but the places that have known him, they are lost—how much anxiety and danger would vanish. I am not alone if I stand by myself. Who knows where in space this globe is rolling? Yet we will not give ourselves up for lost, let it go where it will. (p. 83)

Thoreau recognizes that anxiety and fear are elemental qualities of lostness, yet he rejects this for another perspective: One is not lost, one is standing on the Earth. You are not ‘by yourself,’ but rather are with yourself. Daily walks through the broad expanses of field and forest were a steady routine for Thoreau. Experience taught him that passing through areas of known and unknown (unrecognized) spaces would eventually yield a suitable destination. My childhood certainly held many experiences of lostness. I cannot yet claim to fully balance fear with discovery, but (so far) I have always managed to find myself and eventually return home. Bachelard’s foundational existentialism begins with a primordial sense of home as a first imprint upon the world, and from this foundation we discover the external world. Yet it is only external in contrast to the sense of interior (home), for “the two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 201). If home is a basis of knowing

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a world, of familiarity, then curiosity (and therefore research) can be positioned as inquiry that seeks the unfamiliar, external world. This heuristic approach to lostness in this writing is primarily physical, the sense of one’s embodied presence in unknown terrain. There are certainly other types of lostness that offer provocative connections. The sensation of losing oneself in time, “becoming lost in that other way that isn’t about dislocation but about the immersion where everything else falls away” (Solnit, 2005, p.36). The creative process evokes that sense of losing track of both time and body. Standing in front of an easel or stooped over a sculpture, the body is forgotten as the flow of creativity springs forth, only to surge back into the artist’s consciousness through aches and pains when the frenzy subsides. Loss associated with grieving, with the passing of a loved one, relationships or lifestyle sometimes provoke experiences that feel much like being lost. The poignant opening of C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed confesses: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning” (2015, p. 3). The pandemic of the early 2020’s plunged much of global society into a state of grieving as the loss of life mounted. Weddings, funerals, and all manner of significant events were cancelled and postponed month after desolate month, while many grieved alone for family, friends, and societal normalcy. Creative inspiration offers new ideas that may arrive and depart quite suddenly. We grasp at these ideas, writing, sketching, or recording them quickly before they slip away. There are many aspects of loss and lostness in the human experience. As humans, we bring our full histories with us into the research process, including experience with fear. Let us further explore the possibility of getting comfortable with lostness, of living and working in a space where inquiry is as-yet-unanswered.

3 Wandering and Lostness as Research Methodology Walking as meditation invites us into an intentionally measured pace, opening the possibilities of unhurried perception. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s pocket-sized epistle How to Walk begins with poetic instructions: “The first thing to do is lift your foot. Breathe in. Put your foot down in front of you, first your heel and then your toes. Breathe out. Feel your feet solid on the Earth. You have already arrived” (2015, p.7). Such walking can be practiced purposefully to cultivate one’s sensitivity to observation, an exercise in letting go of unproductive distractions or the windy pace of busy-ness, and opening all our senses to receive what is not known. A growing ontology of walking as research offers intriguing options for inquiry beyond libraries and internet searches. As Truman and Springgay assert, “Walking, we will argue, is not a habit of movement external to the event of research, nor simply an embodied way to feel in space; rather, it is the event’s becoming” (Truman & Springgay, 2016, p. 260). Building upon that idea of walking as becoming, of focused awareness, is the role of lostness in enhancing a sense of awareness and observation.

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Phenomenological walks as suggested by education and research specialist Mark Vagle in Drafting Phenomenological Research are ambulatory events for the purpose of organizing the mind during complex or stressful research (2014: 86–88). Vagle’s exercise suggests a clearing of the mind through accelerated blood flow by walking or even running. Mental clarity is certainly an asset in research however one may accelerate blood flow. Texts such as the present volume move the lens towards an esoteric valuation of the walk itself, wherein observation coincides with the steady rhythm of left and right, treading upon the earth, the gentle sway of arms and hands. De-familiarization is a strategy for enhancing investigation as Thoreau well understood. He observes how the familiar is rendered unrecognizable by a thick blanket of snow or the shroud of a moonless night. He writes of seeking “beacons and headlands” to avoid utter lostness, for only when we are fervently seeking do we “appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature” (Thoreau, 2014, p. 235). Lostness and wandering coexist in this examination as one can lead to the other with almost imperceptible transitions. The possibilities for wandering are thrown open as one makes peace with lostness. Wandering promises freedom of movement, to propel oneself through space without a fixed destination. It suggests a leisurely pace, the liberty to pause at any interesting moment. Eight centuries ago, there were Old English notations of wandrian, and Chaucer describes the well-traveled Wife of Bath as knowing ‘much of wand’ring by the way’ as she rode a slow horse he calls ‘an ambler’ (Chaucer, 2015: lines 178–9). Ambling through unfamiliar spaces provides ripe opportunities for investigation, observation, writing and reflection. Inhibitions are set aside with schedules. “Let us wander where we will, the universe is built round about us” (Thoreau, 2014, p.149). Wandering invites observation and contemplation, to be caught up in a moment. The pace can be erratic, slow or excited, with time for wonder, for tasting and savoring, for the unexpected, for a conversation. Wandering empowers the researcher with a potent tool for inquiry, including inquiry in the service of curiosity. Such wandering is not without purpose. Vagle describes the phenomenological application of the whole-parts-whole approach (2014, pp. 59–60) as both procedure and perspective in the research process. In this multi-tiered approach researchers begin with a holistic view, then break it into small segments for examination, then return to the big picture for analysis in a pattern that may be repeated many times. This linear procedure is effective for phenomenological researchers and was the preliminary platform for my dissertation research on the experience of being creative. Yet that very human experience, reduced to a studied phenomenon, is still a complex organism and resists categorization. The sensation of creativity likewise has enigmatic characteristics that demand a flexible methodology. As my research developed, I welcomed Vagle’s observation: less-polished journal entries that include questions, phrases, wonderings, drawings, etc. can not only serve as an important data-gathering tool, but also as a great opportunity to bridle and practice openness to the phenomenon…using such an observation protocol can help us contextualize the phenomenon. (2014, p. 86)

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It was clear that developing an inquiry into the phenomenological experience of being creative in a creative place required physical presence in this creative place; interviews and traditional data collection must be supplemented by the embodied self to glean rich, nuanced data. The qualities that make a place creative are extensively varied, but there are some interesting aspects to consider. New Orleans is widely deemed a creative place as the birthplace of Jazz. In addition to numerous world-renowned musicians and singers, the city has produced writers, chefs, actors, and artists, and continues to attract others seeking a creative community. A key factor in the aura of creativity of any particular place is the domain of practice: an engineer, a botanist, and an artist will likely be inspired by very different kinds of places, or they could be inspired differently in the same place. A history of creative events in a particular place inspires the visitor, thus we are attracted to the house museums of historic figures in our field. The artist’s studio stands out from a phenomenological perspective as a place where creativity has happened in abundance, where materials are near-to-hand and inspirations develop clarity. One’s own studio or creative workspace takes lead for embodied creativity (Bartholomee, 2018), for when you have been creative in a place your body becomes attuned to the fruitful, generative sensation of imagining, dreaming up, inventing, and making every time you step in.

4 Treading into the Unknown The phenomenological walk is presented here as a provocative element in critical inquiry. As a research methodology, such walks are an effective means to exercise phenomenological sensitivity with a “heightened awareness to identify everyday practices and phenomena” (Vagle, 2014: 87). Through such exercise Vagle discovered the impact of “an open sense of wonder” (87). In Wanderlust: A history of walking, Rebecca Solnit contemplates experiencing the world at three miles an hour (2000). “Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, between being and doing” (p. 5). Wandering is distinguished from walking by a leisurely non-pursuit of a schedule or planned destination. Lostness is a further step towards being fully present, as a heightened awareness puts all our senses on alert. Eyes seek information by constantly scanning, looking for something—anything— recognizable, from a pebble on the ground to the distant horizon. The salty aroma of the sea, the earthy fragrance of forest or garden, the scent of a bakery or beanery, all could be clues related to one’s location. Listening for the sound of traffic, a train or a brass band, savoring a coffee, even feeling the direction of the sun can gain sudden significance in the moment of lostness. Researchers sometimes use the idiom, ‘I fell down the rabbit hole,’ referring to Alice’s introduction to Wonderland as she fell into a rabbit’s burrow and landed in another realm. In research, the idiom expresses the sensation of getting caught up in the experience of seeking, losing track of time, or looking at material that strays away

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from the initial research question. Wandering through archives, following an intuition or impulse, holds the tantalizing allure of discovery. “Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations” (Thoreau, 2014: 235). Lostness is not typically compatible with comfort, and I arrived there only after I accepted that the linear organization of my research methodology would not quite fulfill the ultimate goal of the project. The research question ‘How does it feel to be creative?’ led me to investigate the lived experience of being creative in a creative place, specifically New Orleans, Louisiana (USA). I began this path years ago studying the history of art, music, architecture, and photography of the region, leading to this inquiry in creativity through the living visual and material culture of contemporary life. I interviewed several creatives who all pointed, in their own way, towards the weekly cultural practice called ‘Second Line Parades’ (Bartholomee, 2017, pp. 10– 11) as an intensely authentic creative expression. These parades are not tied to any holiday or the famed Mardi Gras celebrations. They are created and conducted by different community groups and are held almost every Sunday throughout the year. Although I am a regular visitor to New Orleans, I am from another region. And as a White, female, researcher, writer, and artist, my outsider status is relevant to sensations of lostness. My interview participants consistently pointed to the parades in mostly Black neighborhoods as the pinnacle of creative expression. Still following a linear approach, I began to incorporate my observations (writing, photography) with attending and participating in these eclectic parades, which by design invite the audience to join in singing, walking or dancing behind the musicians on a slow, winding route. It did not take me long to get lost. Retreating from a preliminary experience, I veered back towards events that were held on solid ground—stationary locations. During an event held on the famed Congo Square, where jazz music was born, I learned that in my hasty retreat (via taxi) from lostness I had missed a particular creative happening. Second Line parades again were presented as an authentic creative expression that would be fruitful—indeed, vital—for my investigation: creative visual culture moving through the community, improvising to create the event and recreate the space of the open streets into the temporal place of the parade. Further, I would be remiss if I failed to include the visual culture of the Mardi Gras Indian community.1 Returning to my research question, proposal, and phenomenological methodology, I found a path to bridle my linear plan and lose myself in this creative experience. I had to be willing to truly, relinquish my research expectations. I opened my hand to give up control. The event was Super Sunday, a celebration of Mardi Gras Indians with a Second Line, and was advertised along a planned route. Alone, I yielded to the open space of unknown streets and the long wait for the event to appear. I chose what I hoped 1

Mardi Gras Indians dwell within the Black community in New Orleans. They are descended from Native Americans and self-emancipated people of color who developed a unique blended culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in rural areas. Some moved to New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century and developed small tribes local to their neighborhoods and families. They have unique language, music, religion, and rituals. Their processional suits, resplendent with beads and feathers and their music are the most well-known features of the culture.

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was a central point and arrived well in advance. I had learned to be ready to wait, to prepare for the long hang-out that was likely ahead. I sat on a piece of cardboard on the Neutral Ground (the grassy median in the road) while a crowd slowly gathered. I heard them before I could see them. The Mardi Gras Indians came into view like an apparition of feathers and beads to the haunting sound of drums, shell rattles, and chants (Fig. 1). The procession continued slowly as they arrived, savoring their moment. They presented their elaborate feather suits and enacted age-old rituals there in the street. I lifted my eyes to view the procession that extended far down the street. Each tribe was represented by different colors in a stunning display of creativity, for each suit is hand made by the person who wears it. The songs, the

Fig. 1 Super sunday: Mardi Gras Indians fill Orleans Avenue (New Orleans, LA, U.S.A.). Photo by Lucy Bartholomee

Fig. 2 Mardi Gras Indian. The front and back panels are designed and hand beaded by the man wearing the suit. (Note he carries a tambourine). Photo by Lucy Bartholomee

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Fig. 3 Mardi Grad Indian: The wild man suit often includes horns, shields, symbolic weapons, and predatory animals. Photo by Lucy Bartholomee

chants, the haunting syncopation of djembes and snare drums swept us into a place where creativity, culture, and history collided into a singular, shimmering moment. The crowd cheered, chanted with them, took photos and video, ate and drank, talked and laughed (Figs. 2 and 3) As they wound through the street, past halted traffic, a brass band arrived. Some of us followed this band for awhile, dancing or walking on the streets and sidewalks. I was immediately immersed in unknown territory. The Neutral Ground had grown familiar over time. Now I was thrust into places I did not recognize and my sense of direction evaporated. I became a witness to an extraordinary creative expression of dance and improvised ritual, call and response

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with anyone and everyone. The kinetic creativity was exceptional. I observed, participating at times, as we moved through the neighborhood. By yielding, by opening my hand, I became the recipient of a glorious, powerful, creative moment. Eventually, the music ended, and the crowd dispersed rather quickly to cars and a corner building. There was some talk about another band, but anticipation was not evident. Isolated, I faced my lostness. I looked in every direction for clues. The sky was overcast so I could not use the sun to find a direction. I studied my phone intently, but the internet service was too slow. I took a few lingering pictures and listened. The rattle and rush of traffic could just barely be heard, so I headed in that direction. After a few blocks there were still no major streets, so I again scanned the view slowly to find a guidepost. I thought I recognized a distant sign from this morning. My cell phone remained useless. A white-haired man on a bicycle with an elderly yellow dog in his basket rode up and asked me where the Second Line was. I had to admit that I did not know, I was lost coming and going. He looked around and observed that the street was too empty, “They didn’t come through here.” He pedaled away. In truth, the site where I spent the day had transformed into an exterior living room, gathering debris, lawn chairs, coolers, and various decorations. Where I now walked was empty of such fragments, for the parade had not passed this way. The aura of place, of the temporal place of the parade, was also characterized by physical evidence written upon the landscape that could be read if one knew the language. This information would have remained unknown to me if I had remained in comfortable, familiar locations. The difference between place and space was starkly clear, in which space is territory impoverished of meaning in comparison to the vibrant identity and significance associated with place. Evidence of kinetic creativity as a component of visual and material culture was presented in a newly tangible way. Revealed by the overall experience were a myriad of small creative gestures, intimate improvisations, the temporary construction of a public living room, a way of dwelling that brings the interior world into the outside public space, a liminal space that held the surprising sense of home. Time invested in wandering and the heightened awareness of lostness, were key to these meaningful revelations. On this long Sunday I did not want to be lost, but I anticipated that lostness would most likely occur. I intentionally sought optimal observation through a personal lived experience. I was not afraid that I would never find my way back to familiar territory, but I was truly lost for a time.2 I eventually found Esplanade Avenue, a long road that stretches from city park to the Mississippi River. Exhilarated, I walked the miles, savoring the experience: enormous oak trees, wide avenues, wrought iron fences, creative architecture, and buckling sidewalks giving way to powerful ancient tree roots. My feet tread on sandy gravel, cement, slate, and stone. Moving forward 2

Please know that this writing is not intended to spark reckless or dangerous actions in the service of research.

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through this space propelled me from the unknown towards the known amongst the historic landscape of dwelling. Bridling in phenomenological research methodology requires that the researcher set aside their personal bias (intentionally, as much as possible), their expectations for what the outcome should be, their opinions or desire to steer the research any particular direction (Vagle, 2014, p. 67). Interviewing is characterized by open ended questions, bland openings that suggest but do not steer embodied descriptions, then stepping back and allowing the participant to give authentic responses. The case for validity can be built through consistent and persistent bridling as well as “the researcher’s sustained engagement with the phenomenon and the participants who have experienced the phenomenon. This sustained engagement has been described as requiring the researcher to be open and sensitive to the phenomenon under investigation” (Vagle, 2014, p. 66). The expedition into the research must remain open, allowing the outcome to create itself as you explore new territory. Such phenomenological research methods provoke and support lostness as we yield to discovery, bracketing our intentions and allowing time within the research process for wandering and observing. Academic research is also high stakes research. Relinquishing control of the outcome is a terrifying prospect. Allowing the material of the research (the archives, the artwork, even the participants) to generate data freely and authentically is the Platonic ideal of phenomenological research. Learning to be comfortable with the sensation of lostness frees us to wander amongst and between the data. Through such wandering, a heightened awareness reveals unnoticed details and discovers unknown connections, yielding unique and meaningful insights. For “Inception is that fragile moment of a heuristic event: of the coming upon, being struck by, or suddenly grasping an original idea, experiencing a fundamental insight, realizing the depthful meaning of something” (Van Manen, 2014: 237).

5 Lostness and Place Our sense of place is not as concrete as maps and border walls would lead us to believe. In Place and Placelessness, geographer E Relph asserts that “Space is claimed for man by naming it,” (1976; 2016, p. 16) for “where there are no names the environment is chaotic, lacking in orientation, even fearful, for it has no humanized and familiar points of reference” (17). Relph, Heidegger, and Tuan discuss the sense of existential place that begins with our impression of home. The first imprint of our world upon us as young children is powerful, although it can sometimes be superseded or matched by dwelling in another place for an extended time. Such a sense of home impacts the experience being lost in a place where home is near-to-hand, geographically. It is distinctly difficult to feel an urgent sense of lostness in one’s native region.

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Fig. 4 Mobile kitchens and grills are set up outside along the parade route. Pictured is the Zulu social aid and pleasure club headquarters. Photo by Lucy Bartholomee

Fig. 5 Fresh oysters on the grill. Photo by Lucy Bartholomee

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Wandering is sometimes considered the purview of the traveler. Meandering through the historic district in an ancient city is a pleasurable endeavor where lostness is desirable. In classical Florence, for example, the isolated side streets hide niches with medieval relics and local osterias. The Otra Arno, across the river, is a maze of tiny streets shaded by sixteenth century palazzos, where neighbors greet one another through open windows and families prepare to eat while chatting in the local dialect. One quickly loses sight of the familiar without much hint of fear. Lostness is rewarded, a fog pierced by stumbling upon treasures such as a plaque marking the residence of Galileo. One can almost hear ‘e pur si muove’ whispered on the wind. A profound sense of placedness overshadows the sense of lostness. Research endeavors likewise can be well planned inquiries in well-known territory and still yield unexpected discoveries. New Orleans is populated with a community who shares a co-constructed civic identity and a strong sense of place. On the Super Sunday described above, late morning stretched unbound into the early evening. An ordinary street corner and wide grassy median was transformed from an unremarkable liminal space into the intimacy of home through dwelling. Food was prepared and shared in anticipation of the procession (Figs. 4 and 5). The interior lifeworld was brought outside and reformed into a kinetic and temporal cohabitation. “This coexistence of things in a space to which we add consciousness of our own existence, is a very concrete thing…In this coexistentialism every object invested with intimate space becomes the center of all space” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 203). Such coexistentialism infers a state of being with and being within simultaneously, as an exterior and empty space is infused with the objects and population of home. Participants cannot be lost in such a place, at least not physically. My role as a visitor, researcher, and observer placed me as adjacent to the coexistence of the created place. To be clear, people were friendly to me, but I was a visitor to their lifeworld, their veritas vita.

6 Self, Lostness, and Place The Roman architect Vitruvius (30 BCE, translation 1960) dedicated much of his first book to a description of healthy and suitable locations for the construction of new towns. He asserted that considerations of water, wind, and light were crucial to the establishment of a healthy community. His view of place revolved around the assessment of the unbuilt landscape, its physical properties in terms of the physiological impact it would have upon the health and wellbeing of the future inhabitants. Before the first brick is laid, the designation of place takes primacy. When my children were elementary age, we went back to the town where I grew up, half a continent away from where they were living through their formative years. Returning to a place with personal significance to me was nostalgic, rich with memory. My children’s experience was quite different, abstracted by their complete

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lack of connection with the town. Theirs was a day of discovery, not remembrance. My elementary school, now on the National Register of Historic Places, was merely another old red brick building to them. I stood before it transformed back to my sixyear-old self. I lifted my feet to climb the stone steps, surprised that they no longer seemed steep. The huge wooden doors had endured, and I was able to peer through the gap left by heavy iron latches and decades of wear. I recalled the January drafts that swept through this gap whenever I entered the hallway from the heated classroom. Memories flooded: giggling with friends, swings at recess and great leaps into piles of leaves, loudly singing in the hallway, picnics, measles vaccines. I stepped back from the door and found I was crying. My kids were on the swings laughing, and I watched my adult feet tread back down the stairs. My hand found the railing without looking, for my body remembered. We drove a few blocks to my childhood home. The patch of forest where I first experienced lostness was gone, lost now to a parade of mundane apartment buildings. Even the lovely view of the distant mountains was lost. Solnit proposes that such landscapes become the depositories of memory, that our sense of remembering can be tied to the place of occurrence. “For me, childhood roaming was what developed a sense of reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back” (Solnit, 2005, p. 7). Our sense of memory and place are intertwined with our memories of the place, and our memories in that place. The lost child may experience extreme fear, aware of the separation from their people and able to conceive of never reconnecting. The awareness of home also makes us aware of what is not home, spaces that have little meaning to us, or no one knows who we are. Venturing into such unknown terrain is the first step towards lostness. Intentionally seeking the unknown is a driving force in research, thus as researchers there is significant value in learning to be comfortable in the state of lostness, comfortable living in the space of inquiry. In the 2016 reprint, Relph refreshes his description of Place and Placelessness not as a simple binary, wherein a location is either a place or is placeless. Rather, any given landscape has “manifestations of both distinctiveness and standardization. Place and placelessness exist in a state of dynamic balance” (p. v). Relph acknowledges that some areas have “exceptional settings in which place is dominant and placelessness is subservient” (p. v). A distinctly creative place has an aura of creativity, a sense that creativity has happened here, is happening now, and will continue to thrive— creative dwells here. New Orleans is demonstrably a place with such a dominance. The long historical presence is fraught with the pain of colonization and slavery, yet culturally elevated through a heritage of creativity in music, literature, theater, architecture, culinary and visual arts. Contrasting areas of placelessness remain the purview of airports, gas stations, and the homogenized landscape of commerce. This is a heuristic approach, as experienced by the individual, and is prone to exceptions. In extremely rural areas, such as where my maternal grandparents lived, the regional gas station was a hub of community interaction, a welcome relief from the isolation of farm life.

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7 Wandering Art/Ography as Creative Place Making Just as place names bestow order upon a human’s amorphous world, mark-making attaches uniqueness and meaning upon liminal space. Some might perceive the natural world, undisturbed by human construction, as a blank canvas prepared for development while others seek to construct place through naming and marking. Relph describes the cultural dichotomy through a comparison set in northwest Australia, where local Aboriginal people read the land as a fully formed landscape (Relph, 2016: 14–15). Rocks, trees, ravines, and mountains are complete as structures and communities of abundant wildlife. Rivers are places of dwelling for water creatures and roadways for canoes. All are ripe with myth, spirit, and story. Upon arrival, the European looked upon the same vista and perceived it as empty, unused, and in urgent need of exploitation and development (Relph, 2016, p. 15). What a difference cultural philosophy makes in our worldview of nature! My perspective of creative wandering has evolved into a project called La Ricerca di Movimento. In the spirit of phenomenological walks, this project is an exploration of wandering-ology. Temporal movement through open space engages with mark making that suggests motion, history, and time. I have chosen the ancient triskele, adapted at times into other swirling designs, as a designation of movement that is adaptable to each setting (Figs. 6 and 7). La ricerca is the research, the study or project, while the phrase la ricerca di movimento translates as the search for movement. Here, I turn these underpinnings towards creative processes that rely upon the body to perceive, conceive, and generate a visual expression of movement through space, to temporarily make manifest the fleeting gestures of motion.

Fig. 6 Triskele on the neutral ground, New Orleans. Photo by Lucy Bartholomee

Fig. 7 Marking movement; Aegean memories, Galveston Island. Photo by Lucy Bartholomee

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8 Final Thoughts Wandering into unknown spaces with a creative agenda adds an element of suspense. Awareness and observation are enhanced with the energy of desire in the search for an opening for mark making within a notable visual presence. Wandering through unknown places–wandering rather than getting lost, but often getting separated. Fighting self-consciousness as I find a stick and begin to draw in the sand or dirt. One never knows what material will present itself for the project, how long it will remain, or if anyone else will see it. A practice of wandering is a continuous experiment. Mystery is its own compass. Every journey into terra nuova spins the dial. Wandering and lostness are experiences unto themselves, and such experiences are ripe with potential for research. This non-linear approach can also be a generative tool for adapting and reforming traditional academic methodologies in the process of decolonizing or shifting Western-centric processes. To admit that you are lost is to concede that the world is not in your control and that it holds mysteries of place that are bigger than your self : your body, your experience and knowledge and identity and assets and power (if you imagine that you have any). This is humbling. I am merely a small bipedal mammal, and the seashore has no end.

References Bachelard, G. (1994). The poetics of space. Beacon Press. Bartholomee, L. (2018). ‘New Orleans: America’s creative crescent’, in Art, creativity and politics in Africa and the African Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan. Bartholomee, L. (2017). How does it feel to be creative: A phenomenological investigation of the creative experience in kinetic places, Dissertation, University of North Texas Libraries: UNT Digital Library. Chaucer, G. (2015). Canterbury tales. Digireads Publishing. Lewis, C. S. (2001). A grief observed. Harper Collins. Relph, E. (2016). Place and placelessness. Sage Publications. Solnit, R. (2000). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin Books. Solnit, R. (2005). A field guide to getting lost. Penguin Books. Thoreau, H. D. (2014). A week on the concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod. Heritage Publishing. Truman, S., & Springgay, S. (2016). Propositions for walking research. In K. Powell, P. Burnard, & L. Mackinlay (Eds.), Routledge handbook of intercultural arts (pp. 259–267). Routledge. Tuan, Y.-F. (2014). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press. Vagle, M. (2014). Crafting phenomenological research. Left Coast Press. Van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice: Meaning giving methods in phenomenological research and writing. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press Vitruvius. 30 BCE. De Architectura. English edition: Vitruvius. (1960). The Ten Books on Architecture. (trans: Morgan, Morris Hickey). New York: Dover Publications.

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Lucy Bartholomee, Ph.D., is an Artist, Writer, Teacher, and Traveler. Supporting diverse learners in an arts rich environment is the focus of her professional practice as Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator in Art Education at the University of Texas in Arlington. With over twentyfive years teaching experience, she is also an advocate for experiential learning and creativity. Dr. Bartholomee’s research centers around aspects of creativity as a lived experience, including phenomenological perspectives and the role of movement, place, and community in the creative process. Publications include research and pedagogy book chapters, textbooks with Davis Publications, and articles in Art Education Journal and Policy Futures in Education. Visit her website for a full description of her teaching practice, professional presentations, and artistic practice. www. lucybartholomee.com

Anecdotal Edges: Propositions from Sketching the Walk as a Posthumanist Research Method Sarah Hennessy

Abstract Reconciling the multidisciplinary nature of being a researcher and artist is a place of tension. In moving away from the binary limits of qualitative or quantitative research this paper tracks the generative nature of walking and sketching as posthuman research methods. Over the course of numerous forest and community walks in conjunction with the Climate Action Childhood Network research in early childhood education, limits of language-based data collection are backgrounded in favour of a post qualitative, post humanist zone of contemplation and questions (Lacy, S. (1995). Mapping the terrain. Bay Press.). In being drawn to draw the forest floor, strewn with pig-nosed nut shells, thistles, and bunny tracks, the process of sketching simultaneously becomes the doing of research (Grosz, Architecture from the outside, MIT Press, 2001). During these common worlds-informed walks with children learning is something done with and within natures as opposed to something external we learn about. As a lingering, enmeshed, delicate process this slow learning with requires patience, sensorial listening and defiance. Walking and the resulting sketches are political acts - an unwillingness to be wholly complicit in the material, consumptive behaviours of an anthropocentric culture and education. In framing these sketched walks, multitudinous and enmeshed worlds at once precarious, dead, vibrant, struggling, thriving, political and trampled become first anecdotal edges and later, propositions (Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. Harvard University Press.) in the creation of an uncommon field guide (Hennessy, S. M. (2022). Creative common worlding with research creation in early childhood education. Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 8931. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/8931). Keywords Sketching · Walking · Posthumanist methods · Uncommon field guide · Early childhood education · Common worlds

S. Hennessy (B) Faculty of Education, Western University, 1137 Western Road, London, ON N6G 1G7, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_6

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1 Introduction The pairing of sketching with walking is part of a larger research narrative where early childhood education, art and research intersect in pursuit of understanding alternative educational directions in addressing climate change and precarious planetary health. This chapter is part of the creation of an uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022) using a research-creation1 methodology. Sketching, for me, is part of an onto-epistemological way of learning and being that has always included creative rendering. In addition, the expression of knowledge and learning through and with artistic practices and mediums has always informed my professional practice as an early childhood educator. The personal intersection extends to include a stance on the interconnected natures of humans as a species that are part of the world, not separate from or superior to other species. Animals, plants, energies, histories and temporalities have always been a part of my conscious existence informing my move towards a common worlds (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020) understanding of the interconnected-ness/mess and the natural choice of feminist new materialist-informed common worlds as theoretical framing for my research. Focusing practice on thinking with nature in early childhood education considers new ways to be with the planet in light of climate change. What could thinking differently in early childhood education look like when we decentre humans in the more-than-human worlds we share? It is with this question that posthumanist method of researching and creating an uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022) entangle walking with sketching as ways of knowing. This research falls under a broader field of Education for Sustainability (Ärlemalm-Hagsér & Inoue et al., 2016; Sandberg, 2011) which brings a posthumanist lens to the growing and complex field of environmental education. Inoue et al. (2016) address the need for a “broader view of sustainability [that] should prompt educators to create pedagogical environments and plan learning activities that enhance children’s awareness of ecosystems, environmental issues, and relationships between humans and nature” (p. 177). This education for sustainability with Common Worlds, “reposition[s] childhood and learning within inextricably entangled life-worlds, and seek[s] to learn from what is already going on in these worlds” (Taylor, 2017). In entangling alternative pedagogies in early childhood, humans become one of many non-hierarchical understandings, existences, histories and tensions instead of anthropocentric defaults in culture and education. In the space left by child-centred pedagogies (Langford, 2010) other, differently-informed possibilities can be considered.

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Research-creation is defined by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2016), as “an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation” (Loveless, 2019, p. 6).

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Thinking with Latour’s (2004) propositions as a “realm of language now shared by humans and nonhumans alike” (p. 83) carrying uncertainty unlimited by language repositions humans within Common worlds. Latour’s (2004) propositions shift away from conceptualizing human separatedness from nature with statements of science (Latour (2004). In sketching the walk as posthumanist method I think with the anecdotal edges of creative renderings as questions and provocations as “other, not ideas, or things, but nonhuman entities, or …propositions” (p. 288)? Are these propositions, that participate from the edges, in fact a form of dialogue with nonhuman entities? An uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022), as an alternative to traditions of common field guides, is conceptualized as an opportunity to think differently with young children and educators about how we understand the complexities of place. Place, is understood as more-than-material, relationally-constituted (van Dooren & Rose, 2012) and embodied by many discourses, species, energies and histories. Field guides, illustrated identification manuals, are a way of learning about a place, species or ecosystem. Field guides share a number of characteristics that include an illustrative nature, often favouring hand drawn, painted or sketched renderings accompanied by systematic, scientifically-based classification of biological traditions of taxonomy (Schaffer & Young, 2015). Physically compact, they are purposefully designed to be carried into the field for active, identification use. They are often organized by biologically-ordered categorization to identify and distinguish genus, species, and subspecies in a geographically defined area (Law & lynch, 1988). An additional element of a field guide is the conceptual design for a specific end-user, the amateur, as they are positioned for use in the real world within nature not as comprehensive compendiums for laboratory reference. Visual rendering of the natural world in field guide traditions has included the works of Aristotle and Virgil through to European-led colonization practices driving the works of Lewis and Clark, John James Audubon and Charles Darwin (Philippon, 2004). Much of the early field guides were scientifically-based, government-led initiatives of cataloguing and inventorying the human dominion over the natural world (Scheese, 1996). Field guides also have a long history tied to pastoral approaches to nature that work to further separate humans from nature (Scheese, 1996). These tendencies to position a pastoral, pristine wilderness act to romanticize nature as singular and other, perpetuating and supporting human beliefs of superiority and separation from the natural world. In introducing the term uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022), I trouble the concept of nature, as separate, in an effort to reclaim this tool for a planetary, twentyfirst century era facing climate change. An uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022) favours a more approachable, dialogic way of dismantling one vestige of colonialism by attending to the slow, close and relational ways of being in more-than-human worlds; reconsidering colonial histories of inventorying place for human need, and; reframing them as more-than-human, storied and political.

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1.1 Research with Place This research is part of ongoing pedagogical inquiry inspired by the scholarship within the Common Worlds Research Collective (2021). The field work for this research occurred from September 2018 to March 2020 in an early childhood centre located in Southwestern Ontario on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, L¯unaapéewak and Attawandaron peoples. The research forms part of ongoing work in the Climate Action Childhood Network,2 an international collaboratory of shared ethnographic research focused on alternative climate approaches in early childhood education. In place-centred thinking and shared more-than-human worlds it is possible to consider climate beyond human exceptionalism. As part of weekly site visits to the early childhood centre groups of educators, children and researchers walked local neighbourhoods, forests and pond areas. The place of these walks and this centre carry tensioned histories. The centre exists on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, L¯unaapéewak and Attawandaron peoples, lands connected with the London Township and Sombra Treaties of 1796 and the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum. This land, home to diverse First Nations peoples, is changing rapidly from farmland to developed suburban housing. The childcare centre is a product of resulting population growth from this transformation. This place is many places at once—traditional lands, farmland, subdivision, and changing habitat for many. This is a place of many places, tensioned and troubled. As part of the research, observations with place are foregrounded on walks as we collectively witness complicated, political and troubling change. It is this tensioned change that prompted the conceptualizing of an uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022)—a guide beyond traditions of field guides to alternatively render the complicated realities of worlds we are part of. Sketching and walking are the two primary, interlaced methods of data collection in creating the uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022). In keeping with posthumanism’s repositioning of the humans a species in more-than-human worlds, posthumanist methods favour a positioning of embedded humans in situated and relational entanglements (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). Both walking and sketching in the field honour an embedded approach to place, research and common worlding. Drawing on sketches and walks with young children (ages 8 months-4 years) this chapter considers the interwoven natures of walking and rendering as posthumanist methods, conceptualized through anecdotal edges. I begin with conceptualizing my understanding of sketching and walking as process. Using examples, the chapter continues with consideration of the anecdotal edges of sketching the walk as research process and its relations with Latour’s (1999, 2004) propositions.

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This paper is part of a federally funded study with Climate Action Childhood Network (http://www. climateactionchildhood.net/), an international collaborative partnership created by the Common Worlds Research Collective (http://witnessingruinsofprogress. climateactionchildhood.net/). The research is focused on young children, education, and challenges related to climate change.

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2 Anecdotal Edges Anecdotal edges are where visual meaning, technique, response-ability (Haraway, 2016) and a dialogic existence with others happens. Anecdotal edges are a process and a pedagogical approach to sketching and walking as methods, acting as possible spaces—posthumanist, unfixed openings to aesthetic data (Bennett, 2010). Anecdotal edges are a personal term for the confluence through sketching that entangles the indecision and discomfort of options—options that infiltrate, pollute and enliven thinking with sketches. The concept of anecdotal edges began by chance through a decision to paint on wood because of the way the grain participates in the work. From painting (Fig. 1), the possibilities found in edges act as openings to multiple possible directions. Questions and tensions hang on these edges and provoke thinking. The term, anecdotal edges, is found in Canadian author, Alice Munro’s (1983) introduction to The Moons of Jupiter, a fictional short story that weaves mourning, memory and family in a non-linear format. In the introduction Munro explains that while her writings may connect to personal stories she positions short stories, such as The Moons of Jupiter, as art “carried away from the real” continuing by explaining how observation-derived stories “lose their anecdotal edges” and are “invaded by familiar shapes and voices” (p. xv). While Munro explicitly frames the fictional nature of her writing and its distinctly un-real nature, I use anecdotal edges to actively engage with real, tensioned and present politics, stories and histories.

Fig. 1 Anecdotal edges 1 Author’s field book photo ©Sarah Hennessy

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With a posthumanist approach to multiple realities, I frame my voice as one of many stories, all of which may carry art, fact, and/or feeling. Furthermore, I trouble what Munro references as the ‘familiar shapes and voices’ as these, for me, are often colonial legacies, violences and oppressive voices. I choose not to subconsciously default to the familiarity of colonial voices instead foregrounding other stories and voices often not afforded familiarity in recognizing that stories that normalize narratives have consequences (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Heydon, 2019). I remain intrigued by the fact that my place-based research is coincidentally located in the same county in Southwestern Ontario where Munro was raised and where she returned to live before writing The Moons of Jupiter (Munro, 1983). I wonder if there is not some serendipity of place that brings two alternate approaches (daresay stories) together on a distinct term of anecdotal edges?

2.1 Anecdotal Edges and Sketching Sketching is complicated terminology embroiled with a multitude of definitions, theories and approaches. For the purposes of this chapter and the bridging of walking with sketching as posthumanist methods, the following section is an effort to coalesce ideas on sketching. As part of a process of envisioning an alternative understanding of humans as part of, not distinct from an othered “nature”, the dialogic nature of anecdotal edges in sketching an uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022) brings other stories, more-than-human, more-than-colonial, more-than-dominant stories into the sketches. This visual thinking is enmeshed with ethical and political considerations. I cannot unsee the knowledge of histories, presents, futures that exist with my gaze. For me this is a choice, an unwillingness to be mindless in rendering a current moment of what is visible with my privilege. What I see often carries ethical troubles and histories. The act of defining shapes and the defaulting to contour can damage understandings of our limited visual abilities (Greenhough, 2016; Smailbegovi´c, 2015) and a common worlds’ (Common worlds research collective, 2020) approach that works to blur boundaries not enforce them. Rendering the form of black walnuts (Fig. 4), buckthorn berries (Fig. 3) or thistles (Fig. 6) is not simplified lines but a barrage of questions about native species “introduced” by unsettlers (Jackson et al., 2020), the unseen among us, toxic neighbours and the implications for this place. Sketches like Buckthorn and Sonic pebbles (Figs. 1 and 2) carry as much political and ethical considerations as they do lines, marks and representation. The political and ethical enter the sketch through the indecision, openness and, potential of anecdotal edges. The sketches carry conversations, relationships, histories and discomfort. The process of sketching prompts reflection with others, more-than-human and human. The plethora of complexities only distantly connect to constraints of drawing instruction to represent what ‘is’: Sketching with anecdotal

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edges is only tenuously connected to what ‘is’. Sketches such as Buckthorn (Fig. 3) and Ghost Acorn? (Fig. 4) resemble actual plants and moments of forest floor decay and life. The edges of those sketch lines carry dangling questions that perturb.

Fig. 2 Anecdotal edges 2 Author’s field book photo ©Sarah Hennessy

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Fig. 3 Buckthorn, 2020 ©Sarah Hennessy

Fig. 4 Ghost, acorn?, 2018 ©Sarah Hennessy

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The sketch, for some, is an act of abandon and freedom (Causey, 2017). For me it is a collage where thought, memory and place vibrate together with politics and histories. These sketches, with anecdotal edges, move past limits of a reality, seen and mediated by an artist. The black walnut is a nut shell. But, it is also a pig’s nose and ghost-like provocateur. It carries many realities with each encounter. In a squirrel reality is a nutritious nut cache. To other trees it is a “dominant influencer with the ability to extinguish competitors” (author’s field notes). In thinking and rendering with anecdotal edges, reality is closer to an understanding of Latour’s (2004) pluriverse, where the work towards a common world is composed of propositions. The black walnut is many realities. Not all these realities are human. I sketch within the tension, of undetermined propositions, as an alternative to an approach of getting lost and abandon used by other artists in sketching (Causey, 2017). In an alternative to categorizations that further humans from nature, I actively hold tensions in my pencil/pen. As many drawing instructors, such as Nicolaides (1969) suggest we should concentrate on what is before us when we draw. I choose not to put away, sideline or dismiss the ethical, political and historical realities of what I sketch or my privilege in being in this place and doing this work. In particular, I sketch with complex realities of being a settler on First Nations land and the outrage of persistent, systemic colonial realities. I sketch with realities of a changing planet from waste, pollution and human-generated climate change. I sketch with a Western system of early childhood education that remains focused on a world of individuals, school preparedness and productivity (Ritchie, 2016). I do not put these away to sketch, instead choosing to see these complex politics as they enter through anecdotal edges and participate in the sketch. I confront the systemically perpetuated stories that exist but may not be visible before me but are nonetheless present. Like the sketch of European Buckthorn, an invasive species introduced by English and French settlers in the 1800s, it is a berry, a bush, and a consequence of certain behaviours.

2.2 Anecdotal Edges with Walking Walking, as method, brings complexity to place through a collective embodiment. It is both a way to arrive at a place to sketch and the dialogic path of anecdotal edges. Walking is one step in front of the other connecting and separating from place with each footfall. For McClintock (1994) the walking that happens in a place is a “common action become uncommon” (p. 95) evoking spiritual, sensorial and aesthetic thinkings beyond the simplicity of one foot in front of the other. To consider walking we often also consider the places where we walk. Place is a rich, complex understanding beyond a tradition of geographic location: It is embedded with geology, time, histories, and framed as educator and narrator (Iorio et al., 2017; Smith et al., 2019; Styres, 2011). Walking, as generative practice, “brings attention

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to the landscape… [providing for] patterns, paces and paths of walking as experienced in the breath, rhythm, sweat and memory of the walker” (Myers, 2010, p. 59) and as a result of being in the presence of others connects to more collective thinking (Stengers, 2005). The embodied, walking dialogue with others, human children and educators, with histories, with tensioned questions actively carries anecdotal edges. With Buckthorn, dialogue of invasive species, colonization and consequences open to a deluge of problems, questions and possible answers about the complex meanings of invasive. The problems, questions and possible answers are walked as much as they are talked. These walked discussions are interwoven further with interrupting binaries of good and bad species, shaking bushes to create “berry rain”, questions of bird food and the staining consequence of squeezing berries. The result is that these anecdotal edges occur in a melded blur of walking, stories, histories and sketching into a pedagogy of ecosophical awareness (MacCormack & Gardiner, 2018). The openness to experimenting with berry stains and the indeterminate natures of walking with questions of ‘what does invasive mean?’ positions walking as an open, attuned and respectful method (Ingold, 2015; Instone, 2015). The dialogue emanating from encounters with the invasive species of European Buckthorn is an example of Instone’s (2015) respectful wayfinding as invitations to “take less-worn and unknown paths and to forge new connections” (p. 181). New connections with buckthorn become the staining results of colonial behaviours and more. When walking with children, especially children mastering walking, much visual attention is ground focused. Often in the forest and field the walking is a slow, dialogic revelation of stuckness—we trip and we see. In waiting for others we notice tracks and ask questions. We problematize our steps, “in finding bunny tracks, we question the implications of following” (Hennessy et al., 2020).

Fig. 5 Bunny tracks, 2018 ©Sarah Hennessy

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Walking uncovers sparks for engagement within entangled worlds of the ecosystem. In looking slowly, through walking, the practice transforms to a way of being with open ‘inventories’ focusing on the “rich, often category-defying jumble of features” (Tishman, 2018) found on sketched walks. This way of looking, seeing, and being with sketched walks, is an alternative to the encyclopaedic tendency towards categorizations of many common field guides. When those dialogic pauses happen to consider our human path in a more-thanhuman world, we think with a critical ecology of place (Instone, 2015), on that walk, at that moment. The ‘let’s follow them’ thinking upon finding bunny tracks (Fig. 5) is problematized as we consider their fear. Walking becomes as much about where to walk and where not to walk and the consequences of decisions as care and opening ourselves to the indeterminacy of potential in this moment, on this walk and in this place. Nairn and Kraftl (2016) suggest, “Places gain meaning—through

Fig. 6 (in)vulnerable?, 2019 ©Sarah Hennessy

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human action, through dwelling, through emotional attachments, through events, and through memories attached to them” (p. 5). With the bunny tracks (Fig. 5) and Buckthorn (Fig. 3) human behaviours and resulting consequences position curricular and pedagogical response-abilities (Blaise et al., 2017; Haraway, 2016) that can develop from place-making. The relationality of bunny tracks (Fig. 5) and Buckthorn (Fig. 3) help focus human implications in the history and future of this shared place.

2.3 Wayfaring As posthuman methods both sketching and walking share a commonality of placeattuned wayfaring. Both sketching and walking are understood as embodied acts of attunement to a slowed, attentiveness that works carefully to understand rhizomatically, deeply, and ethically (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor & Blaise, 2016).3 Tim Ingold (2011) brings sketching and walking together when he writes, the practice of drawing has little or nothing to do with the projection of images and everything to do with wayfaring—with breaking a path through a terrain and leaving a trace, at once in the imagination and on the ground, in a manner very similar to what happens as one walks along in a world of earth and sky. (p. 178).

In sketching, as practice, a common worlds’ approach to pedagogy and morethan-human relations intersect with the role of place a mutualism (Simard, 2021). These traces, of ethics, politics, consequences are embodied in the walk and rendered on paper as anecdotal edges that create unlikely and messy partnerships (Haraway, 2004). As human wayfarers both understandings of place and pedagogical practices work to re-orient towards alternative thinking about children’s relations with place in common, shared worlds.

3 Common Worlds The messy ways of being within a shared place of buckthorn, black walnut and bunny tracks has a porous nature. The place-sharing is akin to a permeability to influence and be influenced by others. This permeable, common world is encapsulated by Taylor’s (2018) explanation of childhood “as made and lived through entangled sets of noninnocent human and more-than-human relations indebted to the maxim of situated knowledges” (p. 207). A Common Worlds framework decentres the human child and flattens participation in worlds with a more-than-human understanding, working alternatively to a child-centred focus of early childhood education. Common worlds 3

Other works on attunement include: Nelson, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Nxumalo, 2018; Taylor, 2013; Tsing, 2015; van Dooren, Kirksey, & Münster, 2016.

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practices carry political tones that influence understandings of care and ethics in early childhood. Common worlds, a term from Bruno Latour’s (2004) book The Politics of Nature is explicit in merging thinkings between nature and politics. While early childhood is absent in the book, it positions a collectivist approach for common worlds and practitioners suggesting we “replace the singular with the plural everywhere. Suddenly we have natures” (p. 29). By bringing this thinking into a common worlds practice care extends beyond the human child (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Nelson et al., 2018; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In extending care to the more-than-human in practice educators engage with political behaviour beyond a neoliberal, developmentalist discourse of institutional curriculum and policy. Material, consumer behaviours that frame humans as employees, workers, and buyers contribute to the dominant developmentalist focus on skills and competencies. This is to say the thinking in practice can extend to land and Indigenous considerations and the tracks we leave as educators when we model care for and with children (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Smith et al., 2019; Tuck et al., 2014). An additional area of political nudging in educator thinking is the move away from mastery over nature towards a collective, non-hierarchical thinking with (Nelson et al., 2018; Plumwood, 1993): It is a political move away from stewardship, human ego, and superiority approaches in light of climate change (Taylor, 2017). To think with we notice and experience differently. Anna Tsing (2015) practices a specific kind of noticing that informs both my position as researcher and a post-qualitative lens shift with nature. In Tsing’s model of noticing, I position myself within both the research and worlds as a subjective, non-innocent participant. The arts of noticing, in creating an uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022), counter field guide traditions of rational, verifiable positivism. It is through walking together with place and being drawn to draw the forest floor, strewn with pig nosed nut shells, tracks, and thistles with toxic neighbours, that the processes of sketching and walking simultaneously becomes the doing of research (Grosz, 2001). A part of honest dialogue in common worlds methods is a focus on the value of the anecdote—a short, narrative story designed to engage listeners to ponder a topic in a relational way (Merriam-Webster, 2019). This anecdotal concept allows thinkings and moments to be tangible and accessible connecting storytelling and re-storying to close observing and methods of practice (Nelson et al., 2018). Storytelling, a staple in cultures and education systems, provides a platform for the lived experience of a common worlds approach. These anecdotes and moments are a method to counter the tide of an abstract, global, foreign and daunting side of climate change (Kraftl & Khan, 2019; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015).

4 Relational Everyday Practices A post-humanist ethics of relationality is one that allows for all that is human, nonhuman, organic, inorganic, alive, dead, yet to materialize, the virtual, and the real,

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Fig. 7 Buckthorn regenerated, 2020 ©Sarah Hennessy

to be a part of the practice that is ‘creative’ knowledge-making within the context of environmental education (Blyth & Meiring, 2018, p. 107). Common worlds methods, rooted in the ordinary, everyday walks, conversations, observations and sketches, resituate lives within more-than-human common worlds (Hodgins, 2019; PaciniKetchabaw & Taylor, 2015). As open-ended, indeterminate and exploratory walks, sketches, ensuing conversations and re-storying (Fig. 7) become collective educator/child/researcher memories with more-than-human common worlds, where stories are regenerated differently as a form of ethical practice. In troubling tracks and berries the everyday become spaces to adjust Munro’s (1983) familiar voices and, instead, trouble stories and consider alternative behaviours. After photocopying the buckthorn sketch children are invited to regenerate the sketch as we revisit our stories and memories. In layering regenerated stories, walks, memories and conversations these marks become a practice and product of a pedagogy of ecosophical awareness (MacCormack & Gardiner, 2018). As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) explains the building of wisdom, which comes from the ground up in Nishnaabeg epistemology, is continually regenerated through the relationality of the personal and community. How then are these new layers of stories and new marks on sketches acting to interrupt familiar voices of colonialism with invasive species?

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5 Process Thinking Anecdotal edges 1 (Fig. 1) and Anecdotal edges 2 (Fig. 5.2), from my personal art journal are used to consider how creating artistically invokes stories, politics and more-than-human wonderings. In sketching out a painting titled Sonic pebbles the following thoughts on the process capture anecdotal edges: Start the painting with an ethos of blurred edges – use thick, water-thinned brushstrokes with some transparency. Edges/non-edges are superseding the painting’s original concept – tension Now which way to go next? Bring the white edges of paint in from the edges of the wood pane to keep the story fluid and avoid the static nature of A final piece. What other stories enter this painting? What are the anecdotal edges contributing? How do I listen and follow them?

These questions and prompts activate thinking about the complexities of sketching and what the process brings to research, practice and creation. What is the importance of the transparency of paint? Is this a connection to the grain of the wood, an attempt at honesty of my individual place in the work, frustration with the lack of transparency in society or more? Why do I return to the word tension as an invitation to think differently? The indeterminacy of where to go next is a vital part of the process, a sketch, walk or dialogue: It is exciting and laden with consequence with each choice. The fluidity and avoidance of A finished finality resonates as the work of the pluriverse (Latour, 2004) and posthuman positionality. As a story that can be re-storied will the piece be finished? The use of “follow” suggests a lack of control or power in this engagement. These complexities extend to considerations on the problems of boundaries, creeping language and Latour’s (1999, 2004) thinking with propositions.

5.1 Creeping Language The tension with words like invasive in Buckthorn (Fig. 3) and questions in Ghost Acorn? (Fig. 4) highlights the creeping nature of language and writing to infiltrate the sketch, as a habit of my enculturation to English, writing, reading, and Western, settler ways. Similar to the field notes on Sonic pebbles (Figs. 1 and 2) is the engagement of invasive as a question directly attached to the stem in Buckthorn (Fig. 3). The writing changes the sketches, acting to breathe the conversations onto the paper and the realities of a field book as collage of living, doing and creating. A field book is at once a sketchbook, a journal, observation repository and jumbled collage of happenstance with leaves, dirt, dead bugs and children’s drool participating in the mix.

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The words carry different weights in sketches. With (in)vulnerable? (Fig. 6), what began as a note to question educators about became both the title of the sketch and a critical incident of pedagogical practice (MacNaughton, 2009). The tiny thistle plant that broke through layers of asphalt opened to discussions of early childhood education as an underpaid, neglected profession and months of discussions about disrupting power, as adults, in early childhood practice. The thistle was re-thought as (in)vulnerable? (Fig. 6) and later conceptualized with toxic neighbours like asphalt and cigarette butts (Hennessy et al., 2020). Words on sketches provoke questions. Are the children’s markings in Buckthorn Regenerated (Fig. 7) unspoken speculations we are unable to decipher? With Ghost Acorn? (Fig. 4) edges of the sketch become the words and questions. How does a hollowed black walnut shell become a pig’s nose, squirrel food, toxic cause of nut allergies and scary? How do these observations and anecdotes of the walk and sketch carry dialogue on the question of ghosts and the unseen among us? The anecdotes that continue to perambulate with pedagogy and curriculum-making happen both in the sketches and the words and marks that mix with the sketch storying the uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022). A sketch becomes a walked story of anecdotes, questions and tensions within these entwined worlds. Buckthorn (Fig. 3), Sonic pebbles (Figs. 1 and 2), (in)vulnerable? (Fig. 6), and Ghost acorn? (Fig. 4) have gone on to inform individual entries in the Uncommon Field Guide (Hennessy, 2022).

6 Latour’s Propositions I question whether what is happening in the anecdotal edges of sketches and paintings is akin to Latour’s (1999) propositions. Propositions, with Latour’s (2004) common worlds, extend beyond a generic understanding of suggestions. Propositions are a “realm of language now shared by humans and nonhumans alike” (p. 83) carrying uncertainty unlimited by language. Propositions shift away from conceptualizing human separatedness from nature with statements of science (Latour (2004). Are the questions and provocations at the edges in fact “other, not ideas, or things, but nonhuman entities, or …propositions” (p. 288)? Are these propositions, that participate from the edges, in fact a form of dialogue with nonhuman entities? Is the participation of the wood grain in Sonic pebbles (Figs. 1 and 2) a collective dialogue in a single livable world without division of nature and culture? If this is the case, I am left to consider how to reframe the anecdotal edges beyond the limits of ideas: They are not ideas but co-creators. If, as Latour (2004) suggests, we dismiss the binary of the Enlightenment’s subject/object, and move forward into the uncertainty recognizing offerings then the grain of the wood is neither subject nor object but a possibility. As a possibility my presumptive habit to sign a work as solo creator is impossible and irrelevant. For political ecology, there are not one world and multiple languages, just as there are not one nature and multiple cultures: there are propositions that insist on being part of the same collective. (Latour, 2004, p. 84)

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What happens when wood grain, pencil line, written words, connections of feet with ground, grass, air and more stop being multiple languages and instead open to propositions? Are the edges of a sketched walk possibilities in this shared realm? Is considering the tensions in anecdotal edges a habit in a collective common world practice? Habits, as understood by Latour (2004), are similar to human interests, are open to revision in the collective proceedings. When we move beyond divisions of objects or people to shared propositions in a world with member requirements, we become sensitive to resistance from others in the shared realm: It becomes an enactment of ethical mutualism. Could the invasive of Buckthorn (Fig. 3), considerations of the unseen in Ghost acorn? (Fig. 4), and toxic neighbours of (in)vulnerable? (Fig. 6) be member resistance? As practice, how do I form the habit of attuning to the grain of anecdotal edges? How can the word-grain-dialogue of possibilities inform interactions in the real worlds we cohabit? How does the porosity of influence inform the walk, the sketch and the ways of knowing?

7 Conclusion The importance of anecdotal edges in sketching is part of an effort to think alternatively to the firm, bounded material comfort which humans are encultured. As Jane Bennett (2010) explains, “humans need to interpret the world reductively as a series of fixed objects” (p. 58) but with anecdotal edges these fixed natures of understanding at a human level get blurred. Spirits, microbial, untouchable, unseeable (by humans) worlds and histories exist and can be sidelined by what Bennett (2010) refers to as human bias for fixed. In conceiving of an uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022) for precarious climate times the habits and propositions suggest that a different kind of field guide is required for a different kind of progress. In engaging with the habits of anecdotal edges is it an orientation, and daresay as way, of practising Haraway’s (2016) responseability? As generative methods, walking and sketching open to alternative stories. These alternatives inform the creation of an uncommon field guide (Hennessy, 2022) and considerations of place-based practice in early childhood education. While the anecdotal edges found in this chapter inform thinking with propositions, how do we build more-than-human habits of possibility?

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Sarah Hennessy is a PhD candidate and Instructor at Western University’s Faculty of Education. With particular attention to early childhood education, she is curious about art (as artist, witness, and educator) and how creative expression informs understanding. Her research is focused on feminist new materialism and common worlds theoretical perspectives in search of alternative narratives, methods and pedagogies in education. Her approach to research is focused on openings to living well with others, more-than-humans and humans alike. With more than two decades of facilitating learning, she continues to explore the intersections of art, practice, ethical engagement, and place in considering childhoods differently. Her research merges art and education in the creation of an Uncommon Field Guide as a way to think with place.

Walking to Create an Environmental Arts Pedagogy of Music Matthew Yanko

Abstract In this chapter, I address the question of what an environmental arts pedagogy of music may look like for young learners. I draw from walkography, soundwalking, songlines, and soundscape composition to create a gateway that supports children as they partake in outdoor learning experiences. Through an autoethnographic framework, I story my journey with Kindergarten and Grade 1 students as they listen and make music in forests and creek beds. As their walking inquiries progress, the children begin to cultivate attentive and contemplative listening abilities, whereby many engage with a heightened awareness and develop a bond with places that speak to their hearts. Participation in walking as a somatic and embodied lived experience with music making and listening can hold the potential for multisensory and relational encounters. Thus, illuminating the primary value of place-based education that serves to strengthen children’s connections to others and to the regions in which they live. I postulate that through an environmental arts pedagogy of music there is the potential for the landscape to reveal a sonic relationship between body, senses, and the land—illustrating music as a sounding model to deepen the awareness of our connection to the natural soundscape. Keywords Environmental arts pedagogy · Music education · Walking pedagogy · Soundscape composition · Early childhood · Place-based education

1 Introduction Nature-based experiences have gained an increased attention for their capacity to establish a child’s bond with nature (Chawla & Derr, 2012), and research supports the argument that teaching outdoors promotes an appreciation and lifelong connectedness with the environment (Herbert, 2008; Sobel, 1996). To provide opportunities for students to learn in the natural world, educators can turn to place-based education, as it promotes learning in the local of students’ lived experiences. Place-based M. Yanko (B) The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_7

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education can enhance an appreciation for the natural world and can create a heightened commitment in students to serve as active contributing citizens (Sobel, 2004). In reflecting on that, Sobel (1996) believes it is important “that children have an opportunity to bond with the natural world, to learn to love it and feel comfortable in it, before being asked to heal its wounds” (p. 10). He alludes to the concept of “place attachment” in young learners, which is a phenomenon where children are attached to a place that makes them happy when in it, distressed when leaving it, and see value in it for its own intrinsic qualities (Chawla, 1992, p. 64). Place attachment is significant to childhood development, as it can foster places for security, social affiliation, creative expression, and exploration (Chawla, 1992). The importance of supporting children’s emotional relationships with place can be extended beyond the human environment to interactions with the more-than-human world, to all living and nonliving things and to place itself (Yanko & Yap, 2020). In order to support and deepen young learners’ awareness of their connections with nature, educators can turn to the arts because the arts provide a platform for children and teachers to see things in ways other than they are normally seen (Eisner, 2002, p. 83). Environmental arts pedagogies are artful and open-ended processes that both condition and modulate learning experiences through environmental engagement and creative experimentation (Rousell et al., 2018). In place-based learning that involves the arts, there is the potential for the landscape to reveal a ‘kaleidoscopic’ relationship between body, senses, and the land (Worster & Whitten, 2018). With the above in mind, I ponder the potentials of music as an environmental arts pedagogy and what it entails for young learners. Researchers have consistently argued that knowledge and cognition alone are not enough to produce pro-environmental behaviours in children, as sedentary classroom learning has little impact on fostering pro-ecological behaviour (Herbert, 2008, p. 63). If we as educators want to ensure that all children have the possibility of establishing a positive connection with the environment, then it is important to reflect on pedagogies and practices that promote curiosity, active engagement, and attachment to the natural world. There is value in place-based learning experiences that allow students to venture into the outdoors, and in encouraging them to build meaningful connections that can lead to place attachment through embodied experiences. Pedagogies and practices that support such ideologies should enable children to represent their understandings and attachments with nature through artful media of their own choosing, including that of music. Music can serve as a point of connection with the outdoors, and can inspire environmental action and advocacy, all the while helping to foster empathy for the natural world (Turner & Freedman, 2004). In this chapter, I employ a contemporary autoethnographic storying approach (Ellis, 2004) to guide my inquiry of a Kindergarten class and a Grade 1 class over an eight month period.1 I explore the potentials of music as an environmental arts pedagogy by providing place-based learning experiences in the outdoors. In doing so, I seek to determine how music can encourage a transformation of the affective 1

Both classes comprise of diverse learners. Although the current chapter highlights each class as a whole, all students participated and contributed in the inquiry to the best of their abilities.

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relationship students have with nature. I explore how playing, listening, and making music with the living landscape can be a valid approach to magnify the relationship young learners have with the environment.

2 Grounding Literature 2.1 Walking John Muir wrote, “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in” (Muir & Wolfe, 1938, p. 427). Just as Muir walked through the forests and hills of Yosemite, wandering in nature can become a gateway to connect children with nature, and overtime can support the development of place attachment (Chawla, 1992). Walking illustrates closeness between wandering and wondering, as Aristotle would stroll with his students beneath a canopy of trees while seeking to ponder difficult questions of philosophy. In such experiences, walking slows down the pace of thought, in a rhythmic awareness of sensations and perceptions to be fully engaged with the aesthetics of place, of experience, and of movement (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018). There are many approaches to educational walks, but to support music as an environmental arts pedagogy I turn to walkography (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018). Walkography is a method of inquiry, whereby the “graphy,” can be an artful language, including that of music, to illuminate a walking experience. By its very nature, a walkography is a shifting and dynamic organism, and indeed the terms ‘walk,’ ‘walking,’ and ‘language’ are meant to be decomposed, defied, transmuted, allegorical, and provocative (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017, p. 134). With that in mind, as the students in this inquiry explore the outdoors, I will be cognizant of providing them with opportunities to represent their meaning making through a “language of music” (Yanko, 2019, p. 272). By doing so, I hope to empower them to engage with music to express their discoveries, connections, and understandings of walking in place—to express that which cannot be expressed through text alone. Walking researchers insist that walking is embodied because it is immediate, tangible, and foregrounds the bodily experience of moving (Triggs et al., 2014). Pink et al. (2010) argue that walking is significant because “it is in itself a form of engagement integral to our perception of an environment. We cannot but learn and come to know in new ways as we walk” (p. 3). Alongside that, walking can be repeated over and over as a creative process, allowing access to sensory experiences by an engagement of the body, mind, and environment (O’Rourke, 2013). A famous example is Richard Long’s (2005) A Line Made by Walking (a contemporary, conceptual walking art piece), in which he walked repeatedly back and forth in a field, drawing a diagonal line across the grass. Long’s walk involved an art-making

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practice that sought to illuminate the natural environment around him. I believe the value in his art is its transdisciplinary inspiration, and as a musician I am intrigued by the sonic element of his art—i.e., the percussive nature of his feet as he walked back and forth across the field to create a sustained soft tone. In reflecting on the above, there is the potential for students to learn through the relational activity of the body-in-place by engaging with the materiality of the place with their senses and actions (Somerville, 2010). Pedagogies based on embodiment turn our attention outward to a dialogue with the situated materiality and emotional tonality of place itself. Embodiment is not a detached and objectifying cognitive form of knowing, but an emotional and sensorial whole-body form of knowing in place (Tooth & Renshaw, 2018). Rather than thinking of place as an entity to be studied and objectified, embodiment suggests that we relate to place in a highly visceral manner that involves a responsiveness from our heads, hearts, and all our senses. Therefore, if walking invites sensorial experiences by bringing learners into a relationship with the environment, it can also be perceived as a somatic experience that can enable the students in this inquiry to become familiar with the sounds, movements, and moods of the explored landscape (Springgay & Truman, 2018).

2.2 Soundwalks, Songlines, and Music Composition After a walk in the woods, Henry Thoreau (1906) wrote, “Music is the sound of the circulation in nature’s veins” (p. 251). He believed the wild is a metaphysical space where nature is dominant and valued, and where walking signifies living in tune with natural processes (Gibson & Cridland, 2018). Like the walking practices of Thoreau and Aristotle, meandering with children in the outdoors can allow for a listening that enables them to abandon themselves to the conviction that they and their understandings are but a small part of a broader, integrated knowledge that holds the universe together (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 49). Alongside that, Westerkamp (1974) posits, “with your voice or your footsteps…you are ‘talking’ to your environment, which then in turn responds by giving your sounds a specific acoustic quality” (p. 19). She believes that by engaging with the environment, listening to our movements in it, and all that co-exists in its ecosystem, we can develop a bond and an understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Thus, to mindfully guide the children as they walk in the outdoors I turn to the ‘soundwalk’ for support (Westerkamp, 1974). During a soundwalk, one walks in nature to develop attentive listening, which in turn can lead to a heightened awareness and an ecological attitude. I ponder how listening can be perceived as a mode of understanding, and as the children walk and listen to the world around them, it is my hope that they may come to better understand it and their place in it. When students walk and listen to a living landscape, their role in the learning experience is not passive, but rather one that is emergent and embodied. This experience involves them actively making music with the environment. To guide the

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children as they walk and make music in the natural world, I turn to the Indigenous songlines of Australia for inspiration. Songlines are part of an oral history that chart the creation of the land and the generational routes of people across the land through various markers—i.e., trees, waterholes, rocky outcrops, animals, and creatures (Daley, 2016). Songlines embrace the stories of the people and the eternal spirits who inhabit them. The melodic contour of the song describes the land over which the song passes…certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the actions of the ancestors’ feet. An expert song man…would count how many times his hero crossed a river or scaled a ridge—and be able to calculate where, and how far along, the songline he was…A musical phrase is a map reference. Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world. (Chatwin, 1987, p. 108)

Although a songline can be sung in various languages, the melody that describes the land is always the same—If you know a melody, you can navigate the land. I turn to the songline to stimulate the children with heartening inspiration to engage with the soundscape of the natural world, reflect on its sonic elements, and bond with it through music making. The living landscape is an acoustic context, but also a cultural domain that greatly contributes to defining the characteristics of a region and the culture of the people (Scarre & Lawson, 2006). I am aware that the students will bring their own subjectivities that will affect how their music making with the environment unfolds, and the extent to which they develop a connection with the landscape through its melody. To give structure to the children’s outdoor music making experiences, I turn to Murray Schafer’s practice of soundscape composition (1969). A soundscape composition contains recognizable environmental sounds that invoke listeners’ associations, memories, and imaginations related to the soundscape. Within the context of outdoor learning experiences, this practice can involve students applying musical constructs (i.e., form, rhythm, texture) to the timbres of a particular place to create a soundscape composition. I also turn to the composition practices of John Luther Adams, an Alaskan composer who evokes Northern landscapes through experimental music (2009). I ruminate over his outdoor piece for percussion ensemble, Inuksuit (2014). The arrangement of rhythmic layers in the piece mimic the shape of Inuksuits—Stone markers used by Indigenous people of the north to help orient them in the Arctic. Each performance of the piece allows the music to inform the experience of a place, and the place to inform the music. As a result, performers and listeners develop a connectedness with their surroundings: “We have listened to our surroundings and made music with them, but we have also become aware of how powerful we can be in collectively transforming a place” (Shimoni, 2012, p. 265). I reflect on the aforementioned composition practices to support the students in this study to develop a bond with particular places that they connect with by weaving sonic elements of those places into their music.

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3 The Symphonic Landscape: Four Autoethnographic Vignettes A framework of autoethnography empowers me to create stories written in a creative nonfictional style based on observations, notes, and artifacts (Ellis, 2004). To illustrate and elaborate multiple points of view and skillfully draw the reader into the story, I use various forms of voice (Gouzouasis, 2008). Weaving the children’s voices amongst my own can also reveal the fractures, sutures, and seams of my interactions with the children and the natural world in the context of researching a lived experience. Within the context of early childhood music education, autoethnographic research has been used to illuminate the learning and teaching experiences of students and teachers in the living landscape (Yanko, 2019; Yanko & Yap, 2020). Attempting to portray and represent precise facts would be impractical due to the place-based nature of this inquiry that cannot be replicated in other contexts. However, autoethnography supports me to preserve the authenticity of my experience by pursuing essences and meanings, as a lifelike and truthful account can be more valuable than a factual account (Ellis, 2004; Gouzouasis, 2008). Autoethnography can be conceptualized as an inside and outside approach to inquiry, as it allows the reader to generalize their own personal experiences of teaching and learning to those of the writer. What is most personal has the greater potential to become universal and what is a universally shared experience may be experienced on deeply personal, relational levels (Ellis & Bochner, 1996). Thus, my engagement with a reflexive practice has the potential to inspire readers to reflect critically upon their own experiences concerning teaching, learning, walking, and being with nature. I present four autoethnographic vignettes. The first and second vignettes follow the journey of Grade 1 students, Ms. Liu (their classroom teacher), and I (their music teacher) as we journey along a creek. These stories illuminate how the children develop attentive listening skills and foster a bond with the creek’s ecosystem through its soundscape. The third and fourth vignettes bring to light the experiences of kindergarten students, Ms. Stevens (their classroom teacher), and I as we explore the soundscape of a forest. These stories depict how the students engage in making music with the trees to deepen their connection and understanding of the environment in their local.

3.1 Vignette 1: A Walk in the Forest The school grounds are no longer in sight as we wander into the woods. The Grade 1 students, Ms. Liu, and I march toward the sound of a trickling stream and stop on a small wooden bridge to observe.

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“Try to listen like a scientist to the gentle sounds of the creek.” Jake crouches near the edge of the bridge to get closer to the water. “It sounds like my bathtub filling up. It’s saying shhhh.” A few students nod in acknowledgment and lean in to observe (see Fig. 1). “Look!” Ashley notices. “There’s a family of bugs dancing.” She twirls around and flicks the air to mimic the sharp jagged movements of the bugs. After the bridge, we meander into a forest shadowed by tall cottonwoods, and nurse logs covered in huckleberry bushes. We trek through the dense wilderness and arrive at another section of the stream. Ashley comments, “The bridge was louder. I can’t hear the creek here.” “I can. This part sounds like drips mixed with running water, but you need to be very quiet. Come listen.” Aaron waves her over.

Fig. 1 Students attentively listening to stream

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We walk along the stream to a clearing, and discover a large stump to make music with by jumping and drumming on it. After a short performance, we journey along the course of the creek and stop at a section that expands into a pool. Some of the children notice a pile of sticks and use them to explore the water. “What are you doing with that stick?” I ask Emily. “This big one makes a splashing and a slapping sound. I don’t think the water likes it because I can feel it push back when it hits and it’s not a nice sound.” She demonstrates and then picks up a small branch. “This small stick twirls in the water. It has a gentle touch and sound. The water is more happy… (see Fig. 2).”

Fig. 2 Exploring force and timbre of water with sticks

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3.2 Vignette 2: New Surprises at the Creek The following week we return to the creek, and I provide guidance for our inquiry. “Today I would like you to take note of sounds that have changed and those that are the same. Use your scientist mindsets to think about why those sounds may be different, or the same.” As soon as they begin, some notice changes right away. “It’s louder!” Aaron exclaims. “There’s way more water,” Ashley notices. Jake adds, “It used to sound like crunching, but now its diff….” “It’s like splish-splashing on leaves,” Sophie cuts him off. I leave them to their explorations and walk further down the creek to join Katie and Paulo at a clearing. I watch as Katie stomps a rhythm pattern in a puddle. Paulo freezes and then tugs at my hand, “Mr. Yanko, listen to that…the wind. Can you feel it? There are leaves falling. That must be where all the leaves on the ground came from.” I join him and we open our ears to the call of the wind. Afterwards, I meet up with some students trudging in the middle of the stream with their boots on. “How is the water different from last time?” “There’s a lot more water now. It’s swishing faster,” Jill answers (see Fig. 3). Gavin adds, “It’s pushing against me. It’s hard to walk.” “Last time it was calm and quiet. Now it feels loud and angry,” Cindy states. Jill tosses a stick into a fast part of the stream, “Wow look at that! The stick is moving.” “Let’s follow it!” Gavin shouts. We follow the stick and discuss theories about why the water is quick and deep. Gavin suggests, “The trees were thirsty and drank all the water last time.” Cindy adds, “Maybe big rocks have something to do with it.” We follow the stick further down the stream towards the open sewer. Gavin exclaims, “Wow! It’s very different.” “It’s like a really fast Shhhwwww,” notices Cindy. Jill states, “No, It’s loud like thunder.” Cindy adds, “It’s like a monster.” As our journey comes to an end, we walk back to school and reflect on parts of the creek that were inspiring. Jill states, “The deep part because I got to get in it and make splashing noises.” “The sewer because the water made lots of dark sounds,” says Gavin. Ashley adds, “The creek water because it makes swishing sounds. It was different being in the water and actually playing music and listening in it. Last time I just watched the water from the bridge and it isn’t the same…”

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Fig. 3 Students trudging through the creek bed

3.3 Vignette 3: A Musical Swing, a Dance for Sap, and Dirty Rhythms Over the past few weeks Ms. Stevens’ kindergarten class has been exploring a forest. Today, I join them and provide a provocation of music making with their favourite trees. “Mr. Yanko, check this out. I made a song with Gerald,” Kevin states. “Gerald? There is no Gerald in your class,” I state with confusion.

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“Gerald is my tree friend,” he explains and taps a stick between two thick branches—du, du, du-u-u-u. He repeats his half-note and whole-note pattern over and over again. “That is so cool that you are bouncing your music back and forth between the two branches.” “Not bouncing. I’m making swinging music with Gerald.” “I’m baffled. Can you explain?” “The music swings from branch to branch. You know when you go back and forth and sometimes you swing too high and it takes a long time to come back, that’s what the donut note (whole-note) is for.” “So, you’re not making music between the two branches, but having them be part of the music and swinging the music back and forth between them at the same time?” “Yeah. It’s a swing song.” I depart Kevin and walk over to Sebastian moving around a big maple tree with a pink scarf in hand. “What is the pink scarf for?” “It’s for a sap dance. It’s about sticky sap and dry sap.” “Is it a dance about pink sap?” “No I just wanted a light colour for the sap,” “That makes sense. Are you part of the sap?” “No I’m the tree’s brother. We are dancing together. The pink scarf is the sap. It goes down me like this,” he says as he slowly drags the scarf down the front of his body. When he finishes his performance, I wander across the meadow to a trio of students playing in the dirt. Daniel is tapping a chopping rhythm pattern on the ground, Susan has her shoes off and is drawing long circle notes in the sand with her toes. Katarina watches them and then begins to tap eighth notes on some pebbles and draws a long line in the soil to create a long, sustained note. After they finish, I comment, “I like the swishing motion of Susan’s donut note (whole-note). Its soft sound works well with Daniel’s part. I also like that Katrina’s long notes are different from Susan’s. It is so creative that you chose to make music with the dirt. Why are you making music with the dirt?” Daniel replies, “My chopping music is for the seeds being planted in dirt.” Katarina adds, “Mine is for the garden lines where the seeds turn into plants…”

3.4 Vignette 4: Planting Trees and Sticky Sap After a few weeks of exploring the forest, the kindergarten students have begun to develop a bond with particular trees. One afternoon I join them as they attempt to make music with their special trees. I head over to students at the sap tree and quickly discover that they need some guidance. “Does sap move slow or fast?” “Slow,” they respond.

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“So should your song be slow or fast?” “Slow.” “What direction does sap move? Up, down, or sideways?” “Down.” “So maybe your music can show how sap travels down the tree.” “Yeah, it can have a slow stretch to it,” Sebastian adds. “Is your sap music going to be loud or soft?” “Soft because sap is quiet,” Susan replies. They begin to make music with the tree. Kyla taps a rhythm with a twig, going from high to low down the bark. Sebastian joins her and plays slow and long whole notes on another part of the trunk. “It’s sliding,” He states. After making music with the tree, they fill up buckets with needles from a nearby pine tree. Every time Sebastian adds a handful of needles, he gently swirls the tube to test the sound of his instrument. They play their sap song, and the second half of the piece involves shaking instruments. After their performance I reflect on their playing, “Susan why are you tapping two lids together?” “That’s the hard sound of the hard sap.” “Sebastian, why do you slow down at the end of your part?” “Because the sap slows down and dries.” I leave the sap tree and wander over to a group working on a planting song. Daniel says, “We are making a tree.” “And what are you going to use for your instruments?” “Sticks!” they shout out. “How are you going to do that through music?” “You plant a seed. You water it and it grows every day. The sun gets it bigger,” Spencer adds. “So, someone should do a part about a seed. Who has the smallest rhythm for the tiny seed?” “I do. Mine is du-day sh, du-day sh,” Dylan says. Karl adds, “I am the big tree. Mine is the longest. I go last.” Daniel chants, “Mine is du, du, du, du.” “So, your order is Dylan, Spencer, Daniel, and Karl. Dylan is a seed that is planted, and Karl is an old wise tree. What can we do for Spencer and Daniel?” Daniel replies, “I can be a little tree and Spencer can be a bigger tree.” I leave the group to practice their music and when I return, they are excited to share their song with me. “We have planted twelve trees so far,” Karl exclaims. “Twelve trees. What do you mean by that?” “We played it twelve times.” We journey through the forest and stop at a thick needled ponderosa tree. Karl rubs his hand over the tree to invite it to perform with them, and I watch in awe… (see Fig. 4).

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Fig. 4 Students performing their planting song

4 Discourse on Music as an Environmental Arts Pedagogy The four vignettes illuminate how music as an environmental arts pedagogy can foster a sense of place attachment in young learners, which enables a connection to the living landscape. Their sense of place came into being through a responsiveness of the body to the landscape (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 4), in that the movements through the landscape (wanderings, trudging, dancing) became attuned to different surfaces (stumps, streams, soil, foliage). And as the children returned time and again over the course of eight months, they actively embraced somatic and embodied experiences with the world around them. Their wanderings, listening, and music making with the living landscape also enabled them to take on the role of active place explorers,

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which allowed them to critically read into place and create layered significance and meanings of it. Walking inquiries invite attunement with the environment that is made richer through the layers of memories and subtle transformations that occur when returning to a familiar site (Triggs et al., 2014). As the children’s experiences in the natural world unfolded over time, their recurring encounters illustrate how artful pedagogies involving walking can create deeper layers of connectedness: What begins as a brief encounter, the first rudimentary beginnings of a relationship...I do consciously continue to develop this relationship, to keep it alive and active and vibrant by continuing the dialogue begun in place. I feel I know that place and feel known by it. (Birrell, 2007, p. 288)

Just as human relationships require time to develop, so too do relationships with the more-than-human world. It took great patience, wonder, and creativity on the children’s behalf to build a connection with the landscape. They had to engage their imaginative capacities in somatic and embodied experiences to begin to foster a bond with places that spoke to their hearts. If music grounded in tone is a means of sending messages to the world, then music grounded in noise is a means of receiving messages from the world…As we listen carefully to noise, the whole world becomes music. Rather than a vehicle for self-expression, music becomes a mode of awareness. (Adams, 2009, p. 4)

Adam’s means of listening involves interpretation and giving meaning to the message and value to the non-humans who offer it. And as we journeyed outside, the music of nature surrounded us and spoke to us, illustrating that noise to us is not something that is perceived as unwanted sound, but something that can be heard as the voice of the landscape. During our walking and (re)walking excursions as the seasons passed, the students developed attentive listening abilities, whereby many engaged with a heightened awareness to the sounds in the landscape and how the sounds came into being. For instance, as the children closely examined the creek at different locations, they paid particular attention to changes in its ecosystem and how those changes could impact the sonic nature of the creek. Also, the act of listening in this inquiry not only involved an attentive awareness to the sounds around us, but also brought to light an Aristotelian way of wandering and wondering. In the second vignette, students postulated changes in the strength and volume of the water as they walked through it. As their hypotheses materialized, they immersed themselves in a listening that involved learning to listen, narrate their theories, and offer their own interpretations. In doing so, they represented their theories about the water and were able to “re-know” or “re-cognise” them (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 50). Alongside that, there is something to be said about zooming in to focus on a particular sound. For when Paulo invited me to close my eyes and join him in listening, we concentrated on only the wind. We tuned out the rest of the soundscape, allowing the wind’s call to become more vivid and clear. As we focused our listening, tranquil sounds became audible—we heard the wind tickle the leaves, and its breath ripple across blades of grass. Children like Paulo possess the time of listening, which is not only time for

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listening but a time that is rarefied, curious, suspended, and generous—a time full of waiting and expectation (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 50). That encounter with Paulo reminds me of a summer evening, in which Thoreau walked through woods and heard no audible disturbances by other humans, only the sounds of nature. He commented, “Every sound is music now” (Thoreau, 1992, p. 23). Similar to John Cage’s composition 4' 33'' , Thoreau regards everything as music. This image of being completely surrounded by nature’s music can depict a multi-sensual understanding of sounds, as music is not only meant to be heard but it can also be felt through its vibrations. With that in mind, walking experiences with young learners can be perceived as being multi-sensuous, as our senses are not passive receptors, but are principally involved in the development and association of feelings, imagery, and metaphors of place. As the children walked time and again, they engaged with their senses, and in particular, their sense of listening, to begin to develop feelings and understandings of the local in which they live. Thus, rather than thinking of the natural world as a place to be studied and objectified, the students connected with it in a highly visceral manner that involved being receptive through their bodies, minds, hearts, and senses—“Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world” (Solnit, 2001, p. 29). The vignettes illuminate how listening in this inquiry was not a passive experience, but an embodied lived experience supported by the senses. Thus, the students’ engagement in walking as a sensory experience alludes to movement as a mode of inquiry that can hold the potential for multisensory and relational encounters. As there are limits to written and visual understanding, I turned to walkography to scaffold our walking experiences with music making. I provided opportunities for the students to express their connections, wonders, and understandings of walking in place. Thus, illustrating how walking and music making is able to provide new perspectives into human understanding, as depicted in the children’s explanations of their music making experiences with the soil, trees, and sap. Moreover, while composing music in the outdoors, the students drew from their musical palettes to illuminate the rich and varied landscape that wove in and out of rhythms, harmonies, textures, dynamics, and tone colours. Their music reflects characteristics not unlike the compositions of Adams and Schafer. For instance, the piece about planting and growing trees depicts similarities to Adams’ Inuksuit, which also evokes a feeling of surround sound in nature. Furthermore, similar to the way that each performance of Inuksuit allowed for the music to inform the experience of a place and place to inform the music, many of the children became connected to places that spoke to their hearts. In returning to a place of connectedness as the seasons and landscape changed allowed for a deepening of the students’ curiosities and understandings, as each journey led to new layers of musical discoveries and wonders. Those cultivated connections illuminate the primary value of place-based education, which resides “in the way that it serves to strengthen children’s connections to others and to the regions in which they live” (Smith, 2002, p. 594). Over the course of eight months, the children returned several times to the explored environment and began to know and (re)know those places. Walkography can be

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seen as a means to support young learners to journey into a landscape in continuous movement, and over the course of time it can allow them to represent their meaning making at particular places that they bond with through music. Such places, like the creek, bridge, and sap tree are recognizable to those who are familiar with the landscape, and depict the influence of the songlines—if you know a song, you can navigate the land. Learning about the songlines inspired many students to use music as means to depict markers in the landscape—just as some songline melodies can be performed on the clapstick or didgeridoo, the children also transposed their rhythm patterns and melodies to what was available to them in their ecosystem and culture of music making—i.e., filling a bucket with leaves for soft sap and clapping lids together for hard sap. Also, similar to how songlines hold the stories of the people and the eternal spirits who inhabit them, the experiences of the children also hold imaginative tales told by them concerning all of the living and non-living things in the ecosystem, as depicted by the playful language in their imaginative tales. Furthermore, similar to how Long’s landscape art illuminates a shifting relationship between body, sight, and land, the children’s engagement in the natural world brings light to how human and non-human worlds can merge to make music and evoke a symphonic landscape. In this regard, hidden within their music making experiences are subjective connections that the timbres of the natural world made explicit, whereby the heeding ear embraces the world before it as the child moves through space.

5 Conclusion Within the context of music education, most experiences with nature center on activities in the classroom that hinder children from actually engaging with the natural world. Educators can turn to emergent student-centered pedagogies that encourage children to venture into the outdoors, whereby they are able to establish a connection to places in the local that piques their interest. Making space for lived experiences and opportunities to explore nature can foster agency and social participation in children, which can lead to inventive solutions to nurture and protect the environment (Worster & Whitten, 2018). In this inquiry, I sought to illuminate the value of music as an environmental arts pedagogy by providing opportunities for young learners to walk amid the living landscape, and to participate in music activities with the world around them. I turned to the Indigenous songlines of Australia and the compositional practices of Schafer and Adams in order to facilitate pedagogy that enables music making with nature. That foundation supports the compositional practices of children, and allows them to bring light to the subtle yet significant aspects of the environment that are of value to them. The ways in which the students listened to nature were inspired by the thought provoking walks of Thoreau and Aristotle, and supported by the underpinnings of the soundwalk. Westerkamp (2017) believes, “if we can manage to bring together the detailed and creative perceptual curiosity and knowledge of the artist with the detailed inquiry and knowledge of the scientist, it may be possible to deepen our approaches to

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ecological care for the world” (p. 162). Alongside that, Greene (1995) posits, “when we see and hear more we take risks into the unknown. We embark on new avenues for choosing and action where we may gain a sudden sense of new beginnings, and can take an initiative in the light of possibility” (p. 123). Provoking students to listen artfully and scientifically involves honing in with their ears and with an imaginative mindset as they explore a soundscape. Enabling students to listen to the natural world allows them to develop attentive listening skills, and also encourages them to reflect on what those sounds mean to them and to the community in which they live— they critically think about how a sound emerges, why it is important, and its value. Walking experiences supported by music pedagogy can teach children to be mindful of all living and non-living things in the environment, and comprises listening with stillness, patience, and respect in order to hear, feel, and make meaning from a lived experience. A means of showing success in music as an environmental arts pedagogy is through the ways in which children draw others into experiencing their understandings of their lived experiences. For instance, at the end of one of our walks, a parent wrote a letter talking about how his son guided him through the forest after school, and directed him to listen to particulars of the soundscape. During the walk, he was impressed with his son’s descriptive language and details that he himself would have never imagined. His letter illuminates the value in empowering children with a voice and means to take control of their learning and connections with the environment. Thus, children need to be protagonists of their educational experiences in nature so that they are able to cultivate a sense of place attachment, which in turn can result in caring for the world around them. As it is important to support young learners to develop a bond with nature, I believe it would be beneficial to see that bond unfold in a longitudinal study to examine how that relationship through music supports students to care for the environment. With that in mind, Westerkamp (2017) posits, “the more we know about how we listen and what the sounds in a soundscape mean to us, the more we will be able to identify problems in the soundscape and in our perception and treatment of it” (p. 162). As the context of the study was early childhood, I ponder the outcome if a similar study was conducted with older students, as I believe their attention would be focused on protecting the environment, rather than developing a relationship with it. This hypothesis stems from the curiosities and imagination that many older students lack, but are vibrant in young learners. I also wonder how meaningful and significant a nature-based learning experience would be without developing a connection to the environment, as a bond with place can be seen as an initial step towards scaffolding ecological understandings. An environmental arts pedagogy of music can serve to develop place making and place attachment. As children journey again and again to places that are important to them, they not only move through physical space, but actively take part and contribute to the social and cultural dynamics of those places. Through listening and music making in the world around them, children can come to understand more deeply their place within it. Thus, as they engage musically with the landscape, they are propelled forward—as in a song—through expectation and anticipation and toward realization

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of another moment (place) that is intimately bound with and conveyed by preceding instants (Macauley, 2002, p. 216). Alongside that, the proposed pedagogy in this study supports students to participate in ensemble performances with, and in, the natural world. In such endeavors, musical phrases can be perceived as reference points in the landscape that depict significant places that children connect to, as “music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world” (Chatwin, 1987, p. 108). Moreover, when children depart a particular place, either as a performer or listener, their relationship with it has been transformed. In listening to their surroundings and making music with it, there is the hope that children will become aware of how powerful they can be in transforming that place. Therefore, by deepening young learners’ awareness of their connection to the local landscape, walking through music can provide a sounding model to foster pro-ecological behaviour in young learners.

References Adams, J. L. (2009). The place where you go to listen: In search of an ecology of music. Wesleyan University Press. Birrell, C. L. (2007). Meeting country: Deep engagement with place and indigenous culture [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Western Sydney University. Chatwin, B. (1987). The songlines. Viking. Chawla, L. (1992). Childhood place attachments. In I. Altman & S. Low (Eds.), Place attachment (pp. 63–86). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4 Chawla, L., & Derr, V. (2012). The development of conservation behaviors in childhood and youth. In S. Clayton (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of environmental and conservation psychology (pp. 527– 555). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733026.013.0028 Daley, P. (2016, July 4). Indigenous songlines: A beautiful way to think about the confluence of story and time. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://theguardian.com Eisner, E. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. Yale University Press. Ellis, C. (2004). Autoethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Alta Mira Press. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. E. (Eds.). (1996). Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing. AltaMira. Gibson, S., & Cridland, M. (2018). Pedagogy as walking country at Barambah. In P. Renshaw & R. Tooth (Eds.), Diverse pedagogies of place: Educating students in and for local and global environments (pp. 91–114). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315695389-5 Gouzouasis, P. (2008). Toccata on assessment, validity, and interpretation. In S. Springgay, R. L. Irwin, P. Gouzouasis, & C. Leggo (Eds.), Being with a/r/t/ography (pp. 219–230). Sense Publishers. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination. Jossey-Bass Publishers. Herbert, T. (2008). Eco–intelligent education for a sustainable future life. In The contribution of early childhood education to a sustainable society (pp. 63–67). UNESCO. Lasczik Cutcher, A. J. (2018). Moving-with & moving-through homelands, languages & memory: An arts-based walkography. Sense Publishers. Lasczik Cutcher, L. & Irwin, R. L. (2017). Walkings-through paint: A c/a/r/tography of slow scholarship. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2017.131 0680 Long, R. (2005). Walking the Line. Thames & Hudson.

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Macauley, D. (2002). Walking the urban environment. In G. Backhaus & J. Murungi (Eds.), Transformations of Urban and Suburban Landscapes (pp. 193–226). Rowman and Littlefield Press. Muir, J., & Wolfe, L. M. (1938). John of the mountains: The unpublished journals of John Muir. University of Wisconsin Press. O’Rourke, K. (2013). Walking and mapping: Artists as cartographers. MIT Press. Pink, S., Hubbard, P., O’Neil, M., & Radley, A. (2010). Walking across disciplines: From ethnography to arts practice. Visual Studies, 25(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/147258610036 06670 Rinaldi, C. (2006). In dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, researching and learning. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203317730 Rousell D., Cutcher A. L., Cook P. J., & Irwin R. L. (2018). Propositions for an environmental arts pedagogy: A/r/tographic experimentations with movement and materiality. In A. CutterMackenzie, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), Research handbook on Childhoodnature (pp. 1815–1843). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67286-1_95 Scarre, C. & Lawson, G. (2006). Archaeoacoustics. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Schafer. R. M. (1969). The new soundscape: A handbook for the modern music teacher. BMI Canada Limited. Shimoni, D. (2012). Songbirdsongs and Inuksuit. Creating an ecocentric music. In B. Herzogenrath (Ed.), The farthest place: The music of John Luther Adams (pp. 235–268). Northeastern University Press. Smith, G. (2002). Place based education: Learning to be where we are. Kappan, 83(8), 584–595. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170208300806 Sobel, D. (1996). Beyond ecophobia: Reclaiming the heart in nature education. The Orion USA. Sobel, D. (2004). Place-based education: Connecting classroom and community. Nature and Listening, 4, 1–7. Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin Books. Somerville, M. (2010). A place pedagogy for global contemporaneity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(3), 326–344. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2008.00423.x Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: WalkingLab (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315231914 Thoreau, H. D. (1906). The writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal (B. Torrey, Ed.). Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Thoreau, H. D. (1992). The writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal. 1851–1852. (Vol. 4, L. N. Neufeldt, & N. C. Simmons., Eds.). Princeton University Press. Tooth, R., & Renshaw, P. (2018). Children becoming emotionally attuned to nature through diverse place-responsive pedagogies. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), Research handbook on Childhoodnature (pp. 1423–1443). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-319-67286-1_77 Triggs, V., Irwin, R. L., & Leggo, C. (2014). Walking art: Sustaining ourselves as arts educators. Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art, 3(1), 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1386/vi.3.1.21_1 Turner, K., & Freedman, B. (2004). Music and environmental studies. The Journal of Environmental Education, 36(1), 45–52. https://doi.org/10.3200/JOEE.36.1.45-52 Westerkamp, H. (1974). Soundwalking. Sound Heritage, 3(4), 18–27. Westerkamp, H. (2017). SOUNDWORK: The natural complexities of environmental listening: One soundwalk—Multiple responses. BC Studies, 194, 149–162. Worster, A. M., & Whitten, J. (2018). Responsive environmental education: Kaleidoscope of places in the Anthropocene. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), Research handbook on Childhoodnature (pp. 661–684). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-319-67286-1_128

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Yanko, M. (2019). Learners’ identity through soundscape composition: Extending the Pedagogies of Loris Malaguzzi with music pedagogy. LEARNing Landscapes, 12(1), 271–284. https://doi. org/10.36510/learnland.v12i1.994 Yanko, M., & Yap, P. (2020). A symbiotic link between music, movement, and social emotional learning: Mindful learning in early learners. LEARNing Landscapes, 13(1), 249–264. https:// doi.org/10.36510/learnland.v13i1.1018

Matthew Yanko is a lecturer (Music Education) in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on environmental arts education, social and emotional learning, and formative assessment. Matthew has been a music specialist educator for over fourteen years and has been actively involved in many District initiatives, workshops, and presentations representing and advocating for the transformation of music education, curriculum, assessment, and reporting.

Entangled Subjectivities in Muslim Daughters’ Video Walks: Affective Narratives of Transitions from a Postcolonial Feminist Multisensory Ethnography Montserrat Rifà-Valls and Sara López-Ruiz Abstract In this chapter we reflect on walking ethnography to understand the affective narratives of transitions that shape the subjectivities of Muslim girls using participatory video research methods. In the Trans-Emigra research project, we conceptualised the entangled subjectivities of Muslim girls as produced by intensive flows and assemblages between bodies, sounds, affects and movements; and consequently, we conducted an ethnography to create video-stories of self through their walking narratives. A postcolonial feminist multisensory approach is developed, whereas the analysis focuses on the ways these girls reinhabit, transit and circulate, which are made by directions, lines of flight and disorientations in different urban educational spaces. Walking ethnography and walking methodologies concentrate on the interpretation of place-making and identity-making from sensory inquiry/sensory experiences of place, and embodied ways of knowing. In our research, the Muslim migrant girls have narrated their transitional life experiences using the techniques of ‘walking with’ and video-tours of home, events, and urban spaces. Particularly, we address the embodied practices engaged in the constitution of place through the filmic/video-graphic pieces of walking, as a radical way of a multisensory inquiry aiming to disrupt adultcentrism, colonialism and expanding the limits of qualitative research from posthumanism. Keywords Girls’ identities · Walking ethnography · Visual Narratives · Muslim community · Multi-sensory inquiry

M. Rifà-Valls (B) Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] S. López-Ruiz Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_8

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1 Trans-Emigra Research Context: Exploring the Construction of Girls’ Subjectivities and Parenting with Muslim Families In this chapter, we will interpret the walking narratives –or the narratives of walking— that emerged from the Trans-Emigra project, focusing on the affective narratives of transitions that shape the entangled subjectivities of Muslim girls in a participatory video-ethnography.1 A posthumanist approach has opened a space to rethink subjectivity and agency on the basis of relationality and entanglement, as something constituted by a multiplicity of encounters between human, non-human agents, and the environment (Braidotti, 2013), that take place as we walk with the Muslim girls. The main goal in Trans-Emigra was to analyse how transnational educational spaces intervene through agency and parenting in the production of social and cultural identities of Muslim daughters. Families involved in the project were from Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, and Guinea Conakry. Our research explored principally how girls and families are affected by the challenges of the migration processes when they settle in Barcelona, and how they confront educational and social changes. We interpret the Muslim girls’ stories from the non-anthropocentric subject of feminisms and posthumanism, situated in the onto-epistemological turn for postqualitative research (see Rifà-Valls & Bertran, 2020), in which “such a science is not only less imperialistic but, in meeting the world ‘half a way’ (Barad, 2007), more in touch with the contingencies, relationalities, instabilities, and history” (Lather, 2016, p. 129). Theoretically, the article entangles with the affective turn, inspiring us in postcolonial queer phenomenology by Sarah Ahmed; and new materialism, in the terms of agential realism by Karen Barad and the incorporeal by Elizabeth Grosz. Converging with the biographical-narrative and ethnographic approaches, we assume that: “identity is multiple within itself; or rather, identity is diffracted through itself –identity is diffraction/différance/differing/deferring/differentiating” (Barad, 2011: 125–126). We were in touch with the life experiences of girls, mainly we met groups of sisters (aged 6–12 years), as daughters of immigrant families from Muslim communities. The repertoire of walking narratives in Trans-Emigra avoids adultcentrism, and in line with this postcolonial feminist perspective, we used visual participatory methods as democratic tools (Mitchell et al., 2017). In this process of applying visual decolonial research methods, where methodologies of walking have emerged, we have experimented with different techniques, such as: video-tours, home-tours, event-tours, walking with video, interviews while walking, self-filming, and drifting through public and institutional space. Recent studies had revealed the link between the study of mobilities and the migratory aesthetics (Bal, cited in Rifà-Valls & Empain, 2020), as well as the significant role of arts and participatory methods in narrating the transits and escape routes of migrant and refugees (O’Neill et al., 2010). Here, we 1 I + D + I Trans-Emigra. Migrations and Transnational Spaces of Education: Construction of identities of girls and parenting in Muslim Families in Spain. Ref. edu2016-78958-r, MINECO (Spain). See: https://webs.uab.cat/atlas.

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analyse the Trans-Emigra narratives produced by using walking methodologies, and we approach the entangled subjectivities of Muslim daughters, to understand their video-stories of self in their travelling narratives from sensory studies and affect theory (van Alphen & Jirsa, 2019). The chapter interprets these walking narratives to explore affects in transition through the themes that emerge from these video-graphic pieces conducted in three different territories in Barcelona. The seventeen girls who participated in these activities come from seven different families, whose origins are: Pakistan (6 girls); Morocco (2); Guinea Conakry (6), Senegal (1), and a mixed family from Morocco and Pakistan (2). Firstly, we noted that the ambivalent identity positions that appeared, challenged the cultural and religious references; secondly, that the girls were under pressure because they needed to achieve good grades to stabilise their trajectories of success; and thirdly, we observed the digital repertoires as spaces in which agencies were being produced from the possibilities of reconfiguring entanglements (Lather, 2016). Specifically, narrative analysis revisited from post-qualitative research (Arndt & Tesar, 2019) was applied to a quarter of the narratives produced during the research process in Trans-Emigra, only to those created using critical walking inquiry. The sixteen video-graphic pieces of/by walking revealed five different themes: identities, bodies and popular culture (6 pieces); identities, perceptions, decisions and memories (3); transitions and perceptions in public space (between educational spaces, between other space) (5); transitions and perceptions at/of home (4); and events (festivals, schools and community) (3). Five of these works were coded twice, and these themes guided the process of structuring and writing this chapter.

2 Setting to Music: The Entangled Subjectivities and Agencies of the Walking Narratives In accordance with Ahmed (2006) from postcolonial queer phenomenology, the orientations we hold toward others constitute the spatiality of age, sexuality, gender and race—and their intersections (Hammond, 2018). In Trans-Emigra, Amira—a participant who temporarily moved to Pakistan—recorded a few pieces displaying her trajectory from home to school by car in Lahore, sitting near the driver (Fig. 1 central). At this point, we did not imagine that her journey to Pakistan would not be a failed attempt “to collect data”, but a transnational drift: an illustration of global mobilities, and of children’s identities, which are also mobile. Through these videos, we felt what she was perceiving as a narrator—as in a new tale for Night on Earth (Jarmusch, 1991)—the resonances created while viewing them have also mobilised our experiences as researchers and citizens. We hear feminine voices inside the car, and the insistent honking of horns, we drive behind motorbikes and vehicles, and pass a market with many people walking through the blurred sidewalks with bags and packages. The city becomes chaotic and exotic to the Western gaze. Then, the

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Fig. 1 Still frames from the three walking narratives: making identities, embodied cities, and popular culture. Trans-Emigra ©

noisy traffic outside, contrasts with the silent stability of the camera, leaning on the dashboard, as Amira takes the car glass contours as a frame (or mirror) reflecting the urban landscape, a choreography of bodies and machines (Delgado, 1999, 2007) circulating or ceasing. During Trans-Emigra, Amira also sent a TikTok of an event-tour reflecting a farewell party in Pakistan: a dynamic piece revolving around furniture, clothes, food and drinks, a couple eating cake, flowers and balloons (Fig. 1 left). She included herself in the story, by holding two speech bubbles with “Selfie” and “Girls just wanna have fun.” The song Con Altura by Rosalía, she selected after identifying with the Catalan singer, focused our attention. Entangled subjectivities produce/are produced by affects, gestures, and relationalities. Therefore, we explore the ways through which the Muslim girls reinhabit, traverse and circulate in the city by approaching how directions, lines of flight and disorientations constitute their bodies, affects and desires (Ahmed, 2006; Massey, 2005). Music is ever present in the girls’ lives, both at home and during the urban itineraries. Entangled subjectivities become hybrids at the junction with popular music culture, as affecting agency and cultural memory across the spatiotemporal axis (Bennet & Rogers, 2016). Two of the Moroccan girls played video-clips on YouTube, combining Arabic, Anglo-Saxon and Latin American pop rock, for example: Girls can do anything by Manal-Taj; Road to Russia by Nadwa Rashid; Grupo Cravata; and Grade School Dance Battle. Boys and girls by Scottdw. Materialist feminist contributions expand the notion of discourse tied only to culture, to include other materialities, such as bodies, technologies, virtuality, discursivity and imaginaries, that generate multiple and complex layers and connections in the entangled subjectivities from which agencies emerge (Barad, 2007). A central issue in the feminist politics of becoming is the dislocation from established positions or sites, which in this case, are not only symbolic but also physical. By dissolving the subjectivities of the researchers and participants, and experimenting with walking as “moving”, we seek to capture “the complex entanglements through which the feminist research becomes” (Childers, 2013: 602).

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Grounded in the new materialism (Grosz, 2017), an ethnography of the fluid interprets permeable and porous subjectivities, the hybridization of bodies—both desired and projected—and gender and spatial relations. Then, through digital technology, the girls’ subjectivities appear as entangled with the texts of popular culture, in this case, the lyrics of a reggaeton song performed by Zahira in Barcelona. During the night-time walk, when coming back home after the Quranic lessons, Zahira films her sister’s and the researchers walking, while speaking into the camera (Fig. 1 right). She declares what she likes, as she recites the lyrics of Celoso by Lele Pons, taught to her by a friend. The cultural and religious space we left is transformed during this urban transit by the materiality of the footage that Zahira eventually produces. Zahira’s performance embodied the transnational claim by Muslim girls (and women) of walking at night (Arora, 2019), and simultaneously, questioned the adultcentric and Eurocentric gaze on Pakistan and Indian girls in Western cities. In repeating the lyrics, she also subtly alters it as she embodies her transit as a Muslim girl in a Latino song/town. Here, both, the researcher’s and the girl’s subjectivities are transformed by walking: After dinner, we decided to go to the Quran lessons. It has been a long time since I asked for it, telling the teacher beforehand, and they say I can go without any inconvenience. By the way, we had the same conversation as usual, that is: the teacher used to be angry and scolded, but Zahira and Zineb expect she will change with my presence. [Here there is a description of the room for the Quranic lessons, as well as the dialogue between the researcher and the teacher, who complains heartily about the short time students spend with their families, after a long day at school] When we get home, I tell the girls that the teacher is kind, and they insist on the opposite. I leave thinking about the lack of coherence between the teacher’s words and the way the girls think she exercises her authority. The thinking about what happened does not stop as I said goodbye to go to catch the subway to my house. Then, I take a place, sit down in a seat, and review the clips we filmed today. The song sung by Zahira forces me to quickly turn down the volume and look around. But the subway is almost empty. (Sara’s fieldwork diary, 18/4/2018)

I like this song my friend told me. We play games every day, and I practise with her. I’m going to start now. She told me and asked me to learn the lyrics: “5 in the morning, you call me Just to see who’s in my bed I have no time for your drama Do not call me at 5 A.M But second, I’m probably going on a rumba with my sister I want to dance this night I’m going to enjoy without your objections It makes you jealous if you see me with another I do what I what, I only please myself You get jealous when I dance with another man I’m not theirs, nor you neither I know you are jealous, and I see you And you look at me, I wiggle You get jealous when I dance with another man I do what I want, I just enjoy it I do it rom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom…” (Excerpt from Zahira’s video-tour, 18/4/2018)

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This clip also supports the idea that “the periphery-city discourse adds another layer of complexity to this process of music spatialization” (Bennett & Rogers, 2016, p. 182). The re-learned song is a mode of resistance and reappropriation of the “mestiza” and gendered-sexualized bodies at the city borders, as Rosalia’s song in Amira’s play demonstrates. By setting music to images, they make visible the collective identities as European Muslim girls (Rifà-Valls, 2009). Furthermore, Childers’ (2013) deconstruction of the racialization of urban space, and “urban” education— for African American youth in the US, and here—makes visible the margins of the city, and the places where no one wants to live, or the ‘undesirable quarters’. Even the “urban capitalizes on and solidifies historic and racialized narratives of the always failing, culturally deprived student of colour, and due to the historical context of segregation” (Childers, 2013, p. 604), these narratives set to music reverse the expectations of failure for Muslim girls, who feel integrated into education and social life.

3 Touching the City: Postcolonial Memories, Perceptions and Decisions In Trans-Emigra, we experimented with methods to decentre the girls as subjects/voices in the scenes, and to look for non adultcentric and decolonizing modes: we interrupted the linear correspondence between the girls’ answers and the researchers’ questions during the roundabout interviews, by exploring intra-action, while co-creating visual itineraries. Drawing on a posthumanist reflection on the relationship between agency and voice, the interview is not a technique oriented to certainty and scrutiny, the results of which could be overinterpreted, it is the product that emerges from the interaction between the interviewee and the researcher. Voices are not pre-existent, authentic or unique, they exist only because of the encounter, and this is constitutive of the participants’ agency (Mazzei, 2013). In the series of video-tours, the shapes of entanglements and interruptions emerge from intraaction between subjectivities and spaces, and as Mazzei (2013) has noted, in a ‘voice without organs’ (VwO), the desires and fragments flow in an infinite becoming. The video-tours decentred the interview as a research device, by changing the norms of structured interviews, and suspending the fetishization of bodies/voices, as the following excerpts and images (Fig. 2) illustrate.

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Zahira: We had a mobile toy, and Zineb and I used to steal the phones. When I was little, I used to go into my aunt’s bedroom, I take her lipsticks, break them, and I paint my lips… And they caught me Sara: Well, that’s normal, you painted your lips! […] [Sara is in charge of the little sister on the street and talks to her too] Zahira: I don’t remember anything from when I was little, I don’t know why… I don’t remember anything [we hear the footsteps and the sound of the backpack on wheels] Sara: Really? If you have a lot of pictures from your childhood… They might bring back some memories Zahira: I arrived when I was 4 years old, then we came back, and then we came back here and we never went, 8 or 7 years ago Sara: ¿To Pakistan? Zahira: [Assent]. And now I’m going to travel to Pakistan with my mom Sara: When? [Her twin in the background says: Forever] Zahira: Not forever, she lies. When the first semester is over and we have holidays, we go […] Sara: And Zineb does not go with you? Zahira: No, she does not Sara: And why will only you go to Pakistan? Zahira: I don’t know. I’ll go with my mom, Zineb will be here with my dad, and Harim will be here with my brother [we hear the other sisters talking]. When Harim went to Pakistan with my mom I cried… Uy, they woke up because my mom left to the airport, and I was crying, I couldn’t stop crying Sara: And why did she fly to Pakistan? Zahira: But when my little sister left, we were calm Sara: And without your mom -how did you feel? [more voices from the little sister] Zahira: Very bad, the food was ghastly. Right now, my dad is a good cooker, but before he used to mix the ingredients. I remember the first meal was vegetables… (Transcription of the interview with Zahira)

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Ingrid: Take care of yourself, eh… Nahla: Aliya, you can cross the street, there are no cars Ingrid: Very good, look, is green Nahla: Now we will do a race. Whoever can run up to that wall wins. You and me Ingrid: Do you still have energy? Nahla: You and me. One, two, go! [runs and jumps with the camera, laughs] Nahla: Oh just one thing [she run], Íngrid you don’t participate Ingrid: Oh, I won! Ah not Nahla: No, I won. And now the three… [they keep continued running and jumping, laughing and breathing] Aliya: Nahla! Ingrid: You are faster than the wind, do you still have energy to run? Aliya: “If you call me, we’ll go to your house…” [She sings “Sin Pijama” by Becky G. and Natti Natasha] Ingrid: We have to go over? Aliya: Yes Nahla: Now, we have to pick up the backpacks we left there Ingrid: What’s that? Nahla: Our backpacks. That’s the bar, the bar is full. There is our school. And that’s Teresa and who else… Ingrid: Wow! Nahla: There’s also the… [they enter a shop] (Transcription of the video-tour with Nahla and Aliya)

We also escape the fixity of place as something universal, and highlight, phenomenologically, how places are constituted in multiple ways depending on who is experimenting them—the embodied experiences of place. Through perceiving the multisensory environment, we decentralize events and observe what occurs around

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Fig. 2 Frames from two interviews while walking: being, playing and living the space. TransEmigra ©

bodies, beyond the practices, the reasons for meeting, or the conversation we are holding on, or even, the destiny or goal we have in mind. In other words, we can think of the transits as moments in which things happen, most of which are intangible and imperceptible, but that intervene in the way we construct the sites and the memories of the places we pass through when walking. In these two video-tours, the interview as conversation took different materialities. In the first case (left piece), the interview took place after school hours. Here the researcher interviewed and filmed the two twins and the little sister—in a casual conversation. They talked about girls’ expectations of secondary school, the emotionality of the unfamiliar spaces, their hopes as pedestrians, the children’s memories, and what it felt like to be in Barcelona or in Pakistan. In the second case (right piece), both the girls and the researchers played, ran and laughed. The children’s agencies emerged as they walked, relaxed through familiar streets, incarnating “the sensory sociality” of urban walking ethnography (Pink, 2008). The interview became an assemblage or mixture of steps, gestures, streets, voices, places, and stories through which “the forces of desire” acts (Mazzei, 2013, quoting Deleuze & Guattari). This walking ethnography based on walking methodologies (Yi’En, 2014; Springgay & Truman, 2017) focuses on the interpretation of place-making and identity-making from sensory inquiry/sensory experiences of place and generates embodied ways of knowing. In Trans-Emigra, Muslim migrant girls have narrated their transitional experiences of life in an experimental ethnography, using the techniques of ‘walking with’ and video-tours of home, events and urban spaces (Pink, 2007, 2013). In particular, we have analysed how sensory embodied practices are involved in the constitution of place (Pink, 2015, p. 128), by re-viewing their selffilmed narratives, in which entangled subjectivities are produced as intensive flows and assemblages between bodies, affects and movements. In this walking ethnography the “film/video making context serves as a process through which people, things and sensory experiences are drawn together” (Pink, 2007, p. 245). Furthermore, walking as a radical mode of multisensory inquiry disrupts adultcentrism and colonialism, and expands the boundaries of our research practices through the incorporation of arts and music in drifting, dancing, performing or playing as modes of

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narrating the embodied and emplaced experiences of living and inhabiting in our ordinary cities (Robinson, 2006).

4 Affected by Posthumanist Ethnography: Place and Space as Multisensory Phenomena Sarah Pink’s sensory ethnography is a critical method that combines visual and auditory data with other sensory experiences, to transcend the idea that anything can be viewed or listened to in isolation. Sensory ethnography, or an ethnography of affects, would emphasize the sensory, emotional, and the aspects of everyday life that are not normally shown or analysed. This methodological design “enables a major understanding of identities, moralities, values, beliefs and worries” (Pink, 2007, p. 244) of the girls as participants in the research. From this perspective, sensory ethnography incorporates participants’ perceptions as a reconceptualisation of participant observation from traditional anthropology, by challenging the supremacy of the eye (Pink, 2015). In light of this, analysing multisensorial experiences means not only paying attention to the perceptions of research subjects, but also to our own perceptions as ethnographers. The camera is not exclusively an objective extension of the eye, rather than a source for reflecting how bodies and multisensorialities are mutually affected. In our research, we explore place as a multisensory phenomenon (Casey, 1996; Ingold, 2000; Pink, 2015) where we examine both the immaterial and material elements, that intra-act with the production of space. Moreover, walking and bodily motility cannot be separated from bodies that feel, see, smell, hear, and so on. Videotours and video-ethnographies form part of the multisensory experiences that define the transits and spaces as contextualized sites. This focus on sensoriality and touch is related to a post-representational ethnographic approach, as it takes care of practices, materialities, sensitiveness and the ways in which all of these co-construct our reality (Sumartojo, et al., 2016). Furthermore, our mode of being with the girls in research that allow us to be affected, the indirect way we participate in the different spaces, the abstract reflections we elaborate from what we observe, as well as the experiences of watching, touching, smelling, feeling and tasting, which are modelled by culture, transport us and convey different meanings that touch us and constitute the modes we perceive the inquired reality. Watching Youtube videos on TV when we get home from school becomes a routine that begins while we wait for the meal to be ready at the dining table and becomes peripheral as the girls eat and tell me how their day was at school. After dinner is warmed up, the place gives off a delightful smell of species that makes me hungry. I don’t get used to the chilly taste, but they offer me a glass of orange juice (...). We finish the snack and Zahira plays the video clip song they will dance at the graduation party. Before that, she made sure that her brother doesn’t hear it, because she says that he doesn’t allow her to listen to the music she wants. After playing the song, I ask them if they know the meaning of what they are dancing. They do know. And that is why the brother doesn’t allow them to play the song. (Sara’s fieldwork diary, 27/3/2019)

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As part of a posthumanist multisensory ethnography, the home-tours provide evidence that the materialities we come into contact with, such as surfaces, objects, aromas, and sounds, constitute our sensory embodied, and affective routines in everyday life. In the previous description, where the girls’ bodies are oriented toward the TV, the experience of singing and dancing the song Con calma goes beyond the content of the lyrics and is related to the affective dimension of media and popular culture. Existing works show how music is used to create a sense of self and home (Pink, 2004, 2012). In this sense, the songs performed by Zahira, the artist chosen by Amira, and the video-clips watched by Nadwa and Farah, configure the girls’ entangled subjectivities, produced by gestures, affects and relationalities. On this occasion, the girls’ socialization at school and their desires and shame in dancing this music, along with other videoclips they see from their countries of origin, are connected to the parental role Zahira’s older brother performs when they are at home, and also, to their mother who provides the food. All of that gathers the multisensory experiences that define home as a specific site and are also part of the event. Moreover, the production of space leads us to conceptualize “the site as event,” and consequently, “far from being static sites, [places] are themselves continually changing in accordance with their own proper dynamism” (Casey, 1996, p. 44). Significantly, Casey (1996) suggests two points that constitute the places as such, as we know them. On one hand, he believes that the centrality of bodies is key to the production of places because they draw sites from movement and in relation to the multisensory experiences with the environment. On the other hand, the ability to join bodies and objects, time and space, also makes sites as events. Moreover, the different objects, people and encounters we converge, and the discourses or reflections they entail, are also components of place-making and identity-making in a posthumanist multisensory ethnography. The following conversation occurred during the Eid alAdha celebration, when the girls of two Pakistani families went to the mall, after eating pizza with their mothers at home, to spend their money on gifts (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 Still frames from the Eid al-Adha narrative: from home to the public space. Trans-Emigra ©

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Zahira: [Showing some books] This is a famous TikToker. This is Bellido. This is Naim Darrechi, he’s super handsome and he’s also a famous TikToker. She’s the one who does transitions, who… she’s so famous too. Guy, I want to buy the book! [...] Yasmin: [Showing a colouring book]. It costs 3e. Sara: But, how much money do you have? Yasmin: 2e... Sara: Then, you can buy this. The… soft. [...] Mariam: Roblox, Roblox!! Sara: ¿What is Roblox? ¿Is this a game? Zineb: Yes, it is a game, I made it. [...] Zahira: Oh, come on, I want to buy all TikTok’s books! (Transcription of the conversation in the mall, 04/06/2019)

At home, the static scene is only interrupted by girls, Hasna, Zineb and Zahira talking, explaining how they are preparing their bodies for the celebration: taking a bath, making themselves up, painting their nails, trying on clothes, and so on. But in the mall, they run, scream, and pick out presents. Here the power of the space is its own dynamism. The movement is not confined to the inside of the house, but is extended through the different spaces we cross, we walk. In this way, the Eid al-Adha event is transformed when we enter the Alcampo mall, and the girls go to the children’s and youth literature section. The event is determined not only by family and the traditions of the Muslim celebration, but also by the building, the mall, and the objects: toys, stuffed animals, and famous TikToker’s books that they want to find, take, touch and buy. In this sense, relationalities that emanate from bodies, objects, spaces, and movements ensure that new themes emerge, which would not otherwise arise from the static scene of the beginning, sitting at home on the sofa eating dinner. All of this could be considered a multisensory experience, due to “cognition, action and senses are intertwined, always embodied, happening within bodies” (Powell, 2010, p. 541), and at the same time, bodies in motion constitute that particular moment or space as an event.

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5 Children Bodies’ Orientations Toward Objects in Public Racialized-Gendered Space Place and space as social phenomena allow us to see how the spatial intra-acts with the social and is configured through a series of entanglements and assemblages. Soja (2010) argued that injustice is embedded in space, in a multiscalar sense, and that “the socialized geographies of (in)justice significantly affect our lives, creating lasting structures of unevenly distributed advantage and disadvantage” (p. 20). Therefore, he advocates for a spatial consciousness to think how the ordinary functioning of cities generates power relations projecting an unequal and unfair distribution of resources, services and infrastructures. In other words, it is not about how social life configures or determines space, rather than how space plays a role—or intra-acts with the social—in the production and reproduction of inequalities. Spatial injustice is also mediated by racialization and ethnification, and by how bodies orient themselves in certain directions, which affects how they occupy space (Ahmed, 2006). Furthermore, Ahmed (2006) delves into the intra-action between the spatial and the social, analysing how public spaces are constituted by the habitual action of bodies, so that spaces acquire the shape of the bodies through our gestures, occupations, and transits. With “habit” she refers to “dispositions, and tendencies, acquired by the frequent repetition of an act” (Ahmed, 2006: 130). Paraphrasing Fanon and MerleauPonty, Ahmed’s queer phenomenology assumes that when something becomes part of the habitual, it ceases to be an object of perception, and simply, begins to function: Habits, in other words, do not just involve the repetition of “tending toward,” but also involve the incorporation of that which is “tended toward” into the body. These objects extend the body by extending what it can reach. Reachability is hence an effect of the habitual, in the sense that what is reachable depends on what bodies “take in” as objects that extend their bodily motility, becoming like a second skin. (Ahmed, 2006, p. 131)

In this way, spaces take on the skin of bodies that inhabit them, taking shape by orienting or ‘tending toward’ some objects more than others. In one of the video-tours, this process led us to go across the spaces—a shopping mall, the elementary school, the kindergarten, and the family service located in a secondary school– as “devices of orientation”, through which Farah and Nadwa transited along with her mother and little brother, drawing lines that indicate the edges of belonging that constrain but also habilitate human action (agency). The girls’ and families’ movements through the different spaces enable their bodies to be in touch with different objects. Simultaneously, the existence of political and unfair policies distributes bodies unequally, and we can also fail in the orientations, by making things could move, by proving that something or a situation could happen rather than in mere reproduction. The notes of the fieldwork diary written in the same interstitial mall where a Moroccan family goes, question the minor presence of Muslim racialized bodies in Barcelona, and this reflection has changed the ethnographer’s orientations:

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Fieldwork does not begin and end at this family’s house. It ends at the mall, when I write something in the diary and begins at my house, when I take the clothes out of the drying machine, before I take the subway (...). The family doesn’t go out often, the mother doesn’t go to the Mosque because she is responsible for the kids (...). The second distance I felt is related to the conception of public space. Today, my son had a birthday party in a park and tomorrow his school party. The reclusion or confinement at home -Is it higher in the poorest families? Is this an issue of racialization and ethnification of spaces? Are there different models of schools and families in the same city? (...) I wish to enter a shop before leaving the mall –because I recently moved and I’m looking for home accessories. I think that this family’s house is better conditioned than mine, and I need to transit through a non-place to get back to my reality. Morocco was also present in our conversations this afternoon: some trips, memories, and life there. (Montse’s fieldwork diary 25-05-2018, cited in front of Media Markt)

If spatial justice (Soja, 2010) pursues to resolve spatial manifestations of justice and injustice, and therefore, interrogates how to initiate equitable distribution of access to spaces, resources and opportunities, we believe that walking routes and transitions between spaces can work as enablers of this transformation. Affective narratives of transitions between different spaces also generate new opportunities for constructing Muslim girls’ selves and learning from the directiveness of moms’ and girls’ bodies, emotions and desires (as observed in Fig. 4). For families and daughters—like Akanke and her sisters, Farah and Nadwa (see Fig. 4)—walking distance to school places is the path to reach educational success and social integration as a Muslim girl/community. Walking enabled the girls to rethink their subjectivity, affecting the space for the Other, while touching, playing with, and connecting with the Other—adults, children, objects or desires. Ahmed (2006) uses the concept of ‘mixed orientations’ in the context of the possibility of new identities emerging from the textures of everyday life, in the sense of touching other bodies

Fig. 4 Still frames from two different video-tours: Girls’ orientations in the public space. TransEmigra ©

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and objects to create hybridization. This hybridization is a third space according to Bhabha (1994), which is produced by the multiple points of contact or the encounter with the different lines we cross. Consequently, we emphasise the connection between spatial justice and transitionality as modes of possibility for self-construction, as well as modes of expanding the “normalised” bodies, to re-signify the lines that unequally divide or create spatiality and make spaces “more habitable” to the extent of amplifying the surfaces occupied by the bodies. If “we also consider ‘institutions’ as orientation devices” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 132), then Muslim girls, with their racializedgendered transits and taking up public places as children, also transform the whiteness and gendered-adultcentric orientations of urban educational spaces.

6 Conclusions The video-tours have created innovative modes of narrating the entangled girls’ subjectivities, and, at the same time, enacted spaces for re-thinking the self. From this perspective, subjectivity became discontinuous, and the agential cuts evidence the affective flux circulating through the different spaces. Methodologically, the narratives of walking enable to interpret subjectivities from non-linearity and disruption, by focusing on the intra-actions of bodies with the multiple elements—objects, music, places, memories, technology, performances—that we encounter and perceive while walking and moving. Consequently, the materiality of fieldwork is constitutive of relationality or intra-action, making visible new transnational identities that revert the exclusion of racialized and gendered bodies and create emerging narratives of otherness based on the identities and transitions of Muslim girls. In addition, we took distance from an “imperialistic science” to experiment with a postcolonial feminist multisensory ethnography and understand the girls’ agencies using walking methodologies, through which: we approach to the entangled subjectivities from their popular culture in everyday life; we improve the orientations of research with walking techniques that have transformed the processes of interviewing, observing and filming; and, we reflect on the affective video-stories that narrate the multiple positions for these girls in public racialised and engendered spaces. Specifically, in the video-graphic narratives produced by Amira, Zineb, Zahira, Hasna, Yasmin, Mariam, Nahla, Aliya, Nadwa, Farah, Akanke and their sisters, ethnification and hybridation are performed while walking. If hybridity means expanding our bodies and re-signifying spaces, we can conclude that the entangled subjectivities of the Muslim girls in the visual narratives of walking constantly reinvent their cultural identities by constituting the performative narrative of agencies.

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Rifà-Valls, M., & Bertran, M. (2020). Epistemologías del self. In J. Sancho, et al. (Coord.), Caminos y derivas para otra investigación educativa y social. Octaedro (Chapter 8) Rifà-Valls, M., & Empain, J. (2020). In-betweenness on moving images. Six experimental tactics of video-ethnography to narrate South-Asian immigrant girls’ subjectivities. Ethnography and Education, 15(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2019.1631867 Robinson, J. (2006). Ordinary cities. Between modernity and development. Routledge. Soja, E. W. (2010). Seeking spatial justice. University of Minnesota Press, United States of America. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: WalkingLab. Routledge. Sumartojo, S., Pink, S., Lupton, D., & LaBond, C. H. (2016). The affective intensities of datafied space. Emotion, Space and Society, 21, 33–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esmospa.2016.10.004 van Alphen, E., & Jirsa, T. (2019). How to do things with affects. Affective triggers in aesthetic forms and cultural practices. Koninklijke Brill. Yi’En, C. (2014). Telling stories of the city: Walking ethnography, affective materialities, and mobile encounters. Space and Culture, 17(3), 211–223.

Montserrat Rifà-Valls Associate Professor (Serra Hunter fellow) in Visual Arts Education at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Ph.D. in Philosophy and Education Sciences (UB), after completing her degree in Fine Arts, she specialized in curriculum studies, diversity and visual arts education. She is currently a researcher at the Centre for Studies and Research in Migration (CER-MIGRATION), where she participates in the group atlas—Critical Intersections in Education. She has published in Ethnography and Education, Visual Inquiry, International Journal of Education through Art, Gender and Education and Visual Arts Research. She teaches in the Degrees of Early Childhood and Primary Education, in the Degree in Socio-Cultural Studies of Gender and in the official Master’s in Research in Education (MURE). She has been a visiting researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA, UV) and teacher at the University of Hamburg (Germany), Odyssey (Belgium) and University College Copenhagen (Denmark). Sara López-Ruiz Graduated in Primary Education and studied a Master’s degree in Research in Education (MURE), where she specialized in art, body and movement. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat de Lleida (UdL). She also belong to the research group atlas— Critical Intersections in Education. She has taught in the Degrees of Early Childhood and Primary Education, and in the Degree in Socio-Cultural Studies of Gender at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She finished her Ph.D. in research in education through the arts, focusing on vulnerable youth, mobile identities and digital photography. Her research topics are: visual culture and education, the construction of identity and gender in educational contexts using visual research methodologies and ethnography.

Walking lutruwita/Tasmania: Navigating Place Relationships Through Moving and Making Antonia Aitken

Abstract A growing discussion among artists, academia, and the community more broadly introduces the need to pursue embodied research and teaching methodologies that nurture consensual and reciprocal dialogue with place. Mobility is emerging as an important concept and practice for shifting settler desires from home-place attachments towards models of fluidly and multiplicity. Mobility dissolves seemingly impermeable boundaries, revealing a complex co-mingling of time; leading to new ways of experiencing the body in place. This is an understanding already familiar to many Indigenous ontologies and critical place theorists. In lutruwita/Tasmania a number of non-Indigenous artists are exploring how creative research methodologies that combine walking, writing and making can cultivate intercultural relations through imaginative and restorative ways of being with and knowing place. While acknowledging that walking practices are not exempt from contestation when considering histories of invasion, walking is presented here as a critical art of inquiry that has the potential to lead to positions of ethical responsiveness and collective responsibility. Keywords Walking methodologies · Embodied drawing · Critical-place inquiry · Settler-colonialism · Non-linear time · Decolonisation lutruwita / Tasmania is an ancient place, imprinted with the geological markers of continental drift, epochal climatic shifts, of sea rises and falls, and the evolution of unique and remarkable life supporting ecosystems. As I walk, I am aware of moving along millennia old human and non-human tracks. Pathways shaped by a complex interweaving of relations; impressions formed by the cadence, speed and weight of many moving bodies in direct relation with the ground. (Aitken, 2018, p. 8)

The walking body moves with place in a rhythmic synchronicity of breath, step and thought. With a slowed-down and heightened sensory attentiveness, the porosity of the body is revealed through movement and touch. Perceptions of linear time dissolve to expose a complex interweaving of memory, perception and imagining. It is this A. Aitken (B) Launceston, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_9

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realisation that has led me to understand walking to be a generator of expanded thinking and making. Kinetic engagements invite possibilities for enlivening the senses and deepening corporeal awareness of the self in relation with place. This chapter will consider how interdisciplinary creative research methodologies that engage walking as a relational movement or event have the potential to cultivate restorative intercultural connections. I will locate the reader within southern lutruwita/Tasmania, where I have lived and practiced for the past seven years. I will examine my walking-drawing practice and the Fall of the Derwent (2015–2017), a performance and publishing project by artists Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward. By reflecting on these artworks, I will posit how walking can move non-Indigenous artists into relation with place through processes of acknowledgement, witnessing and attentive embodied dialogue.

1 Walking Methodologies 1.1 In Relation/Positioning the Self I moved to lutruwita/Tasmania in 2014 from mainland Australia. Over seven years I have begun the process of walking into relation with place, exploring how the embodied actions of walking, making and writing might enable us to become more attuned, flexible and connected to places that bear witness to complex settler colonial histories. lutruwita is in a process of reparation and dialogue concerning its devastating settler colonial history. Since arriving here, I have witnessed a growing community of critical and imaginative thinkers and makers attempting, through creative exchange with land, each other and the archive, to acknowledge and respond to the complex narratives of place. The traditional custodians of the land, the Palawa people, are voicing their survivance stories through powerful creative acts of truth telling in the face of institutional structures that continue to disempower and silence. Those of us with arrival narratives, here through histories of settler colonial invasion and subsequent ripples of migration are too, trying to navigate our ancestral stories whilst deepening understanding of where we now stand.

1.2 Why Walking Methodologies Over the last decade there has been a growing interest in walking-based methodologies within a range of disciplines, but perhaps most notably within the arts and social sciences. This has resulted in a surge of research hubs, projects, organisations, publications and conferences exploring the political, social, philosophical and

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aesthetic dimensions of walking. Central to this growing area of practice and scholarship is a critical consideration of place and situated knowledges. With an emphasis on mobility, embodied and multisensory perception artists and scholars are considering walking’s ability to support new ways of being with place explored through creative, relational and participatory methodologies. Informed by and responding to a number of Indigenous scholars, Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman write withness, “emphasises complicated relations and entanglements with the human, non-human, Land, and an ethics of situatedness, solidarity of resistance” (2019, p. 4). An increasing critical questioning of the dominant walking discourse has occurred through the exploration of what it is to walk within the context of complex political, social and cultural situations. This has seen an important broadening out and away from Eurocentric, heteronormative and ableist walking tropes such as the ‘solitary nature walker’ and ‘able bodied flâneur’—figures, which have until recently remained largely unchallenged (Springgay & Truman, 2019). Recent academic writing and practice-led projects are beginning to acknowledge and address the contemporary challenges of walking disputed and unceded territories, as well as the diversity of walking bodies and identities. Artists, academics and activists are now asking how might we walk with and respond to places in the face of major global issues of our time including anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation, capitalism and settler colonialism (Plumwood, 2002; Rose, 2004; Simpson, 2017; Springgay & Truman, 2019; Tuck & McKenzie, 2014).

2 Walking with the River The mid-summer day is unusually warm for nipaluna / Hobart. I arrive with my packed snacks, a drawing book and my walking shoes. Gathered on the edge of Geilston Bay I am met by a group of artists, writers, academics, children and dogs. We are here, together, through our webbed connection with artists and independent scholars Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward. We are to take part in a day-long walk as part of Fall of the Derwent (2015–2017) a year-long process of research-creation. Through archival research, walking, writing, making, recording and publishing, the artists have entered ‘into relation-with the river(s) Derwent as living events’ (Phillips & Woodward, 2016b, para. 4). By the time the artists have finished they will have walked from the sea to the source of two rivers with the same name – from Workington to Borrowdale in the UK, and from Blackmans Bay to leeawuleena / Lake St Clair in Tasmania. Welcomed onto Country by Palawa community member Aaron Everett and his two daughters, we are led along a passage up the rocky dolerite cliffs; their sheer edges and cavernous overhangs moulded by the ebb and flow of the estuarine waters. The palawa kani language name for the river is timtumili minanya. The ancient river edge, now known as Bedlam Walls is an ancient cultural landscape. The extensive middens and quarry hold the traces of a gathering place for the Moomairremener people who fished shellfish from nutrient rich channels and bays, hunted seal and chipped stone tools from its bedrock. Scattered with endemic sheoak, eucalypt and native cherry, the cliff top provides extensive views north and south of the river and across to kunanyi / Mt Wellington. Described by Palawa woman

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Sharni Read as ‘one big midden, one big living space’ (cited in McIntyre, 2017), the headland provides a significant place for the present community to connect with their ancestors. English born Lieutenant John Hayes sailed the river in 1793 on an expedition to Van Diemen’s Land for the British East India Company. He named the waterway the River Derwent, after the river of the same name in his homeland of Cumberland in England – where the oaks grow. In the hold, British Captain, John Hayes enters the waters of lutruwita (lu-tru-weetah). Navigates his vessel as far up as the Fall. Son of Fletcher Hayes of Tallentire on the River Derwent, he names the water of his father’s birth, on the upper reaches of the river. Throws acorns overboard. To ensure a safe and righteous passage. Der-went. The way of the oaks. Hayes names the part he cannot see. A father. He will not see. Again. (Phillips & Woodward, “Fall of the Derwent,” p. 12) Aaron takes cues from the place; stopping occasionally to reflect and direct our eyes and senses. Over several hours we are guided though place, generating a deeper knowledge of its embedded stories, its geological layers, its traces of past and present cultural use, of violent frontier conflict and the more recent politics of its protection. This learning is interlaced with the personal connections made between walkers; stories, memories, observations shared and made together. Our walk continues to Risdon Cove. Aaron leaves us here and we walk on alone to the site of the first British settlement in lutruwita/ Tasmania. Established in September 1803, Risdon Cove was set up as a New South Wales colonial outpost to prevent the French from claiming land. It is a place that holds the scars of horrendous violence, wrought by the British aspirations for permanent settlement.1 They say there could be as many as three hundred. Grapeshot ploughing the crowd at Risdon Cove. Take aim. (“Fall of the Derwent,” 24) Few words are spoken here; we witness together, breathing in the knowledge. We’d like to pay our respects, we say to Fall. Others join us. Tread lightly on Moomairremener Territory. 1

On the 3rd of May 1804 a massacre occurred at Rison Cove. Several British soldiers fired upon a large group of Aboriginal people, likely undertaking a hunting expedition. The group included men, women and children. At the time there were mixed reports about the number killed, however an estimated 50 people were murdered. It may have been more. This marked the beginning of many violent encounters between the Palawa people and the British invaders, as the apprehension of land for the colonial-settlement continued with force (Lehman, 2013; Reynolds, 2012; Ryan, 2004).

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We try to slough off our English settlement but it clings to our hollowed-out moss dwellings with the pluck of eely-mucus. Nothing smooths our journey. Not the voices. Not the screams. Not our guide who welcomes us. Breathes the black breath of his people. (“Fall of the Derwent,” pp. 22–23) Only a few continue on with Justy and Margaret from here, over the Bowen Bridge to Glenorchy Art & Sculpture Park (GASP) in Hobart’s northern suburbs. At our final destination we stop to share food and give well-wishes to the artists who will walk on to the source of the river some 170 kms away.

∗ ∗ ∗ Through my own walking and drawing practice, and projects such as Justy Phillips’ and Margaret Woodward’s Fall of the Derwent (2015–2017), I wish to consider how non-Indigenous artists are attempting to employ creative walking methodologies within a Tasmanian context. In particular, how these processes of walking with place collectively and through independent practice might negotiate the difficulties of walking stolen land. In Australia, it is important to consider that walking was used as a colonising and overwriting practice to explore, discover and survey land with the intent of seizing and appropriating it for the colony. In lutruwita/ Tasmania, walking was used as a military device during the frontier wars to not only seize land, but also seize Aboriginal people.2 This knowledge is a necessary consideration for those of us navigating sensitive and ethical ways of walking as a research and teaching methodology. Discussion among artists, academia and First Nations communities recognise the need to pursue practice-led methodologies that can challenge and begin to unravel repressive colonial systems of power. Place-based approaches are being sought to lead towards more consensual and reciprocal dialogue with land (Plumwood, 2002; Rose, 2004; Simpson, 2017; Springgay & Truman, 2017; Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). Approaches that philosopher Jeff Malpas suggests, will put us “into genuine proximity to the human, to ourselves as well as others, and so into proximity to the real ground of ethical obligation, ethical responsibility and ethical responsiveness” (Malpas, 2017, p. 18). From my own experience of walking, I have come to recognise that critical and sensitive motile engagements can fundamentally shift the ground we walk. 2

The Black Line was a military operation devised in 1830 to remove Aboriginal people from the ‘settled districts’ of Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania. It aimed to drive people into captivity on the Tasman Peninsula. The plan called on every settler who was fit to join the effort. Between 7 October and 24 November 1830, over 2200 men were enlisted to walk in lines towards the Peninsula. The exercise resulted in the capture of only two people and was regarded as a military failure costing half the annual budget for the colony in one exercise. (Boyce, 2010, 273–276, Reynolds 2012, 61–62). However, the distress cased to the Palawa community who witnessed this attempt at their forced removal is evident in written accounts of George Augustus Robinson on 26 November 1830, who describes their distress and fear (cited in Boyce, 2010, 275).

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Walking can dissolve boundaries by enabling us to recognise the significant and necessary interconnections between places and between communities. Desires for home-place attachments, which too often dominate settler place-making attempts, can shift towards models of fluid entanglement, and linear time concepts can dissolve to reveal a complex merging or knotted time. All of these shifts have the potential to better cultivate intercultural relations by enabling more imaginative and restorative ways of being with and knowing place.

3 Un-settling Settler Place-Making For each of us, home is a place that is not only fixed on a map but floats along the tributaries of our consciousness. The place I come from is, I think, located somewhere on the ebb tide of the world at large, a place in a culture in a continual state of flux, drifting without an anchor. It is a place which is sharing less and less of its space with its kindred plants and animals, and which is inundated time and again by the tidal waves of its own gross superfluities. Too often the world I belong to absolves itself of guilt and responsibility for its actions by washing away the traces of its murky history. I have a sinking feeling that I’m from a society that is now foundering out of its depth, which laid down its foundation on quicksand. (Hall, 2010, 22)

When I arrived in lutruwita/Tasmania, I experienced a sense of what I have come to identify as a form of place panic (Casey, 1993). Moving town, house and community gave me an overwhelming sense of being without place, or being out of place; a feeling of dislocation and estrangement from the familiar. This experience heightened my attention to the histories of displacement, narratives which are imprinted in the paths I walk. It also importantly led me to consider the ways in which we each enact place-making strategies and rituals in attempt to reorientate and embed ourselves. Conceptualisations and acts of place making are intrinsically informed by personal, cultural desires, losses and longings. Australian artist, Fiona Hall speaks to a familiar sense of being unanchored, experienced by many of us with arrival narratives living in Aboriginal land. Adrift from our own ancestral lands, we come to acknowledge our separation from an inherited “plot-of-place” and confront the reality of the “dis-location implicit in living in stolen land” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014, p. 69). Whilst longing is an important experience for recognising the importance of where we are as fundamental to who we are, we need to explore ways to shift settler thinking away from damaging colonial conceptualisations of place that continue to justify or play victim to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls ‘possessive logics’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Our preoccupation with land acquisition and ownership has been central to our society’s approach to seeking ‘sense of place’ or ‘belonging’ (Gibson, 2013; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Plumwood, 2002). This lies in our nation’s British settlercolonial origins, whereby land was appropriated on the basis of the idea of terra nullius (or uninhabited land) and attempts were made to establish new and improved replicas of the societies left behind (Banivanua-Mar & Edmonds, 2010). Without

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critically questioning or actively considering other possible approaches or conceptualisations of place making, we easily associate intimate connection with a need to identify with, own and apprehend “bounded plots of country” (Gibson, 1992, p. 259). Indigenous theorists, such as Unangax scholar Eve Tuck, Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton Robinson, explore the notion of settler emplacement. They discuss the common desire for settlers to resolve the experience of dis-location, either by practicing quasi-religious forms of cultural and spiritual appropriation or further endorsing ideologies of replacement of Indigenous cultures. One of these ideologies is the idea of linear causality, whereby the future state supersedes the past and settler-colonialism can simply be “modernized away” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014, p. 69). Many non-Indigenous artists in Australia are challenging settler colonial notions of place through generative examinations of their own feelings of cultural place separation or displacement. Conceptualisations that acknowledge the contradictions in longing for anchorage, whilst understanding that this situation requires us to move fluidly with place and accept settler dis-location. Only through this acknowledgement do we have the potential to begin place-making that is respectful of Indigenous claims to land. These considerations have led me to enact ways of making-with-place rather than place-making that explore notions of movement and multiplicity. Motile engagements have the capacity to blur the boundaries between self and place and between places by enabling us to recognise their significant and necessary interconnections.

4 Listening to the River Fall of the Derwent (2015–2017), listens and responds to the interwoven relationships and narratives between human and more-than-human bodies and ecologies which make-up the river. The river and her tributaries with their full breadth of sensorial expression, lead a complex passage through place. The artists were joined by various companions on their walk (see Fig. 1). People were invited to walk and enter into conversation with their knowledge of the winding waterways. These companions included Aboriginal custodians, family members, industry stakeholders and artists. The interactions were threaded and folded into a series of prose like passages revealing stories of place and of two individuals on a path of deeper knowing. Compiled into a text or hydrographic score readers are travelled along tributaries of Country through multi-sensory description, memory and imaginings. Commissioned by Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park as part of Swimmable! Reading the River (2013–2015), Fall of the Derwent, resulted in a number of public artworks. The 96-page hydrographic score can be accessed by scanning a QR code on site at GASP or via a link on the artists own website.3 Each download onto a personal tablet, 3

See http://www.fallofthederwent.net.

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Fig. 1 Day #4, Shag Bay. Public walk, Fall of the Derwent (2016), A Published Event. Photograph Margaret Woodward

computer or smartphone is a unique version of the text, generated in response to the River’s current energy storage levels, recorded by Hydro Tasmania via coded html (Phillips & Woodward, 2016b). When downloaded, one finds an invitation to read aloud. By taking up the offer, the reader becomes an active participant in the sounding out or voicing of the story. The language and images absorbed, interpreted and expressed differently each time. This keeps the text moving—generatively iterating or looping via multiple voices. To mark the conclusion of the walk and completion of the score, a performative reading of the text was held at GASP in 2016 (see Fig. 2). Many of the people who had walked with me at Bedlam Walls a year earlier were invited to read from the printed texts. Here is my reflection from the day: The many voices form an asynchronous chorus. Words entangle, collide and merge. I am moved between memories, observations and imaginings. Each book dusted with graphite, deposits silky metallic powder onto readers’ hands; faces and white shirts soiled as books pass between.

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Fig. 2 Hydrographic Score, performative reading, Fall of the Derwent (2016), Glenorchy Art & Sculpture Park, A Published Event. Photograph Stu Gibson

Justy and Margaret describe their process as a conscious roaming—a writingwith place through a form of what they call fictioneering—a process of ‘speculative eventing’, whereby they use “language and experience to construct new events” (Phillips & Woodward, 2019, para. 3). These events—the walk, the text, the performative reading—each transform our encounters with place. We are invited to consider place as a relationally produced ‘event’ rather than something fixed or known (Massey, 2005; Springgay & Truman, 2017). Fall of the Derwent, is one example of arts practice exploring ways to communicate the multiple voices of place, by bringing together living stories, archival research, theoretical and conceptual ideas, objects, images and language. This project demonstrates the potential of creative walking research methodologies to shift our conceptualisation of place and reveal the complexity of our shared histories. Fall of the Derwent explores non-linear, embodied and participatory methodologies of making—approaches which deepen sensory experience and involve us as active participants in the walk. By listening or voicing aloud into direct relation with place the approach used enables us to sit with knowledge, rather than attempt to resolve it.

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5 Making Marks/Marking Time in Place I am looking towards the far eastern shore across the River Derwent to Bedlam Walls from a flank of kunanyi /Mt Wellington. This hill side is now known as Knocklofty Reserve. It is an area of steep regrowth forest that fringes the north-western edge of nipaluna / Hobart. This is Muwinina Country and it is where I have spent the last few years in lutruwita / Tasmania, weaving a connection between self and place by walking and drawing looped pathways from my place of dwelling into the world beyond.

∗ ∗ ∗ The daily walk from my place of dwelling into Knocklofty return is a looped movement—a process of gathering and propelling the body through a network of interlocking pathways. Through my drawing and printmaking practice I have come to recognise the loop as a generative action and gesture that enfolds and reveals the body in place. Tim Ingold describes the choreography of looping as gesture of retrieval, opening and propulsion; “a rhythmic alternation that bears comparison with the beating heart and heaving lungs of the living body” (2015, p. 20). One of the keys aspects of my making methodology explores the relationship between walking and iterative making practices, particularly, how the porous relation between the body and place might be explored through repetition and gesture. I am interested in how we might re-sensitise or enliven the boundary between self and place through looped and repetitive movement and mark-making. Tasmanian-based artist, Annalise Rees explores drawing as a process of wayfinding; a way of conceptually and physically negotiating our situatedness. She writes: Marks are a trace of movement across a surface and through time but also, a conceptual wandering – a thought in action. As a form of active thinking, drawing is both distanced and intrinsically connected. In this way, the activity of drawing can be thought of as a wayfinding process, an embodied means of negotiating and mediating experience to situate oneself in the world, physically and conceptually. (2017, p. 16)

Searching for ways to both physically and conceptually reveal the experience of simultaneously wandering my internal and external reality, I began to consider how I could communicate the intimate merging of self and place that occurs through the walking and drawing process. In 2006, I developed a practice of walking and drawing at the same time (see Fig. 4.). Beginning from my place of dwelling I set out along loosely pre-determined routes wearing an armature of copper plates, paper or a journal bound with string against my chest and mark-making tools in each hand. I recorded my daily looped walks marking or inscribing the rhythmic actions of stepping or breathing with lines or strokes of the tool onto the copper plate or paper. With every step/breath recorded as a mark the presence of the body was captured through an accumulation of visceral accretions or scars inscribed on the substrate (see Fig. 3). The angle, weight, and speed of the arms and hands, the changing energy of the body and the physical terrain all contributed to the unique gathering of marks resulting in drawn records of their own becoming.

Walking lutruwita/Tasmania: Navigating Place Relationships Through … Fig. 3 ©Antonia Aitken, Drawing the Step. Left hand for right foot, right hand for left foot: One mark for every step. Seven daily walks in Rosendale, NY, USA, 2012. Artist book (detail): letterpress, hard-ground etching on Rives Heavyweight paper and sound track. 38 × 16 × 320 cm

Fig. 4 ©Antonia Aitken, Drawing the Step: Walk Three Monday 29.10.12. 3:03–3:45 pm|42:00|3201 steps. From Studio past Williams Lake on the rail trail. Photograph Rachel Kraus

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In The Thinking Hand, architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa explores the notion of drawing as a temporal compression of a whole process into a single image by the fusion of a distinct duration (2009, p. 90). Similarly, my walking-drawings capture my embodied and situated movements; accumulations of time with place. This process of drawing emerged from a growing awareness of the limitations of and concern about my need as a settler artist to interpret place through what I had begun to see as an extractive process—an act of observing and surveying the land through a sight-based drawing practice. I was curious to explore how disrupting my ocular sense bias could shift my experience of the drawing process and of my relation to place. The walking-drawing armature (see Fig. 4) enabled not only the mark, but the entire drawing substrate to move with me through place. This shifted my drawing process from an act of statically sitting, observing and responding from the eye to hand to mark, to a movement attuned to the body’s internal and kinetic rhythms in and informed by place. Sight, with its intimate connection to touch continued to support me to navigate and negotiate my body in physical space and place, but it no longer led the drawing process. Considered as the most important of the senses and fundamental to thought in Western culture, sight has dominated the senses and positioned itself as the pinnacle of and key to intellectual cognition. Sight, Pallasma suggests, has since early Greek philosophy, become analogous with clarity, light and truth. The renaissance invention of perspectival representation further made the eye the centre of perception and to the concept of the self (2005, 16). A practice that neglects peripheral and unfocused vision and hapticity. This ocularcentric paradigm within the observational drawing tradition has shaped the way we articulate our relationship to the world, evidenced most profoundly within Western cartographic practice. Through her discussions of the evolution of observational drawing systems and their role in colonial practices, artist Annalise Rees discusses the use of drawing in the sciences of surveying, collecting, measuring and gridding. “The cartographer’s line”, Rees writes, “cool and objective, established a clear ground upon which to plot and control an assumed uninhabited space” (2017, p. 43). In an Australian context, the ocularcentric viewpoint exercised via the cartographer’s line was and still is a powerful tool for conceptualising land not as an existing place but as empty space ready to be drawn, written and culturalized (Gibson, 1992). As a maker and tertiary educator, I am mindful of perpetuating colonising practices and have begun to consider ways to integrate embodied methodologies within traditions and academies that still emphasise the hegemony of linear perspective. Similarly concerned about sight bias and the suppression of the other senses Pallasmaa, in the The Thinking Hand (2009) raises urgent need for educational systems and pedagogies that foster human empathy and imagination through the full utilisation of the senses. Pallasmaa identifies a cultural ‘petrification’ of the boundary between self and world through continued emphasis on ocularcentric modes of knowing and perceiving (2009, p. 20). He argues it is the isolation of the eye from the other sense modalities which “fragments the innate complexity, comprehensiveness and plasticity of the perceptual system” and ultimately detaches and alienates the self (p. 39). This realisation has been fundamental to developing a

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practice and teaching philosophy that values a re-sensitisation of the body with place through haptic gestures which heighten our awareness of the whole sensory register and critically question dominant western paradigms. This is particularly important when considering ways to move the settler body into relation with place and into ethical responsiveness.

5.1 Listening to the Body with Place My walking-drawings (Fig. 4) are documented using a sound recording device. The placement of the microphone in relation to my body and the environment, emphasises different relations between the body and place. Sound has the capacity to evoke the rhythm and changing conditions of the body as it negotiates terrain, climate and other mobile beings it encounters. This awareness of the transportive nature of sound as a mnemonic device, led me in 2015 to explore ways to bring my walks into the studio space. I began to consider ways of re-enlivening the walks through a process of listening and drawing simultaneously. These led to a series of live performative walkingbreathing-drawings (see Figs. 5 and 6) and video works (see Fig. 7) exploring the internal and external rhythms of the moving and making body. Listening and drawing in response directly onto the studio wall, I used the full extension of my body. I established a cycle of breath as a single looped gesture; on inhalation moving both arms upwards from the centre and then downwards and out on exhalation. The width and form of the draw line shifted according to the breath and its navigation of the recorded and real time studio terrain. Through the changing of speed, length and pressure of the hand-held tools against the wall, my lungs drew in air whilst simultaneously drawing two charcoal lines upwards from the centre. As I exhaled my lines opened outward, ready to propel the body into the next cycle. Over time the individual charcoal lines blurred—merging into a haptic tonality and fusion of time and place. When I walk, I find intimate, tactile and unexpected connections between the place, my thoughts and my marks—an experience that I now understand is informed by the way a walk slows down and engages my body in this self-propelling, bipedal rhythm. Focused in the sensorially perceiving present, I simultaneously weave in and out of tributaries of thought, memory and imagining. Multiple times and places are being wandered and entangled. My walking-drawing practice and in particular the walking breathing drawings, present a way to re-sensitise the body to my other senses by engaging particularly with touch and sound. By engaging with my external and internal experience or what Pallasmaa calls a ‘double perspective’ (2009, 19), I am able to explore a merging or co-mingling of time in place. Importantly, this shifts the dominant linear time paradigm through practice and a process I have come to identify as a form of time-knotting.

146 Fig. 5 ©Antonia Aitken, walking-breathing-drawing: Knocklofty walk 1, 2016 (performance). Charcoal wall drawing, sound. Dimensions variable. Photograph Scott Clarkson

Fig. 6 ©Antonia Aitken, walking-breathing-drawing: Knocklofty walk 1, 2016. Charcoal wall drawing, sound. Dimensions variable. Photograph Scott Clarkson

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Fig. 7 ©Antonia Aitken, walking-breathing-drawing: Knocklofty: 21.9.2016, 2018. HD video and sound, 32:17 min. Filming: Scott L. Clarkson. Editing: Otis McDermott

6 Knotting Time Postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabati (cited in Rose, 2004, p. 25), uses the metaphor of time-knots, which he attributes to subaltern historian, Ranajit Guha. Time-knots are a powerful way to overcome modernity’s linear sequencing of time. Co-mingled or entangled time enables us to recognise the intrinsic plurality of our own times. This awareness has the potential for those of us caught in Western successive past-present-future models, to consider alternative conceptualisations of time. This is a fundamental step towards more ethical and decolonial approaches to being and making with place for settler Australians. Discussing the negative impacts of linear time concepts on our daily lives, Rose (2004) and Casey (1993) suggest that successive events on a linear timeline, where things appear before us in the present and disappear into the past, give us a sense of closure or demise.4 Casey writes, “we are lost because of our conviction that time, not only the world’s time but our time, the only time we have, is always running out or down. All time, it seems, is ‘closing time’” (1993, p. 7). Rose suggests that these conceptualisations of time have had incredibly damaging effects on our societies as they support powerful systems of moral closure between the past and present. In Australia they have enabled colonial triumphal histories of progress to continue feeding our notions of settler place making (2004, p. 152). 4

In Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world Edward S. Casey explores the development of the marine chronometer; the timepiece that captured and standardised/regulated time and how the revolution to navigation led to ‘the subordination of space to time, or “temporocentrism” (1993, p. 6).

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Rose discusses Aboriginal orientations of time, drawing on her intimate knowledge of Yarralin ontologies. At the heart of Yarralin time–space co-ordinates is the Dreaming. Present community conceive of themselves as the “behind mob”—people follow the ancestors and the Dreaming, which are directionally in front (p. 152). To reorientate time, to consider the source as the future, enables the source to be in direct relation with the present. This has fundamental effects on the way one considers death, notions of progress and, importantly, responsibility to that future origin. By considering making approaches that invite “entanglements of real life in time”, whereby the past is not overcome and consigned to the past (p. 25), we have the opportunity as artists to explore the realms of co-mingled times. This importantly invites us to better understand and more sensitively walk in sync with the complex rhythms, patterns and stories of the places and communities of which we are part.

7 Making-with-Place We cannot just think, write, or imagine our way to a decolonized future. Answers to how to rebuild and how to resurge are therefore derived from a web of consensual relationships that is infused with movement (kinetic) through lived experience and embodiment (Simpson, 2017, 162). Examining the Fall of the Derwent (2015–2017) by Margaret Woodward and Justy Phillips and my walking-drawing practice I aim to reflect on the ways in which settler artists and scholars are walking slow rhythmic pathways through lutruwita. Meandering the tributaries of place and mind through embodied action is a process of physical and conceptual wayfinding. By moving and making we can become more sensorially aware and open to the haptic realms of experience. Intimacy with our internal and external existential experience enables us to contemplate the porosity of our being in relation to place. Walking and making enables us to shift between perception, memory and imagination, opening us up to the plurality of our own times. This presents new ways of thinking about time, not as a sequence of successive moments but as an entanglement of co-mingled events. Shifting linear time concepts through creative practice invites me to contemplate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander time models that re-orientate us towards a future origin. This fundamental shift in thinking allows the past to be in conversation with the present, placing us into direct proximity with our histories. This, importantly, provides an opening for non-Indigenous Australians to enter into genuine ethical responsiveness. Fall of the Derwent, explores the potential of walking with place to listen and respond through a process of ‘speculative eventing’ whereby multiple voices, times and places are co-mingled through the actions of moving, writing and sounding. The hydrographic score reveals not only the interwoven experience of the artists as they attempt to navigate their embodied relation with the rivers, but also sensitively exposes the trauma and grief that lies within these places.

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Through my creative art and teaching practice I have been attempting to expose these same realisations through a process of re-sensitising the body through drawing and walking looped pathways into place. By examining and shifting Western ocularcentric drawing practices and linear time concepts, that are complicit in settlercolonial overwriting and place-making, I am attempting to consider how we might imagine more consensual and reciprocal dialogue with where we are. ∗ ∗ ∗ We sit together on the river’s edge looking towards kunyani / Mt Wellington, with our senses activated and drawing books in hand. I have returned to Bedlam Walls, almost two years since the Fall of the Derwent. This time I am with a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander university art students. Palawa elders and community members give an acknowledgement of Country and Jamie Everett is given the task to lead us into place with his knowledge of the area. Jamie shares his particular knowledge of plants - their medicinal, edible and tool making properties; deepening our awareness of the place as ‘one big living space’. I am given permission to enter an ancient rock shelter with community. As I walk down the steep cliffs toward the cave, looking out to the big stretch of water across nipaluna / Hobart, I am made starkly aware of how with every step on Country we are enabling the past and present to fluidly entangle. This recognition supports me to sit with my dis-location.

References Aitken, A. (2018). Walking contested ground: Navigating settler-colonial place through drawing and printmaking [Ph.D. dissertation. University of Tasmania]. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/31407/ 1/Aitken_whole_thesis.pdf Banivanua-Mar, T., & Edmonds, P. (2010). Making settler colonial space: Perspectives on race, place and identity. Palgrave Macmillan. Boyce, J. (2010). Van Diemen’s Land. Melbourne: Black Inc. Casey, E. S. (1993). Getting back into place: Toward a renewed understanding of the place-world. Indiana University Press. Gibson, R. (1992). South of the West: Postcolonialism and the narrative construction of Australia. Indiana University Press. Gibson, R. (2013). Motility. In C. de Zegher (Ed.), Here art grows on trees: Simryn Gill (pp. 259– 267). Australia Council for the Arts in association with Ghent: MER. Paper Kunsthalle. Hall, F. (2010). Fiona Hall artist statement. In A. Cameron (Ed.), Burning bright. Djalkiri: We are standing on their names blue mud bay (Vol. 14). Nomad Art Productions. https://www.nom adart.com.au/documents/Djalkiri_ProjectNotes.pdf Ingold, T. (2015). The life of lines. Routledge. Lehman, G. (2013). Tasmanian gothic. The grifith review, 39. https://www.griffithreview.com/art icles/tasmanian-gothic/ Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage. Malpas, J. (2017). Thinking topographically: Place, space, and geography. https://jeffmalpas.com/ wp-content/uploads/Thinking-Topographically-Place-Space-and-Geogr.pdf McIntyre, P. (2017). A hidden gem: Bedlam Walls walk offers glimpse of Tasmania’s aboriginal heritage. ABC News, October 22, 2017. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-22/bedlam-wallsoffers-glimpse-of-tasmanias-aboriginal-heritage/9058728. Accessed November 1, 2020.

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Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press. Pallasmaa, J. (2005). Eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses. Wiley. Pallasmaa, J. (2009). The thinking hand: Existential and embodied wisdom in architecture. Wiley. Phillips, J., & Woodward, M. (2016a). Fall of the Derwent: A hydrographic score. Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park. Phillips, J., & Woodward, M. (2016b). Fall of the Derwent. Fusion Journal, 10, http://fusion-jou rnal.com/wp-content/uploads/2016b/11/xx-Woodward.pdf Phillips, J., & Woodward, M. (2019). Maggot and crow. In Sydney review of books, November 1, 2019. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/maggot-crow/ Plumwood, V. (2002). Environmental culture: The ecological crisis of reason. Routledge. Rees, A. (2017). Navigating the unknown: Place, space and drawing [Ph.D. dissertation. Univeristy of Tasmanina]. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/23913/1/Rees_whole_thesis.pdf Reynolds, H. (2012). A history of Tasmania. Cambridge University Press. Rose, D. B. (2004). Reports from a wild country: Ethics for Decolonisation. UNSW Press. Ryan, L. (2004). Risdon cove and the massacre of 3 May 1804: Their place in tasmanian history. Tasmanian Historical Studies, 9, 107–123. Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: WalkingLab. Taylor & Francis. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2019). Walking in/as publics: Editors introduction. Journal of Public Pedagogies, 4, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.15209/jpp.1170 Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2014). Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. Taylor & Francis.

Antonia Aitken is an artist and educator. She is currently living in lutruwita/Tasmania where she is researching independently and lecturing in Art at the University of Tasmania. Her practicebased research is informed by critical place theory, walking and a material knowledge of printmaking and drawing. By bringing these practices together Antonia hopes to communicate complex entanglements of time, place and self. Exploring walking as an act of inquiry and dialogue with place has led to a number of traditional and non-traditional research outcomes. These can be found at www.antoniaaitken.com.

Walking in Suriashi as a Radical and Critical Art of Inquiry Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt

Abstract This chapter contributes to the discussion on moving in and through sitespecific and urban space; at the cusp between higher dance education and everyday life, creating a post-Certauian tear through space and time as a call for agency. It draws from my Ph.D. research Suriashi as Experimental Pilgrimage in Urban and Other Spaces, where I propose an experience of society from within a Japanese practice called suriashi, which translates as sliding foot. Suriashi is a specific gender codified walking technique in classical Japanese dance and theatre, and an important method for acting on stage. Gender is constructed physically through the positioning and moulding of the body. The original practice is performed in the dance studio or on stage. My research asks whether suriashi also could be a method for agency to act, as being active, or to activate, and temporally alter spaces outside the theatre; i.e. the practical application of this artistic practice outside the theatrical context. This relocation brings a traditional form into new configurations, connecting to everyday practices and sites of resistance and performance. It also contributes to the burgeoning field of walking arts practice, bringing a Japanese dance-based practice into a dialogue with debates and practices of Western dancing and walking. Suriashi performed in urban spaces was able to unfold and identify new relations between aesthetic practice and politics, between movements and monuments in the city as a way to critique the unequal distribution of power, and by looking for new ways to protest/resist peacefully. I assess this from three of my many experiments with slow suriashi walkings. The first one is Suriashi Intervention, performed at Gothenburg Culture Festival in August 2016. This experiment did two things: it engendered the city’s unacknowledged dance archive, while performing critique of the unequal distribution of funding of the arts. The second experiment is an ‘invisible’ suriashi performed by the then Hong Kong-based scholar Ching-yuen Cheung during the violent protests at Yuen Long Station in Hong Kong in July 2019. It showed

A. Skånberg Dahlstedt (B) Stockholm University of the Arts, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_10

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how artistic methods are necessary when democracy collapses. The third experiment regards introducing suriashi as methodology to master students of Contemporary Performative Arts at University of Gothenburg. Here, suriashi unveiled important issues regarding art in urban spaces, necessary for the art student. To further contextualize, I interlace my arguments through positionings by sociologist Doreen Massey. Keywords Suriashi · Walking art · Artivism · Micro-activism · Experimental pilgrimage · Counter-public spheres · Discursive arenas · Soft resistance · Site and collective memory · Dance walking · Gendered walking · Speculative walking

1 Background This chapter contributes to the discussion on moving in and through site-specific and urban space; at the cusp between higher dance education and everyday life, creating a post-Certauian tear through space and time as a call for agency. It draws from my Ph.D. research Suriashi as Experimental Pilgrimage in Urban and Other Spaces, where I propose an experience of society from within a Japanese practice called suriashi, which translates as sliding foot. Suriashi is a specific gender codified walking technique in classical Japanese dance and theatre, and an important method for acting on stage. Gender is constructed physically through the positioning and moulding of the body. The original practice is performed in the dance studio or on stage. My research questions ask whether suriashi also could be a method for agency to act, as being active, or to activate, and temporally alter spaces outside the theatre; i.e. the practical application of this artistic practice outside the theatrical context. This relocation brings a traditional form into new configurations, connecting to everyday practices and sites of resistance and performance. It also contributes to the burgeoning field of walking arts practice, bringing a Japanese dance-based practice into a dialogue with debates and practices of Western dancing and walking. Suriashi performed in urban spaces was able to unfold and identify new relations between aesthetic practice and politics, between movements and monuments in the city as a way to critique the unequal distribution of power, and by looking for new ways to protest/resist peacefully. I assess this from three of my many experiments with slow suriashi walkings. The first one is Suriashi Intervention, performed at Gothenburg Culture Festival in August 2016. This experiment did two things: it engendered the city’s unacknowledged dance archive, while performing critique of the unequal distribution of funding of the arts. The second experiment is an ‘invisible’ suriashi performed by the then Hong Kong-based scholar Ching-yuen Cheung during the violent protests at Yuen Long Station in Hong Kong in July 2019. It showed how artistic methods are necessary when democracy collapses. The third experiment regards introducing suriashi as methodology to master students of Contemporary Performative Arts at University of Gothenburg. Here, suriashi unveiled important issues regarding art in urban spaces,

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necessary for the art student. To further contextualize, I interlace my arguments through positionings by sociologist Doreen Massey. I encountered suriashi specifically as a part of the classical Japanese dance lesson. The first time was in July 2000 with my teacher Nishikawa Senrei (1945–2012) in Ky¯oto, Japan. Ky¯oto is the city where I have spent most of my time learning suriashi for a dance context. My study originates from being a professional dancer and choreographer trained in Europe, U.S. and Japan. I studied with Nishikawa Senrei at Traditional Theatre Training, and I also took private classes at her studio Senreinokai (2001, 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2015).1 Yamazaki has depicted how the transmission of knowledge in a Japanese dance class happens on a one-to-one-basis, a standard method in the studying of traditional Japanese arts (Yamazaki, 2001). Sensing the concentration and silence in that space, where only my master’s and my own sliding feet were heard, was an unforgettable experience, which affected all subsequent movement practices. Practicing suriashi, the whole body is involved, but also a psycho-physical practice with ideas from past time, and imaginations of where spirits and ancestors are placed. Suriashi has many functions and formations, and it is performed differently depending on the narrative and atmosphere. In Japanese dance, slow suriashi is used when the play is about to begin, and when the character is divine, noble or when a ghost or spirit (Motokiyo et al., 1984). Nishikawa Senrei made the suriashi practice remarkable and meaningful, as if it was the most important assignment of the day. The structure of classes with both slow and fast suriashi, followed by narrative choreography with a dance fan, focused on precision through repetition until suriashi and other movements permeated life. Her in-depth focus on slow suriashi was a rather rigid and virtuosic balance act, however rewarding because of its meditative quality. For my Ph.D. research, I left the dance studio and the stage and instead walked out in suriashi through society. When deciding how to proceed, I first considered what might be the risks leaving the dance studio and instead practice suriashi on the streets. I noticed how the slowness in particular was challenging for our fast-contemporary society, and also the most deviating from my other dance practices. Moving slowly in both rural and urban, both calm and busy spaces, I sensed how space and sound was amplified, which created an intense artistic experience. To my surprise, through slow suriashi it was possible to process issues of visibility/invisibility, gendered spaces, and the power geometries between mortal monuments and immortal moments, which my chosen experiments evidence. How is suriashi related to walking? Suriashi performed on stage often represents walking, however it is a theatricalized walking style. It represents the traveller in constant flux, either travelling between geographical places or travelling from a spiritual state to a human state (Tokita, 2016). My research found that suriashi derives from creation myths and from Daoist, Shinto and Buddhist practices. The female performers (Aruki)miko, Asobi, Kugutsu, Shiraby¯oshi, and Kusemai, prominent in 1

Traditional Theatre Training is a yearly cultural exchange programme at Ky¯oto Art Centre for international and Japanese artists and researchers, founded in 1984 by Ky¯ogen actor Shigeyama Akira and Professor Jonah Salz. https://www.kac.or.jp/eng/program/4227/.

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the Heian (781–1192) and Kamakura (1185–1333) eras all had itinerant lifestyles and made a living as performing artists in both Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples and on the streets (Kawashima, 2001; Meeks, 2011; Nakahara, 1999; Strippoli, 2006). In addition, my teacher Nishikawa Senrei had a strong interest in walking, and in how walking affected artistic practices. The first initiative to engage with suriashi as an actual walking practice for my research—an act that could be separated from dance practice—came from her. The focusing on suriashi practice before the studying of choreography was her own invention, and rare to other schools of Japanese dance. Her very last performance that premiered in April 2013—four months after her death—had the title ‘Reveries of a Solitary Walker’ and was based on writings by Jean-Jacques Rosseau. Nishikawa Senrei’s specific focus on suriashi also showed her interest in walking as practice.

2 Artivism: Suriashi Walking with a Radical Potential Suriashi showed an activist potential that was revealed when it was relocated from the dance studio to the streets. This enabled a reformulation of how activism might be performed. Since 1997, the term artivism has become frequent; ‘a hybrid neologism that signifies work created by individuals who see an organic relationship between art and activism’ (Sandoval & Latorre, 2008, pp. 82–83). The claim is that an artistic experience is transformative and thus changes people and society. In 2005, literature scholar Andrew Hewitt showed through his concept ‘social choreography’ that ideology needs to be understood as something embodied and practiced, not just as an abstract form of consciousness (Hewitt, 2005). Choreography is a way of thinking about the relationship of aesthetics to politics. DIY activism is described as ‘small-scale user-initiated, not officially sanctioned tactics’ (Fabian & Samson, 2016, p. 167). However, not all DIY-activities are connected to art. Small-scale tactics sometimes grow to involve the whole world, for example Swedish Greta Thunberg’s Skolstrejk för klimatet, which started in 2018. What began as a one-person strike inspired the weekly demonstrations in hundreds of cities called Fridays for Future in The Hague.2 Another concept in use is micro-activism. The political scientist Jose Marichal defines micro-activism ‘as one-to-several forms of politically oriented communication that reflect expressive micro-political accomplishments’ (Marichal, 2013). In micro-activism, the goal is not to mobilize one big cause. Instead, it regards smaller activities for small changes, for example ‘the formation of political Facebook groups, the retweeting of articles of political interest and the sharing of politically relevant videos on YouTube’ (Marichal, 2013) (Fig. 1). Suriashi relocated from the studio to the streets found a way to ask what might happen to space as a result of a performative, slow and possibly radical walking act. Suriashi did not cause a stir, but as a slow physical action it definitely had an impact. Bodies are always used as political tools in activism—for example through walking 2

https://theyearofgreta.com/.

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Fig. 1 The author walks in suriashi as pilgrimage in Bloomsbury with conference participants at the Archives, Art and Activism Conference at University College London in 2015. Photo Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt © Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt

and marching—but as dance scholar Jaana Parviainen pointed, “many scholars have ignored activists’ highly sophisticated and intelligent ways of using their moving bodies” (Parviainen, 2010, p. 311). She meant that when we focus too much of the agenda of an act—such as protesting against inequalities, we ignore how political ideas are performed as concrete gestures and postures. However, to concern suriashi only from a dance aesthetical point of view blocked any other potential of what suriashi could stimulate rather than being a fixed tool for perfection. Also, suriashi relocated to the streets might be considered a political object in itself rather than an independent performance with a political content. Bodily actions can stir awareness, and thus stimulate change.

3 Choreography as Political March In order to situate my work with suriashi, I make a comparison to other choreographer’s engagement in dance and politics. Choreographers emerging from the postmodern era in the U.S., such as Deborah Hay, claimed that dance itself can be considered a political activism. However, Hay did not point to waving signs in the streets; her activism was situated in the studio and worked to change mainstream systems of dance training and choreographic transmission (Steinwald, 2012). Earlier, Pearl Primus (1919–1994) declared her dance to be ‘the scream which eases for a while the terrible frustration common to all human beings who, because of race, creed or colour, are ‘invisible” (Courtney, 2021). Later, choreographer Liz Lerman

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described how it may seem ‘as if the artist is behaving like an activist, when actually all she is doing is building a world in which she can live and work’ (Lerman, 2014, p. 242). Dance pieces such as Yvonne Rainer’s Street Action (1970) and Anna Halprin’s (1920–2021) Blank Placard Dance (1970) performed as political marches on the streets were conceived as a way to provoke audience participation, however not as confrontational as an actual political march. Instead, they were performed to activate issues that matters to people on a personal and collective level. In my research, suriashi also functions as a political march where the body alignment and self-reflexivity was an important part of the investigation. This enabled a transformation of the original agenda of feminine suriashi as an act of ‘becoming woman’ for male performers to instead include an activist position in which the discussion concerned what was revealed while moving slowly. The fact that ‘feminine suriashi’ was constructed because of the banning of women from stage by Tokugawa shogunate in the seventeenth century, activated an embodied discussion of inequalities and of historical and contemporary gendered violence. The discussion was nourished through the rehearsal and repetition of feminine suriashi on the streets.

4 Aesthetic Experience as Artivism Educational reformer John Dewey explained ‘aesthetic experience’, as ‘where the quality of the experience, the feeling of wholeness or fulfilment, will define whether the experience is to be seen as aesthetic or not’ (Leddy, 2006). My research showed that moving together in suriashi created an aesthetic experience and a sense of collective ritual. Suriashi performed in a group enabled critique of spatial practices, where the group of people do not march in defence or march forward any messages, but instead lean back in space, and move slowly together. I have presented suriashi as artistic research at symposiums and conferences. In these contexts, I have found that when people engage in slow suriashi together with me in groups, they gradually perceive themselves as one single body. When this slightly more secure body visit a place, feelings of gratitude, affiliation, humility and euphoria appear. For example, at the Archives, Art and Activism Conference at UCL in 2015, participants ‘felt protected and empowered by being part of the group’, ‘feeling capable of filling a moving gesture’ transported ‘to a space of infinite time’. One of the participants claimed: ‘Activism is WITH not AGAINST’ (UCL, 2015). At first, the UCL conference suriashi walk had such a rich level of detail that it was difficult to think critically of the event. Still, my claim is that suriashi offered to think critically together while we simultaneously had individual experiences of the body alignment, the slowness, and with space. Our moving slowly together, created arguments of resistance for future strategies and for being in the world as individuals and as collectives. The conference participants wrote that when suriashi was performed together with others, the space was perceived as protected and secure. Practicing slow feminine suriashi together activated a sense of care among the participants, as in ‘caring about each other’. One participant wrote that the experienced

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bodily discomfort with the suriashi walking task was still worth it with regards to assisting a peer with bringing forward new questions and answers in their research. This showed the fact that even if we are—in research conferences, artistic practices, education, work, life—positioned against each other as if in a competition, we can always work for strategies that enable support and care about each and everyone’s different perspectives. My conference presentation, leaving the conventional conference space, evidenced how methodologies from artistic research contributed to innovative, embodied thinking. I claim that our eleven-minute slow walk in suriashi potentially worked as an example of activism or artivism. Suriashi was therefore proposed as a walking activism in 2015 for the first time. However, when we perform artivism in urban spaces, we must always process how we interact with the rest of society. Sociologist Christian Borch’s research showed how a group of people protesting is a force to fear, an embodiment of danger. The notion of crowds has referred ‘to something which is intrinsic to the edifice of this social order’ … ‘and therefore looked upon with terror’ (Borch, 2012). I engage with this problem in this chapter as I present how suriashi found its way into the democratic movement in Hong Kong where the ruling powers took advantage of reacting violently to ‘the crowd’, while completely ignoring the peaceful message of the democratic protest. Suriashi performed during the Hong Kong movement showed how artivism functioned as a critical art of inquiry, blurring the boundaries between aesthetic practice, inquiry, activism, and everyday life.

5 Method The methodological framework for this investigation originated from studying suriashi in a theatrical studio context in Kyoto. However, the practice changed focus, and instead developed into a methodology for experiencing spaces and society in a new way. Suriashi originated as a method for embodied stability, for example in dance and martial arts, where suriashi is a distinct way of working, a precise way of using the body as an instrument/tool to get something done—such as performing a narrative. When suriashi was relocated to outdoor spaces, the practice changed from being a method for perfection and instead became a methodology for processing society. Suriashi was not performed as a secondary experimentation, but instead served as an overarching strategy. In that sense, the suriashi practice is the methodological frame itself. Knowledge achieved through practising suriashi was not a static endeavour; it changed with the situations and spaces performed within and elicited a variation of artistic experiences. By performing suriashi alone and with others, I was able to find new questions and answers regarding gender, space and dance practice. I exemplify this by revisiting and elaborating on three experiments with slow suriashi walking in urban spaces. The first one is ‘Suriashi Intervention’, performed at Gothenburg Culture Festival in August 2016. The second is an ‘invisible’ suriashi performed by the then Hong Kong-based scholar Ching-yuen Cheung during the violent protests at Yuen Long Station in Hong Kong in July 2019. The third

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experiment shows how suriashi unveiled important issues regarding art in urban spaces, necessary for Master students in performative practices. In order to frame these concepts and apply them towards an analysis of these walking experiments, I use my own empirical observations and experiences from being an insider to the dance field in the city Gothenburg. I state that the experiment and the analysis show aesthetic practise’s and artivism’s importance as a way to form democratic values, both in peaceful times and in times of crisis.

5.1 Suriashi as Walking and as Experimental Pilgrimage Valuing the lived experiences from suriashi walks, the word pilgrimage seemed appropriate for conceptualizing choreographed walks with no obvious agenda as a methodological frame. By claiming the concept ‘pilgrimage’, it is possible to structure dance practice, walking and the reflective component activated through suriashi. Pilgrimages are performed in specific spaces on specific routes to achieve a religious experience and an enhanced reflection of the self. Suriashi performed for my research was not aiming for achieving a specific religious experience, however Nishikawa Senrei requested a mindful way of working, which encouraged and valued the experience of practicing slowly and in silence. I found further support for my claim from the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsur¯o (1889–1960) who meant the purpose of pilgrimages were not for a specific religious purpose, “but an experience to understand art” (Watsuji, quoted by Cheung, 2018, p. 141). Watsuji did not walk in suriashi, but he walked slowly in order to understand how past times interact with contemporary times (Sullivan, 2014). Watsuji’s slow walking through temples experiencing sculptures—and the rhythm of objects—from many angles was for him a source of spiritual enlightenment. A pilgrimage provides space and time for paying close attention to our being in the world. Watsuji meant that walking while appreciating art engendered an otherworldly mood, which I argue suriashi also brings about (Sullivan, 2014). The artistic or bodily experience of the practice informs an autoethnographic perspective, which I use extensively in this chapter. However, this ‘otherworldly mood’ achieved from suriashi can also engage critically with situations and societal issues.

5.2 Participants See Fig. 2.

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Fig. 2 The author Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt with artists and students at Gothenburg Culture Festival, Aug 17th, 2016. Photo Palle Dahlstedt © Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt

6 Example #1: Suriashi Intervention at Gothenburg Culture Festival I process what was manifested during the experiment with slow suriashi walking as a political, experimental pilgrimage, which further helped define suriashi’s potential to become a critical and radical act. I was searching for a word that described the specific role suriashi might play when it was made into a societal performative act, and I decided to use ‘intervention’ in the title. Suriashi Intervention was targeted towards the city’s unequal distribution of funding of the arts, which has affected the local female dance artists. My critique of the city’s spatial injustice was offered through suriashi emerged at a much slower pace, where walkers of all genders leaned back in space, while appropriating the ‘feminine’ embodiment as a feminist strategy. ‘Suriashi intervention’, investigated how suriashi could work in resistance to gendered inequalities. My aim was to facilitate participants to walk consciously, while experiencing suriashi’s ‘feminine’ shape of the body, the slow encounter with a fast society, interconnected with political cause. It aimed to be a contribution to political marching in the form of an artistic/activist pilgrimage, walking to acknowledge the absence of artistic practice, particularly by women dancers, in the city centre.

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6.1 Gothenburg Culture Festival In order to understand the challenges surrounding this kind of act, I briefly provide details of the space; the Gothenburg Culture Festival, and where suriashi arrived in this. On August 17, 2016, I was invited by the choreographer/curator Benedikte Esperi to perform suriashi with a group of dance practitioner- and art studentparticipants at the Gothenburg Culture Festival. I chose my act to explore how suriashi might collectively address ‘the political’, regarding space and independent dance in Gothenburg. Gothenburg, founded in 1621, is the second-largest city in Sweden, fifth largest in the Nordic countries. It has a population of approximately 570,000 in the city proper and about 1 million inhabitants in the metropolitan area. Through slow suriashi marching we were offering critique of the low funding support of the local dance scene. Local artists have long been critical of how the city’s politicians allocated the money to sport and entertainment events, and their reluctance to instead support and put forward the city’s art scene. This became even more evident at the start of Gothenburg Culture Festival, which at its inauguration in 1991 bore the name Gothenburg Festival (without the word culture). Gothenburg’s local newspaper reminded how the politicians discovered that there was less drunkenness and less fighting (and less police intervention) when the festival was filled with culture (Holmgren, 2015).

6.2 Radical Walking for a Critique of Real Estate Speculations The starting point was the gallery space ‘A~venue’ and finishing point inside a newly built fountain facing Götaplatsen. Before the performance, we met at gallery ‘A~venue’, a space offered for free to the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg by Wallenstam AB, one of Sweden’s largest in the real estate industry. Wallenstam AB stated that they wanted to ‘contribute to more culture and interesting elements on Gothenburg’s parade street ‘Avenyen” (Wallenstam AB, 2015). A~venue immediately became a successful gallery space because it brought the different artistic disciplines of the faculty together, while attracting new audiences thanks to its central location. However, despite the huge success with A~venue, the gallery shut down in 2017. The space was empty for three years, but in July 2020, an exclusive Chinese-Swedish car brand opened, announcing pride to be surrounded by art spaces. However the story told by Wallenstam AB about the parade street hereafter was not about artistic elements, but how to sell out the street itself, announcing that the estimated purchasing power of Avenyen would be 13 billion Swedish crowns in 2020 (Wallenstam AB, 2017). The art spaces were then long gone. These ‘true stories’ from real life showed the failure to think politically and democratically about shared spaces. We unconsciously agreed to loose these spaces to real estate speculations.

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6.3 Radical Walking for a Confirmation of Ephemeral Lineage We were going to walk in suriashi from the gallery A~venue, while honouring Gothenburg’s first postmodern dance ensemble Rubicon, established by Eva Ingemarsson, Gun Lund and Gunilla Witt. They were the female precursors for establishing a local dance scene in Gothenburg in 1987. They also established subsidized professional dance training, performed on streets in the city, and opened two theatres. Primarily, they also worked a lifetime to bring open the doors for dance in higher education. Here, the art of walking was ever so important as a tool for radical modification and for performing a historical lineage. Rubicon’s choreographers have explained how their dance practise had to change after they had encountered the art of Pina Bausch in 1984. They originally had classical ballet as their basic training form, now they engaged with everyday walking as a protest to elitisms. The walking sessions created a new Point Zero for their work. Art historian Astrid von Rosen described how this was a most difficult and demanding task to undertake, which showed that the aim for new walking techniques was a real endeavour. “Not only did such walking instigate change, it manifestly and persistently implemented it in the individual dancers’ bodies and in the collective body politic” (von Rosen et al., 2018). For a full year, they practiced only walking as a new radical way to explore movements. They did not practise the usual ‘ballet walk’, with pointed toes and hips turned out, instead they engaged with everyday walking as a protest to elitisms. The choreographers were pioneers, ‘and, arguably, founding Rubicon was a powerful feminist political strategy, centred on women joining forces in collaborative structures’ (von Rosen et al., 2018). Rubicon used pedestrian walking to formulate their new artistic practice for dance. For a full year they practiced only walking as a new radical way to explore movements (von Rosen, 2016). Rubicon received funding and started the project the City Dancers and began performing new choreography in urban spaces.

6.4 Walking Is Dancing To argue that walking is dancing connected Rubicon with other postmodern artists, for example the New York City-based Yvonne Rainer with her Trio A and Steve Paxton with his Satisfyin Lover, who with their peers at Judson Church famously took the pedestrian and made it revolutionary (Banes, 1977). Of all the walking practices in dance, the postmodern walking was the most radical in its refusal of ‘high aesthetics’. When Rubicon created their choreographies specifically for the city, there was no discussion on what might be political in this shift of embodiment as we discuss it today. However, many dancers and choreographers embraced the new embodied technology of walking, which held an ‘anti-elitist ideology’, sometimes framed as ‘natural’, and which for many Gothenburg citizens was a bit shocking.

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After this change of practice, Rubicon received funding and started the project Dancers of the City and began performing new choreography based on the everyday in urban spaces. In 1986, their landmark piece Götaplatsens Trappor was premiered, performed outdoors at Götaplatsen on the stairs leading up to the Art Museum. I was nineteen years old when I saw the piece. It forever changed my notion of what dance could be and do, and how I perceived my hometown Gothenburg. Götaplatsen, built in 1923, is a typical modernist space, holding grand institutions: The City Library, The City Theatre, The Art Museum, The Art Hall and The Concert Hall. These institutions represented all art forms except for dance. Looking back, Rubicon’s choice of space for their 1986 choreography manifested precisely what was lacking at Götaplatsen: dancing bodies, dancers, and choreographers. Rubicon’s everyday movements revealed how the space was not only a power centre of art institutions—it was also a space of struggle for equal treatment of artists and artforms. When they moved there, they created ‘mortal’ or ‘intangible monuments’, monuments not built by steel or concrete, but by bodies. Thirty years later, my own 2016 performative reply through Suriashi Intervention, while offering critique of the low funding support of the local dance scene, also acknowledged these intangible monuments created by Rubicon.

6.5 Suriashi Walking Begins Our Suriashi Intervention began at the gallery space ‘A~venue’ and finished inside a newly built fountain facing Rubicon’s original stage. In the following section, I retell the personal experience of Suriashi Intervention performed at Gothenburg Culture Festival on August 17, 2016. We had a ‘dance permit’ (danstillstånd), since this is required for public dance events in Sweden per the law of order since the 1930s. It was difficult to anticipate whether our act was perceived as dancing, and whether anyone noticed that many of us were dancers. Twelve walkers left the gallery, took the ‘feminine’ suriashi position and began the ninety minutes/three-hundred-meter journey on the parade street Avenyen. Walking, breathing, sensing, remembering. Once afoot, we noticed that our slow suriashi walking had an immediate effect on the space we were moving in. We received comments from people at outdoor seating, which showed the visibility of our slow act. People made jokes about which one of us would reach the goal first. Some mocked us, since we were not that entertaining. Scenes like this were simultaneously juxtaposed with the sound of audiences, passers-by, narratives of gentrification with its closed and opened cinemas, cafés, kiosks, bars, and an increasing number of expensive shops. The city’s spatial proposal of what Avenyen represented today - an easily controllable space consisting of buying, selling, eating, and drinking – was confined and restricted. We instead wanted to show that the street should also be a space for artistic interventions, for dance practice and artistic experiences. Children were curious and wanted to join the slow walk. Two boys followed us for a long time; giggled and planned to jump into the group and scream: ‘Allahu Akbar!’ They left after a while. I was content that we met, and that the boys desired to make an intervention to our intervention. There were other stories than shopping and eating told on this street today, which had evoked their curiosity: Twelve grownups in slow silence.

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Suriashi had augmented our sense of reality to the point that we could hear a needle fall. We had listened to and sensed the city from a particular, embodied tempo and structure. I experienced how our floating across Avenyen in suriashi was as an exclamation mark of its own, and how we were moving in a different world on our own bridgeway through the real world. However, as we approached the fountain, there was extremely loud music and roaring sounds from a motorcyclist performing his acts on Götaplatsen to a sexist song by Teddybears Sthlm.

These scenes brought substance to slow walking in urban spaces—a relational and connected one. Slow walking with a group of people was perceived as both peaceful and provocative. Our intervention opened for both aesthetic experiences and a critical discussion on what we could do together in space, passing on Henri Lefebvre’s question on ‘the right to the city’ (Lefebvre et al., 1996). For this act we needed each other for support through the durational walking, which was strenuous for both body and mind. Walking slowly, we were also affected by our own bodies shaped in artificial positions, and by sensing the space and each other. Hearing the roaring sounds of Götaplatsen worked like a wakeup alarm, announcing what was made real in that space where slow, silent walking was juxtaposed with a motorcyclist flirting with death. It was a dissonant, ear-splitting experience; the rhythm hammered overwhelmingly through our bodies like a message from the city itself about spatial priorities, and where the real money was invested, which added to the dystopian encounter.

6.6 A Public Fountain as a Manifestation of What Is Not There We were programmed right after the motorcycle act. As agreed, the water jets were shut down just before we entered. We stopped and positioned ourselves inside the fountain, emptied our water bottles, and I raised the megaphone to give a speech. In the following section, I give an account of my speech and the arguments that I made for suriashi as a politically positioning artform and tool for artivism. I wanted to investigate suriashi’s potential as a political march with a cause and added ‘a speech with megaphone’, since such speeches are often integrated with political marches. The purpose of my speech was to show that our slow suriashi walk held a political cause related to space, gender, economy and the art of dance. The fountain was positioned in the middle of a junction. A megaphone was needed for my speech to be heard. The speech, combining archival and political aspects, occurred in the middle of the newly inaugurated, much-criticized public fountain that faces Götaplatsen, thirty years after the premiere of Rubicon’s piece. I claimed that the fountain occupied a space that belonged to the dancers of the city. The fountain, dangerously squeezed in between two bus stops in the middle of the heavily trafficked Avenyen, consisted of a large refuge with dark stone slabs, spraying water at different heights and with coloured light from below. It was built to be looked at

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from the distance, however children wanted to run through it, and it became the city’s biggest traffic hazard, even in need of guards to prevent accident. The fountain was poorly planned. Ninety-two water jets that perform a multi-coloured water show, generating dislike and nicknames like ‘Götasplash’, ‘Bus-Shower’, the ‘Pisseria’. My proposed nickname was ‘Fontana di Danza’. I thought that the fountain placed on a refuge in the middle of a junction and bus stops worked very well as a stage with walls of glass and a bit of distance from the audiences. I am also certain that the fountain never would have been built had more careful city planning been performed beforehand. The suriashi pilgrimage in combination with the speech in a megaphone became a meta-performance and discussion on how political issues could be processed through artistic research. My speech amplified by the megaphone began by acknowledging Rubicon and their artistic acts in the city. I then proposed that the new public fountain with its ninety-two water jets represented the immaterial archives of the city; dancers—female working bodies demanding recognition and payment for a hundred years of unpaid work. I compared Gothenburg’s female dance workers with Gothenburg’s male metal and shipyard workers, where I quoted dance scholar Priya Srinivasan who stated that although the dancing body is often seen only in aesthetic terms, it is also a working body (Srinivasan, 2011). Dance is hard physical work and should be recognized. Our bodies also build lasting monuments like the houses surrounding us, the statues, and city fountains. I argued that our bodies represent a not yet recognized form of work. I also proposed that since the new fountain cost thirty million Swedish crowns to build, another thirty million should be paid to compensate for the unpaid labour of female dancers. I revisit my process journal to add to the recollection of this event: The use of the megaphone made my Suriashi Intervention more confrontational than the acts by Rubicon. However, I was not prepared for just how confrontational. Suddenly, in the middle of my speech, a musical conductor ran down from the festival’s main stage at Götaplatsen. He walked straight into the fountain and tried to silence me. He was worried that my talk would interfere with his concert that would begin in forty-five minutes. I was in the middle of my speech and was too shocked to reply. The megaphone was very empowering in that moment. If it hadn’t been for the megaphone; I would have stopped by fear. The conductor walked into the fountain and tried to talk to the other participants. He seemed not aware that he walked straight into our performance, as justified and programmed by Gothenburg Culture Festival as his own. Since no one answered, he finally left. (Dahlstedt 2014–2019)

The musical conductor’s presence in our artwork could almost be perceived as curated, as if his performed interruption was there to stress the asymmetrical and gendered contracts performers from different artistic fields have with public space. Suriashi walking became the investigative probe that revealed the gaps on this demarcated surface. It made an impact and did not elapse unnoticed. People were curious by the slow walking. They stopped and listened to my speech, and afterwards they wanted to know more about it. When they understood that the suriashi performance sought to activate discussions on dance, economy and the fountain, they smiled and expressed: ‘We hate the fountain too!’ The suriashi walking in combination with the

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Fig. 3 The author gives a speech inside a fountain, when a musical conductor tries to interrupt her. Photo Palle Dahlstedt © Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt

speech in a megaphone became a radical meta-performance and discussion on how political issues can be choreographed collaboratively. Slow suriashi walking opened space for new embodied discussions. The artistic experience revealed a certain kind of vulnerability and gave us a new corporeal understanding of the position of a body in a space, like Götaplatsen or elsewhere. However, through suriashi we could activate spatial memories, guarded and secured through our bodies as valuable records for the future. Therefore, I propose more interventions in urban spaces like these— performed alone, with students, amateurs or professionals—to continue a philosophical discussion about space. The archive is alive, and historic acts live through our body, which yet again resonated with Nishikawa Senrei’s request to always perform with your ancestors (Fig. 3).

7 Example #2: Suriashi as Protest at Yuen Long Station, 2019 This second example concerns an event in which I was entrusted to disseminate suriashi practice for political purposes in Hong Kong. It showed a situation where walking served as a radical strategy for protest. In Beijing 2018 at the 24th World Congress of Philosophy [WCP], scholar Ching-yuen Cheung became intrigued by my presentation on how feminine suriashi could work as a feminist activism. He was then a lecturer at the Department of Japanese Studies at Chinese University of Hong Kong and one of the founding members of International Association for Japanese Philosophy (IAJP). Cheung explained that my presentation of suriashi as a feminist

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outdoor practice at the [WCP] conference as a discussion on gendered asymmetries had offered him a new strategy. His own first experience of suriashi came from Kendo (Japanese swordsmanship). However, in Kendo practice, the suriashi steps were the prelude of attacks (Cheung, 2019b). This showed how some practices dominated the discourse regarding suriashi as practice—it was a step for regaining balance in battles. Suriashi as practised in Iaid¯o, Kendo, Sumo and Karate were more familiar than the ‘feminine’ suriashi used in Nishikawa Senrei’s studio and my own research. Cheung’s own research concerned the philosophy of pilgrimage in Japan, and therefore he recognized connections between suriashi, walking and pilgrimage. Originally, pilgrimage represented a religious journey by foot. However, Cheung argued for a different representation of pilgrimage, where the pilgrimage was not made for religious reasons. He argued for a shift where pilgrimage could be something you can perform close to your home, which left less ecological footprints, and it could be related to everyday practice and to social work (Cheung, 2018).

7.1 Be Water—A Constructed Daoist Concept Cheung’s interest in feminine suriashi weaved further threads between suriashi, new strategies for radical walking, and peaceful protest. My teacher Nishikawa Senrei often used ‘be water’ as an instruction for practicing suriashi in the dance studio. Sociologist Tin-yuet Ting showed how the concept ‘be water’ supported pragmatic actions to confront riot police in Hong Kong (Ting, 2020). ‘Be water’ historically came from the Daodejing, believed to be the earliest Daoist text. Here, water was used as a metaphor for submissiveness and nonassertiveness, which has been interpreted as the Daoist concept of the feminine (Lai, 2000). As such, it has been pointed out as something in contrast to masculine notions of strength, achievement, and power. Philosopher Karyn Lai suggested that ‘the Daoist notion of complementarity of pairs of opposites provides interesting insights into how femininity (and masculinity) might be construed’ (Lai, 2000). I think that the Daoist concept ‘Be water’ collaborates well with a discussion on artistic interventions in urban spaces, as well as artivism and micro-activism. When clashes between police and protesters grew increasingly violent in Hong Kong, the political powers interpreted the protesting crowds as terror and not as democratic demonstrations, just as Borch discussed: a group of people protesting is a force to fear, an embodiment of danger (Borch, 2012). Cheung became frustrated and wanted to show different strategies for his students. Cheung therefore decided to make a political act by himself based on the suriashi I had taught him in the conference. Cheung found support both in constructed feminine suriashi as well as constructed Daoist concepts of femininity. On July 27th, 2019, when almost 300,000 people were marching in protest at the earlier mob attacks, and in protest of Hong Kong’s extradition bill, Cheung walked in suriashi as a peaceful act at Yuen Long Station. I coached him from Sweden, feeling very nervous and responsible that something bad might happen to him. I used my knowledge as dance educator with

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a long practice of teaching dance, walks and movements. This time, I was teaching Cheung a walking body for peace, vulnerable and open for silent communication, which was not necessarily a feminine structure. However, I did guide him through the ‘feminine’ body posture and reminded him of his ancestral spiritual engagement, intrinsic for suriashi. If he directed his eyes to the horizon, people would understand that he walked in peace, and it would protect him from bullying and angry comments. I reminded Cheung to breathe with each step: Breathe out when you slowly slide your right foot forward (count to four), breathe in when the feet meet in the middle (count to four), breathe out when you slide your left foot forward. The breathing techniques, a focus on the horizon, and meditating on ancestral support guided the body through the space, even as the space becomes unruly.

7.2 Cheung Walks at Yuen Long Station as a DIY Micro-artivism As Cheung arrived at Yuen Long Station at 3 p.m., 27 July 2019, he sent photos and videos, which allowed me to participate and support the walk from Sweden (see Fig. 4). He searched carefully for a place to practice suriashi without blocking others’ way. He found a place near one of the entrances to the main hall of the station on the first floor. He walked in suriashi for two hours and filmed the process by himself. He remembered that someone took a picture of him, but he did not care. Nobody talked to him. I asked if the posture gave him peace and courage or if he felt terrified. Cheung replied: “Of course, I was very peaceful and calm. In fact, I learnt from your talk in World Congress of Philosophy [WCP], that suriashi is not a march or confrontation in any sense. I was not worried inside the station, as you were not worried on the London bridge or in the Tiananmen Square”. After he noticed that there were too many people inside and outside the station, he left by train (Cheung, 2020). He met his postgraduate students right after his suriashi walk. It was an important act for him to do; to show students that peaceful protests were possible. Cheung had planned to do a suriashi four months later at the university after the police fired thousands of tear gas on the HK2 Bridge inside the campus on Nov 12, 2019 (Cheung, 2020). However, the campus was soon occupied and barricaded. Later, the university announced that the semester was over, and the bridge was still monitored by security nowadays (Cheung, 2020). This inhibited any further interaction in that space. When Cheung performed suriashi as a radical walking act, it became an example of what political scientist Jose Marichal defined as ‘micro-activism’ (Marichal, 2013). The goal had not been to mobilize one big cause, but to create a smaller activity to show a non-violent resistance in a difficult situation. Both my own and Cheung’s activities were posted on social media, and we had an interested audience following. Even though the actions were done at a smaller scale, it did not invalidate their political purpose. Cheung’s suriashi act was indeed part of the bigger Hong Kong

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Fig. 4 Suriashi walk at Yuen Long Station, July 27th, 2019, Hong Kong. Photo Ching-Yuen Cheung © Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt

movement, a pro-democracy movement which demanded protests not to be characterised as a “riot”, but a defence for freedom of expression (Cheung, 2019b). The situation in Hong Kong became worse, and the Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor finally urged the hundreds of protesters of the Hong Kong Movement to give up since the inevitable risk of the Beijing government to intervene militarily. This forced Ching-Yuen Cheung to flee his country and seek a new position elsewhere. He now works at University of Tokyo. However, Cheung has continued to present suriashi as a nonviolent, feminist protest, arguing that authorities could never label suriashi as a riot, hence its advantage over other protesting walks (Cheung, 2019b).

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8 Example #3: Suriashi with Master Students at University of Gothenburg 8.1 Performative Walking as New Methodology in Higher Education I am concluding my chapter on suriashi walking as a radical act, by discussing how Suriashi Intervention performed at Götaplatsen led to a new artistic research methodology course for master students of contemporary performative arts at University of Gothenburg. Coming from a background of performing, choreographing as well as teaching for theatrical purposes, my research and performance on suriashi walking and the urban spaces changed how I wanted to organize my future teaching. There was so much learning through suriashi walking, and so much embodied understanding of the city/the local space processed. I was confident the Master students would get something out of it, even though it meant moving the seminars to the streets. Following my lecture, workshop and actual collaborative suriashi, I found in the subsequent discussions how much support the practice could offer the students. Suriashi engendered questions about performative arts and city-planning in urban spaces, just by relocating from the university space into the streets and society. The Master students were able to investigate how professional dance- and actor-training also could engage with societal engagement. They evaluated how suriashi enabled artists to critically reflect and discuss their profession in a societal context, as well as how artistic practices could offer change by presenting different ways of being in the world together. We reflected on the purpose of performer training and the place of performing arts in society; as well as on how and in which formats knowledge in Artistic Research could be disseminated. After my lecture, and detailed workshop, the students and I walked out in suriashi for the city of Gothenburg. We brought the slow studio practice with us as a slow interventionist group in society. We worked for three hours, following Avenyen and stopped along the way for shared reflections. The initial question of what suriashi walking could activate in space was in itself a clarification that it was not about performing perfect suriashi. However, some students expressed how the rigidity of the body construction offered a support in itself. They meant that the keeping of ones’ hands on one’s thighs created a clarity for passers-by showing that this was most probably art performed with a predetermined expression with a specific intention. Suriashi also became a method of reflecting on the proximity to their audience, who the audience members might be and how to coexist in space. After hours of practicing together as a group, the students walked out in pairs. I asked them to search for spaces they thought were in need of suriashi. They walked in pairs for support and for documentation. We then met in the classroom to discuss their experiences and to watch the documentations. What unified the students’ experiences was that suriashi challenged them; first as a difficult physical balancing act, an endurance test and then also as a new relationship with the public space and the

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passing audience. The city evolved to represent more than a resource, something for the artist to extract or use. The city was instead neither seen as a background nor a backdrop to their performative acts. They reflected on the division of common, public, private and owned spaces. In our slow suriashi, the question of land ownership became quite acute—who can commission—or evict—performative art for the urban space? How has consumer culture affected spaces for public art? The students raised the important question on the artist’s requirement to be visually consumed by audiences. They even asked if their artistic training had made them less sensitive to space. This enabled a discussion on sustainable artistic training, education, and how performers are trained to act in space. The students began to plan for smaller gestures instead of big busking acts. They realized that slow walking in itself was interesting and radical enough to find out things about space. They made small adjustments to create safe spaces for their performative acts—their choices revealed an inherent concern for other people—their audience. We concluded that public art practices should always begin with a deep concern for space and other people in order to create more sustainable interactions for both performers as well as audiences.

9 Discussion The Suriashi Intervention on Avenyen at Gothenburg Culture Festival processed spatial disagreements, while activating the immaterial archives of dance in the city of Gothenburg. Through Suriashi Intervention, an embodied critique was offered to the city officials who had failed to value work by female dance artists (Rubicon), and at the same time spend their budget on poorly planned and unsafe monuments. ChingYuen Cheung’s ‘invisible’ performance in Hong Kong aimed to show his students how non-violent protests might be performed in violent situations for the sake of democracy. Finally, the methodological course for Master students at University of Gothenburg opened up for a critical discussion about site-specific art practices, as well as the purpose of professional, elitist performer training. Sociologist Doreen Massey argued that simple movements in space have tremendous effect on people sharing the same space (Massey, 2005). The kind of qualities expressed in movement include a much wider and more nuanced range with more attention on the emotional and affective meaning than what is usually addressed in the social sciences (Massey, 2011). By walking slowly in suriashi towards Götaplatsen, at Yuen Long Station in Hong Kong, on Avenyen, an alternative approach to space was proposed, confirmed through our bodies. Through suriashi walking, we sought to change the generalised assumptions of protesting bodies in space, forward-steaming, fists raised. Suriashi Intervention performed critique of the unequal distribution of power and economy in Gothenburg. Audiences engaged both with the walking practice, the situation with unpaid female artists and the irrational building of an expensive fountain. As my speech was interrupted by a male conductor intruding on the space, this event also showed how space is always gendered. Cheung’s act, which he

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performed as a solo act but brought further to his students and other scholars, functioned for him as a new way to protest peacefully. His walking act became part of the bigger Hong Kong movement, a pro-democracy movement which demanded the protests not to be characterised as a “riot”, but a defence for freedom of expression (Cheung, 2019a). Massey suggested three propositions for an alternative approach to space that informed the methodology of this thesis (Massey, 2005). At first, she argued that space does not exist prior to identities/entities and their relations—they are all constitutive. She encouraged the understanding of space as an effect of interrelations created through interactions between the global space out there to the local place in here (Massey, 2005). When we move in between institutional buildings, we create new choreographies, new relations in that space. Second, Massey encouraged the understanding of space as something that is made. Since space is something that is made, we should be aware that we are constantly making space together. Space was the dimension that offers the existence of the other. As we discovered through our slow movements on Avenyen, public space was about to shrink, bought and sold through real estate speculation. This failed to offer the existence of the other, while threatening the possibility to exist on equal terms in space, and to raise voices on inequalities publicly. Massey’s third proposition for an alternative approach to space was that we should recognize space as always under construction (Massey, 2005). It is never finished; never closed. There has never been a one road to follow, albeit this image is very classic to modernist thinking. Rubicon’s artistic work was an earlier example of how artistic acts worked to keep public space open. However, because public space was shrinking, ‘public art performances that are not commercial have almost become impossible’ (von Rosen et al., 2018, p. 229). Because what the researchers Meskimmon, Sand and von Rosen stated ‘In the extreme commercialisation of cities world-wide, public space has decreased and much art has been incorporated into the entertainment industry: public art performances have become another way of promoting ‘the creative city” (von Rosen et al., 2018). I acknowledge the need of new performance acts to continue these kinds of movements in public space. Here is where walking of any kind—slow, choreographed, gendered—could become a radical act. Here is where the artist, researcher and activist become intertwined. Thank you for reading this.

References Banes, S. (1977). Terpsichore in sneakers: Post-modern dance. Wesleyan University Press. Borch, C. (2012). The politics of crowds: An alternative history of sociology. Cambridge University Press. Cheung, C.-Y. (2018). Basho’s visit to the north and the philosophy of pilgrimage: Philosophy of pilgrimage and Japanese culture. In 24th World Congress of Philosophy, Beijing, August 17, 2018. Cheung, C.-Y. (2019a). Facebook.

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Cheung, C.-Y. July 27th (2019b). RE: Mail conversation about suriashi at Yuen Long Station in 2019. Cheung, C.-Y. Oct 29th (2020). RE: Mail conversation about suriashi at Yuen Long Station in 2019. Courtney, E. (2021). Pearl primus on fighting ignorance and prejudice through dance. Dance Magazine. Fabian, L., & Samson, K. (2016). Claiming participation—A comparative analysis of DIY urbanism in Denmark. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 9(2), 166–184. Flinn, A., Terraciano, A., & von Rosen. (2015). Archives, art and activism: Exploring critical heritage approaches to global societal challenges. Call for participation. University College London, University of Gothenburg. Hewitt, A. (2005). Social choreography: Ideology as performance in dance and everyday movement. Duke University Press. Holmgren, T. (2015). From a drunken party to a tidied cultural festival (Från fyllefest till ett städat kulturkalas). Göteborgs-Posten, Aug 9th, p.gp.se. Kawashima, T. (2001). Writing margins: The textual construction of gender in Heian and Kamakura Japan (Vol. 201). Harvard University Asia Center. Lai, K. (2000). The Daodejing: Resources for contemporary feminist thinking. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 27(2). Leddy, T. (2006). Dewey’s aesthetics. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Lefebvre, H., Kofman, E., & Lebas, E. (1996). Writings on cities (Vol. 63). Blackwell. Lerman, L. (2014). Hiking the horizontal: Field notes from a choreographer. Wesleyan University Press. Marichal, J. (2013). Political Facebook groups: Micro-activism and the digital front stage. First Monday. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage. Massey, D. (2011). Proceedings from the 10th International NOFOD Conference: Spacing Dance(s)-Dancing Space(s). Meeks, L. (2011). The disappearing medium: Reassessing the place of Miko in the religious landscape of premodern Japan. History of Religions, 50(3), 208–260. Motokiyo, Z., Rimer, J. T., & Yamazaki, M. (1984). On the art of the Noh drama: The major treatises of Zeami. In J. T. Rimer & Y. Masakazu (Trans.). Princeton University Press. Nakahara, G. E. (1999). The songs of Ryojinhisho. University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Parviainen, J. (2010). Choreographing resistances: Spatial–kinaesthetic intelligence and bodily knowledge as political tools in activist work. Mobilities, 5(3), 311–329. Sandoval, C., & Latorre, G. (2008). Chicana/o artivism: Judy Baca’s digital work with youth of color. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Srinivasan, P. (2011). Sweating Saris: Indian dance as transnational labor. Temple University Press. Steinwald, M. (2012). Feminist movement: Deborah hay, artistic survival, aesthetic freedom, and feminist organizational principles. Walker, Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, National Performance Network. Strippoli, R. (2006). Dancing through time: Transformations of the Gio legend in premodern Japanese literature and theater. Stanford University. Sullivan, L. S. (2014). Pilgrimages to the ancient temples in Nara [Koji Junrei] by Watsuji Tetsur¯o. Philosophy East and West, 64(3), 821–822. Ting, T. Y. (2020). From ‘be water’ to ‘be fire’: Nascent smart mob and networked protests in Hong Kong. Social Movement Studies, 19(3), 362–368. Tokita, A. (2016). The singer of tales as itinerant performer: The Michiyuki trope. In P. Eckersall, H. Kosuge, T. Morishita, & Y. Homma (Eds.) (p. 224). von Rosen, A. (2016). Scenografisk Sinnlighet—I Fält med Stadens Dansare. Humanister i fält. Metoder och möjligheter.

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von Rosen, A., Sand, M., & Meskimmon, M. (2018). Transversal dances across time and space: Feminist strategies for a critical heritage studies. In Gender and heritage (pp. 169–184). Routledge. Wallenstam, A. B. (2015). Kulturaktörer intar Kungsportsavenyen 25 i 243 dagar. Wallenstam, A. B. (2017). Available: https://www.wallenstam.se/globalassets/dokument/lokaler/ saljpresentation/kopparhusetsaljpresentation.pdf?id=4377. [Accessed 2020-10-01 2020]. Yamazaki, K. (2001). Nihon Buyo: Classical dance of modern Japan. Indiana University.

Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt Ph.D. in Dance from University of Roehampton, is a Senior Lecturer in Dance at the Stockholm University of the Arts and University of Gothenburg (Sweden), performer, choreographer, filmmaker and writer. Her performances and films have been awarded internationally. She walks slowly as a ceremonial, subversive act thanks to her studies and work with Japanese dance in Kyoto since 2000. Her research interests are practice led and concern gender codified movement practice, non-hierarchical treatment of global dance techniques, and autoethnographic accounts from within the practice.

Walking and Cultivating a Critical Community of Practice Laura K. Reeder

Abstract This visual essay is a poetic exploration of ways that walking can cultivate a critical community of practice (Reeder, 2015) among people who may not know each other, but who have intersecting physical, functional, or intellectual goals. The images document a series of walking encounters that occurred over a year from Summer 2019 to Summer 2020. The journey involved a walking art practice and pedagogical research with people from many cultures. It moved across the Atlantic from New England in 2019 to the Walking Practices/Walking Art/Walking Bodies International Encounters in Prespes, Greece and through New York and New England during the COVID pandemic. The poetic synthesis of words and images came together using Arendt’s theory of the vita activa through “labor, work, and action” (1958) as praxis for understanding how walking or moving independently may encourage solidarity with so many. Keywords Walking · Critical community of practice · Visual essay

1 Introduction Our bodies provide an intimate measure of human life on earth. When humans move through the world, we gather and leave evidence of our actions. Each step that we take might be research in physical feedback. Data can be found in the texture of grass, in the resistance of stone, in accommodations and interventions made by our weight, our scale, our ideas. Through walking, we can find metaphors in the complexity of a path or discover how direction and atmosphere might bring us to a new place or idea. Walking as bodily research provides rich information for my art and pedagogy.

L. K. Reeder (B) Boston University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_11

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This visual essay is a new form of expression for me. My art comes from a blended heritage of drawing and walking. I etch lines on sand with farm tools and with my feet in snow to develop miles-long and acres-wide labyrinths that I call Cultivators. Thus, the exercise of reducing complicated theories and physically intense experiences into a few poetic images was both liberating and challenging. Writing with a deeply personal voice is also both liberating and challenging, and it adds a layer of risky exposure. As you ‘read’ this essay with your eyes, I invite you to also experience it with your own journeys in mind and body. My pedagogy is rooted in a belief that people can and will always learn from each other and grow when we question the powers that form our shared learning in a critical community of practice (Reeder, 2015). Community of practice theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991) proposes that through shared or “peripheral participation” (p. 29), a group of people can learn from each other and organically form communities for personal and professional growth. The walks in this essay are introduced as examples of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Shor, 1987) because they have sparked participants to question the politics that surround their experience and to “reflect on things as if they could be otherwise” (Greene, 2001, p. 98). I chose to organize the following images as a journey that began with an invitation to participate in Walking Practices/Walking Art/Walking Bodies International Encounters in Prespes, Greece in July 2019. The journey meandered through a year of walking, work, research, and activism through pandemic, through uprisings for Black Lives Matter, and into new spaces for learning through art. As the reader travels along on this journey, they may find layers of their own understanding. The process of selecting and composing images and text during the deep months of the COVID-19 pandemic lock-down provided rich praxis for my life and work as an artist, teacher, and policymaker. Praxis in this text refers to Arendt’s (1958) theory that an active life, or vita activa can move us to engage in important community changes through our “labor, work, and action” (p. 12) and that socio-political solidarity may be an outcome from walking or moving independently. Vita activa resonates in my own ‘cultivator’ practice of large earth drawings that often result in bringing people from diverse situations together to walk the labyrinth of lines: immigrants and citizens, young and old, human, and animal overlap, meet, and sometimes race along curving miles. Cicero likened the Latin agricultural cultura from care of earth to a social idea about collective achievements of people. The cultivated expanses of earth are created by my own body in solitude, yet they have encouraged narratives for being lost and found, challenges for endurance and survival, and metaphors for meditation and action on critical issues. This essay proposes that there is powerful elegance in walking as a labor and measure of shared earth, as the work of sharing ideas and instruments, and ultimately in the action of social change.

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2 Journey In the summer of 2019, I was among an international gathering of artists and researchers convened at the Walking Practices/Walking Art/Walking Bodies International Encounters in Prespes, which shares boundaries between Albania, Macedonia, and Northern Greece. Strangers walked on ancient earth together. We crossed international borders in covert and overt meanderings. Walking in silence and study, blurred boundaries among participating residents, artists, and researchers from diverse international situations. It also gave structure to my own research on critical communities of practice among teachers, cultural partners, and learners in schools. On my journey home, political unrest and hatred scarred my homeland with the actions of a dangerous American president. I walked with hundreds of strangers through the corrals of customs and reflected on the fears and possibilities that occur when our movements are scrutinized and controlled. Back home in New York and New England, I continued the work of supporting teachers as they unearthed creativity that seemed buried by standardized curriculum. I cultivated earth and conversation on winter beaches in cities where people from different cultures escaped to breathe clean air. I dove back into the streets with them in early March of 2020, not knowing that in three days the world would lock down for the COVID-19 pandemic. I was walking the 13-mile Indigenous walking path that became Broadway, New York to understand the relationship between straight lines and the histories that guided our movement through time and space. Within a few weeks, I was back on the streets walking among people to protest on behalf of black and brown lives and climate justice. I borrow strength from writer, scientist, and the Indigenous wisdom of Kimmerer who wrote that our stories “are shaped by the land and the culture and the teller, so that one story may be told widely and differently” (2013, p. 386). The interplay of labor, work, and action is always on my mind as I walk, as I teach, as I research, as I protest, as I care for family and friendships, and ultimately, cultivate spaces with coordinated physical and intellectual intention. I hope that your own walking stories can proliferate here.

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Spring 2019—Cultivator, Massachusetts Bay, MA © [Reeder]. My labor is your contemplation. My contemplation is your work. Our action is transformative

Summer 2019—Orientation, Basilica of Agios Achillios, Greece © [Reeder]. We come together to understand our responsibility. Christianity, Communism, Tourism, Research, and Contemplation

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Summer 2019—Crossing Boundaries. Lake Prespes, Albania, Macedonia, and Greece © [Reeder]. In the middle of blue water, strangers move together across borders, in and out of bounds, with no pockets for their passports. This work is a protest and a promise all at once

Summer 2019—Meandering in Aristotelous Square, Thessaloniki, Greece © [Reeder]. So many feet. So many architects. The movement of trees defies our labors

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Summer 2019—Obedience in US Customs, Boston, MA © [Reeder]. Border crossing as an act of obedience. Hope and fear under bright lights strengthens our resolve

Fall—2019 Mapping past and present, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY © [Reeder]. Looking back and working forward to map a future from the artifacts of hands and minds

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Winter 2020—Convergence in Times Square, New York, NY © [Reeder]. To democratize a long and narrow land, a common was created. It was electrified and became a Great White Way in more ways than one

Winter 2020—Desire Line, Broadway, New York, NY © [Reeder]. Manahatta is an island once traversed by Lenape people. Their line of desire from top to bottom (or bottom to top) moves us infinitely

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Winter 2020—Morning Choices, Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY © [Reeder]. They come for amusement and non-pandemic air. They must consider their choices

Spring 2020—Movement in Old Town, Marblehead, MA © [Reeder]. Our faces are covered against an invisible threat. Our bodies protest a more visible threat. Our urgent moving, singing, corps may be a threat to someone. We hope that it is a promise to more

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References Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar. Teachers College Press. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teaching of plants. Milkweed Editions. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Reeder, L. (2015). Teaching artistry as a critical community of practice [Ph.D. dissertation]. Syracuse University. Shor, I. (1987). Freire for the classroom. Boynton/Cook.

Laura K. Reeder Ph.D. is an arts education consultant and teaching artist who guides people to access their creative abilities and overcome obstacles in many situations. She is a skilled organizer and trainer for developing arts, educational, and social programs and curriculum. She teaches Arts Education Policy and Advocacy at Boston University and is Curriculum Coordinator for a 14+ year USDOE creativity research project with Suffolk County, NY schools and cultural partners. Laura was tenured faculty at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Executive Director of Partners for Arts Education. She presents widely and her publications can be found in Art Education: The Journal of the National Art Education Association, The Teaching Artist Journal, The Journal of Social Theory and Art Education, and more. Her love of the earth and learning guides her art.

Walking-With Covid: Posthuman Walking Propositions Adrienne (Adi) Brown, Alexandra Lasczik, and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

Abstract This chapter walks a doctoral inquiry located in, through and with Covid19, the virus that reached pandemic proportions from 2019 onwards and is still a malignant presence at time of writing. This chapter argues that the more than human presence of the pandemic created the conditions for an inquiry that shifted, responded and diffracted away from its original planning towards an engagement with posthuman entities, Covid-19 being but one. Originally planned as a placebased and pedagogical doctoral study that intended to inquire with Chinese art and design university students in Hunan province, the study was necessarily redesigned and repositioned to accommodate a practice-based inquiry impacted by the pandemic and its associated restrictions. The project transmogrified into a study that focused on the more than human. It became a walking-with posthuman covid as a ubiquitous and unyielding presence, always co-implicated in the study and the life and artmakings of the first author, her students and her doctoral supervisors. Posthuman covid thus became a creature implicated in the work by its absent presence and inspired a more fully posthuman artmaking practice, where the agency of more than human entities became actively and agentically implicated in the materiality of art process, art performance and resolved artworks. Place and pedagogy, once the initial focus of the study, became an apparatus of enactment, in an ecology of practice—in this case, walking-with posthuman covid. Keywords Posthuman covid · Posthuman artmaking · Doctoral study · Walking · Walkography · Walking-with · Arts-based educational research

1 Introduction In these COVID-19 times, education and educational research have been significantly impacted. Educational researchers and postgraduate research students have been compelled to pivot their fieldwork and methodologies into completely new territories, A. Brown · A. Lasczik (B) · A. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles Southern Cross University, Gold Coast, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_12

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just as many educators had to spin to fully online learning in very short timeframes. As a result, the studies of many scholars and doctoral students at our university have been forced to rethink, reposition and redesign their studies. Adi Brown, the first author of this paper, did just that, shifting the focus, fieldwork and thrust of her inquiry almost entirely, supported by her doctoral supervisors Alexandra Lasczik and Amy CutterMackenzie-Knowles. This paper explores that journey—itself a walking-through of the contextual terrain—by foregrounding the COVID-19 pandemic as ‘posthuman covid’, a more-than-human presence throughout the duration of the study, and more broadly, as a global force. To begin, a discussion of posthuman covid is followed by the research design, including how the pandemic impacted its original contexts and practices. Following this, is an exploration of the methodology—the artmaking processes and artworks—before offering final thoughts. In orienting the chapter, we begin by introducing COVID-19 to contextualise the discussion to come.

2 COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2—or severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, a form of coronavirus—is a submicroscopic infectious agent replicating at the cellular level. Its emergence into the human population in 2019 was an Anthropocenic global event that changed the world in myriad ways (O’Callaghan-Gordo & Antó, 2020). Developing into pandemic proportions, it was compared to the wrongly attributed ‘Spanish’ flu, also known as the Great Influenza Epidemic, which appeared just over 100 years prior. Both pandemics impacted global mortality, although COVID-19 is to date, far less deadly by proportion.1 The first known human cases of COVID-19 were identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019, allegedly emerging from the Huanan wet markets, although other species such as bats and birds have co-existed with the virus for millennia (Currari, 2020; Lasczik & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2022). As Fernando (2020) asserts, The most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all coronaviruses is estimated to have existed as recently as 8000 BCE, although some models place the common ancestor as far back as 55 million years or more, implying long term coevolution with bat and avian species. (p. 1)

The Wuhan wet markets, where trafficking of so-called exotic species for the tables of the privileged, were shut down temporarily as the virus spread and people retreated from the outdoors, given the disease’s acute capacity for infection. The human world went into lockdown, and subsequently, Asian xenophobia flared, with some naming COVID-19 the ‘China virus’, inspired by a misguided, suggestive president. Meanwhile, the concomitant positive effects of reduced movement and 1

Although it should be noted that we are not yet through this latest pandemic, and the ‘Spanish’ flu data is contestable.

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traffic resulted in positive impacts on the planet such as an improvement in air quality and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (Borage & Shelotkar, 2020). The impact on the world and its inhabitants has thus been textured: immense, tragic and exhausting for the humans; somewhat restorative for the more-than-human. The human death toll globally has been catastrophic, more than 6 million and counting at the time of writing. Its financial impacts are also staggering, but perhaps more so, is what Braidotti (2020) terms as its ‘negative affective economy’, which speaks to the contemporary psychic landscape worldwide of fear, exhaustion, hopelessness and sorrow, worse still in the majority world countries. COVID-19 effects discriminate; it is a man-made disaster, entirely anthropocentric. COVID-19, like HIV/AIDS, Ebola, hantavirus lung syndrome, and Nipah virus before it, are all consequential of large-scale ecological damage and the concomitant increase in the zoonotic transmission of infectious diseases across species to the human-animal (O’Callaghan-Gordo & Antó, 2020). Vidal (2020) asserts that there is an ineffable link between planetary health and COVID-19, with O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antó (2020) going as far as to assert that, COVID-19 is a paradigmatic example of an Anthropocene disease. It follows a complex sequence involving disruption of the natural, social, economic and governance systems. The destruction of natural habitats and the extinction of species, the poorly regulated capture, marketing and consumption of non-human animals, the influence of lobbies to nullify or delay measures to protect natural and social systems, the limitation of current scientific knowledge and the contempt by governments and companies of the available evidence, have all worked in an orchestrated sequence to facilitate the current COVID-19 pandemic. This sequence of distal causes is closely related to the global climate crisis and the rest of environmental disruptions of the Anthropocene. (p. 2)

Indeed, scholars have begun to refer to the COVID-19 era as the Virocene (Fernando, 2020), albeit with yet limited engagement. What is clear, however, is that the COVID-19 virus is an ineffably posthuman agent.

3 Posthuman Covid: Virocene Agency A posthuman orientation decentres the human and re-evaluates the agencies of matter, as both are equally important to consider as entangled, rather than separate entities in posthuman research. Posthumanism has opened what is possible in research across fields of education, cultural geography, social science and the arts, through considerations of “materiality, vitalism, ecologies, flora, fauna, climate, elements, things and their interconnections” (Ulmar, 2017, p. 1). Posthuman thinkers look beyond dualisms, and the sexualised and racialised other, to contribute various perspectives about research design and to consider contemporary issues (Braidotti, 2019; Ulmer, 2017).

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Beyond philosophy, posthumanism has become a contemporary imperative, due to human disruptions of the ecological balance, including but not limited to altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere—a feat that attests to the pervasiveness of human consumption. Human interactions are implicated with non-human others in the biosphere, in such detrimental ways that should compel immediate action. COVID-19 has forced a reckoning, where humans must face who we are and what we have done, on an individual and species level, as a fundamental, political, philosophical, ethical, and existential concern (Ferrando & Datta, 2021). When thinking of the ways in which viruses leak into non-human and human bodies (Charnley, 2021) with a spectrum of effects, and indeed transfer between them as we are now witnessing on a global scale, the dynamic nature of such transference beckons a more fully posthuman consideration in this sixth mass extinction. COVID-19 is agentic in its power, reach and effects, impacting humans effectively, through permeable bodies and insidious mutation. It resists human containment and mitigation strategies and has forced significant behavioural, social, psychological and economic change. It is indeed a force to be reckoned with. Of interest to this study is COVID-19’s posthuman power to move, often by stealth, consistently, relentlessly and persistently between and through humans. COVID19 is infectious, moveable, leaking from body to body in immanent transference. Posthuman covid then, beyond its murderous implications, is an embodied change agent, in constant movement and flux, infecting and walking-with the human and the more-than-human (Salmela & Valtonen, 2019) constantly, likely for many years to come. It is with this notion of an agentic, posthuman covid in constant movement and flux, that is of interest here. Given that posthuman frameworks provide different ways of thinking, calling for appropriate and creative frameworks for contemporary forms of human-non-human relationships, we take up this call intra-actively (Barad, 2007). Posthumanism is a call to reject the human as a neutral category, and certainly, in the Anthropo/Virocene, the notion of human neutrality is absurd. Therefore, posthuman researchers are impelled to challenge assumptions of human-centeredness and to think relationally with other beings and with matter (Hughes & Lury, 2013). In this study, this has caused a rethinking of educational research in the Anthropo/Virocene as inquiry that must consider—indeed is compelled to consider—posthuman covid as an implicated and somewhat pedagogical actant. What follows is an outline of the original conceptions of the doctoral study, which, when posthuman covid was implicated, diffracted from its origins into a practicebased walking inquiry that is also discussed below. Given its newly conceptualised movement- and place-based positions, the inquiry engaged posthuman covid and process philosophy in its theoretical and methodological enactments.

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4 Methodology Adi is a P¯akeh¯a2 New Zealander, and taught art and design for twelve years in Aotearoa-New Zealand prior to moving to Australia. She had also lectured on-site in China for intensive periods. Adi’s study was initially proposed as a pedagogical exploration of cross-cultural learning styles in Chinese and Aotearoa-New Zealand art and design students, and she had planned extensive fieldwork with these students whilst visiting and working in Hunan on her twice-yearly intensives. For three years prior to the COVID-19 travel bans and as part of a three-plusone agreement3 between the university in Hunan province and the Aotearoa-New Zealand institution, Adi travelled twice yearly from Australia, where she currently lives, to China. The purpose of these trips was to teach block intensive courses in art and design with the intention of preparing learners transitioning to further art and design study in Aotearoa-New Zealand. This model is characteristic of transnational higher education agreements between Chinese and non-Chinese universities globally, whereby academics from a partner university teach content to Chinese learners before they arrive for further study in the host country.4 The travel bans associated with the pandemic changed how and where this transnational teaching occurs, and classes pivoted from face-to-face in China to online digital classrooms remotely. This created a conundrum for Adi, as her research design was already fully conceptualised, her research proposal approved. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic thus caused Adi to completely re-situate the emphasis of her study into other terrains. Moreover, Adi had also been severely impacted by the Black Summer bushfires, a period of unusually intense blazes in many parts of Australia at the end of 2019. Going into the COVID-19 lockdowns, she had already lost her home and much of the preliminary and conceptual work for her original study. Thus, due to the constellation of posthuman catastrophes, Adi was forced to redirect. A practicing artist, Adi’s previous work focused on the uncanny (see for example, Brown, 2015). Given that global circumstances had changed so drastically with prepandemic levels of international travel severely disrupted, Adi considered posthuman covid as an uncanny presence walking-with, in movement alongside human and more than human species. This thinking inspired a turn to the visual arts/performance methodology of walking inquiry, tied to process philosophy and ineffably, posthuman covid. This practice then was considered in relation to contemporary pedagogy in higher education, implicated through Adi’s now remote teaching of art and design students in China, the place from which COVID-19 allegedly emerged into the human 2

There are several definitions of P¯akeh¯a, however here we use it to describe Adi as a non-Maori New Zealander descendent from settler Scottish ancestors. See https://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2018/ 09/14/pakeha-the-real-meaning-behind-a-beautiful-word/. 3 The Chinese students undertake three years study at their university in China and one year in a New Zealand university to complete their degree. 4 See Dai et al. (2020) for further analysis on transnational higher education partnerships between Chinese and non-Chinese universities in an Australian context.

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species. The inquiry thus speculatively intra-acts with walking pedagogy in a digital classroom in China (artist/students), and with Adi’s (artist/teacher) walking practice in Australia. The practice-led research is therefore an experiment and speculation (or a speculative account) into what practice-based inquiry might offer art and design pedagogies in higher education, through a walking-with posthuman covid.

4.1 Walking-With Posthuman Covid and Process Philosophy Process philosophy is a theoretical convention that focuses on ‘becoming’ (or changing), over static states such as ‘being’. As such, it upholds notions of movement, of walking and of walking-with, specifically through the key work of Whitehead. Whitehead’s key text Process and Philosophy (1978, originally written in 1929), is an important foundation for his speculative philosophy that explores the adventures of becoming and relationality, rejecting mind–body dualisms (Stengers, 2011). Rousell (2014) identifies that Whitehead’s process philosophy, when read in conjunction with Deleuze and Guattari (1987), becomes a process-orientated philosophy. As a processoriented philosophy, the doings of artmaking can be upheld—as constant becomings, ontologically committed to creativity, to potential and to novelty. In alignment with Whitehead’s (1978) thinking, propositions for walking were engaged in this inquiry. According to Whitehead, it is more important for propositions to be interesting than they be true. Propositions operate as “lures for feeling” (1978, p. 186) (or theories) that are not necessarily exact; rather they afford possibility, potentiality and actuality. Actuality comes into its becomings through drops of experience or actual occasions (actual entities), perpetually becoming and perishing through prehension, which is the process of concresence—indeed, “past perish[ing] is how the future becomes” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 238). Manning (2013) engages propositions as ‘thoughts in motion’ that are immanent, eliciting change, movement, becoming. When reading Whitehead through other theorists such as Barad (2007), diffractive propositions can be revealed. Diffractive propositions matter and the way they matter is by eliciting interest and diverting attention, so propositions may “account for difference, divergence and novelty in various intra-actions” (Sehgal, 2014, p. 196). Diffraction is a key element in this study, given the way that posthuman covid has impacted its renewed purpose and directions, whereby the research design was reconceptualised and reimagined. Thus, thinking diffractively through research places everything within the becoming of the research (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), but does not categorise the researcher in a position above or over other agents within the research. This also gestures to the flattened ontology of the posthuman project. “Diffraction is the practice of reading insights through one another while paying attention to patterns of difference” (Barad, 2007, p. 71). Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012, p. 50) also note that “diffractive readings can bring creative provocations; they are good to think with. They are respectful, detailed, ethical engagements”. Within a posthuman learning environment, diverse intra-actions between learners, teachers, interpreters and the more than human, matter. When thinking and doing with

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posthuman covid, diffractions are constantly implicated, as they are when engaging in walking inquiry—just as movement is always implicated when claiming process philosophical becomings through artmaking. As a research methodology, walking provides an interdisciplinary environment for a scholarship that involves movement. Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin (2018, p. vii) theorise movement “as a creative, relational and place-making practice”. Place can be a specific location, a process or an event (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2018; Rousell, 2017). In this study, place is both location and event. Place as an event correlates with Whitehead’s process philosophy because place is also always in process, is relational and always becoming (Massey, 2005). To counter place-based research’s incursion into continuing settler colonisation, Springgay and Truman (2018) suggest engaging more than human walking methodologies that uphold land-centred Indigenous theories and posthuman theories that disrupt human centrism. This can be an “ethical relationship to geology” (p. 5) through a human and more-than-human walking methodology that is entangled—as is the case of this study that is walking-with posthuman covid. As a method of inquiry, walking makes provision for walkography (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018), which can be defined as embodied or disembodied movement through place that is documented through the processes of writing, visual work, photography, performance, poetry, dance, painting or any combination of these and more. The walkography engaged in this study is process-oriented, propositional, pedagogical and diffractive. It engages documented walking-with through digital and analogue drawings and documentation of place. The educational aspect of this research activates mobilities and temporalities of walking, through pedagogy (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2018). The purpose of this approach is to encourage iterative and generative approaches to the learning experiences of higher education art and design students in China as well as to Adi’s own visual arts practice. In the images that follow we outline two walking propositions and speculate on what walking-with posthuman covid—which includes analogue and digital drawing practices—might bring to pedagogy and practice.

5 Walking-With Posthuman Covid: Engaging Speculative Propositions Two walking-with posthuman covid propositions are shared in this chapter. Deliberately open and potentially supple, they are designed purposefully as lures for feeling, affording possibility, potentiality and actuality. They are: 1. Walk-with a camera (artist/students); and, 2. Walk-with place (artist/teacher). Implicated in these propositions, is that the artist/students and artist/teacher are walking-with place, materials, apparatus, atmospheres and myriad other correlated but yet to be identified contexts, agents and co-becomings. The first proposition to

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be engaged was for the Chinese artist/students, followed by the proposition for their artist/teacher. Given that Whitehead’s speculative philosophy asserts that in nature, nothing remains static and is always dynamic, such openings allow for actuality, which is assembled from temporal and atemporal events that as mentioned previously, are drops of experience, “complex and interdependent” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 18). There is nothing other than experience, and experiences occur through actual occasions (actual entities), which are in states of perpetual becoming and perpetual perishing to become further data for new actual entities. In this case, this occurs through the protocol or order of the propositions—artist/students first, followed by artist/teacher. Such perpetual perishing is also in constant change, forming the concrescence of new realities, through prehension. The universe and all in it are thus an entanglement of connections and relationality, in constant movement and in constant becoming—including posthuman covid, a central motif of this study. The propositions lean into Whitehead’s (1978) process-orientated philosophy through diffraction (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1997), which in turn underpin this chapter’s speculative proposal (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018; Rousell, 2017; Stengers, 2011; Whitehead, 1978). By speculative proposal, we mean that we lean into the possibilities of propositional thinking and making, whereby walking is not conceived of in any predetermined way regarding subject, movement or space. When walking is considered as a proposition it becomes devoid of its own preconceptions. When thinking speculatively about walking, Whiteheadian propositions are provocative. As Truman and Springgay (2016, p. 260) further argue, walking is not simply about moving around in space, or an “embodied way to feel in space”, but rather is about the “event’s becoming”. Through an event’s becoming, novelty is made possible. This walkography therefore engages the above propositional thoughts in motion as openings for inquiry and action (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2018). We propose that the novelty and iterative potential of walking itself as a proposition enables the regeneration of creative work by the artist/teacher in Australia and the artist/learners in China, remotely.

6 Walking-With Posthuman Covid Proposition 1: Walk-With a Camera (Artist/Learners in China) Posthuman covid in China set the conditions for engaging proposition 1 as an enabling constraint (Manning & Massumi, 2014). The context of remote learning, of empty outdoor spaces because of lockdown, quarantine and self-isolation, the individual nature of the task due to social distancing, and the absence of their in-person teacher due to travel bans, are all contextual factors that impacted the engagement of proposition 1. The absent presence of posthuman covid was always walking-with the artist/students as they took their cameras and explored their immediate environment, their city campus, surrounding places, and the more than human agents that occupy it.

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Since posthuman covid was walking-with the artist/students, the proposition was necessarily engaged remotely from their teacher—Adi. However, this meant that the agency of the students in responding to the proposition was fully enacted— they could decide where and when they could walk, for how long, and with whom. Although constrained by posthuman covid, the artist/students were enabled to create images with significantly strong design elements and aesthetic providence. They wandered around their chosen places, selecting what viewpoints held their gaze as they responded to the proposition. This creative agency can be considered a diffraction in that they all responded to the proposition in unique ways, a further intra-active pedagogy. In walking-with camera, place, and a posthuman covid that kept learner and teacher apart physically yet connected digitally, the students engaged the sensing body of the camera, their gaze mediated and framed by the lens of the digital apparatus. The images portray empty spaces, lonely roads and pathways, building exteriors and empty interiors, and more than human species. The presence of the human is insinuated, through a tendency to capture images of construction. A strong design element is present in almost all the images, where the artist/students have focused upon line, shape, colour, texture, composition, harmony and discord. Posthuman covid’s absent presence is intimated in the evocative and lonely public spaces, the pregnant emptiness of once populated places, the inhabitants forced indoors. The images are portraits of solitary spaces and enigmatic views of a China almost adrift and abandoned in post-apocalyptic landscapes of barely suppressed hopefulness, suggested in the propensity for capturing urban structures that imply human design and construction, yet seemingly erase the human. Posthuman covid is walking-with these artist/students as is evidenced in these captures. A selection of the artist/student works are displayed in Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, with curated written reflections accompanying each. The reflections have been translated by the artist/students into English and are presented as they were originally written, noting that language and its interpretations (both visual and text-based) are inherent in the becoming event. What can be noticed in the reflections is that the artist/students captured subjects of design, of aesthetics, of perspective, of process, of emptiness, of absence. The presence of place, of atmosphere and ambience, is foregrounded in the solitary focus of each artist/student’s gaze. The entanglement of student images and text curated by Adi (Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6) is itself a process of analysis, which provoked deep memory of Adi’s own experiences in China, and of the longing to be with the artist/students there. Causally, it is a loss effected by posthuman covid. This is apparent in a close and slow consideration of these complex visual texts.

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Fig. 1 “I feel like walking and photographing … makes us feel things in a different way … it is very interesting to look for point, line and surface in life. What we don’t notice at ordinary times will be treated with new eyes. This expands our thinking …”. © A. Brown

Fig. 2 “Walking and photographing are … observing life … the beauty of life … thinking and creating with point and line … will bring me more creative ideas”. © A. Brown

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Fig. 3 “… to go out to relax and take some pictures [can] really stimulate my inspiration and imagination. I prefer this instead of staying indoors and drawing pictures”. © A. Brown

Fig. 4 “… walking photography is a good way to observe things on both sides carefully … for my own design inspiration, so that I can speed up the progress …”. © A. Brown

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Fig. 5 “… I observe that the shape of leaf veins diverges from the middle to the outside. When I walk … it also plays a role in the divergence of our thinking … when learning … one should not confine oneself in a certain space, because one’s thinking will also be restrained”. © A. Brown

Fig. 6 “Walking and photographing is a new way for me, and it is very helpful”. © A. Brown

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7 Walking-With Posthuman Covid Proposition 2: Draw in Place (Artist/Teacher in Australia) In responding, diffracting and reflecting upon the artist/students’ images, which could also be considered as a drawing practice—drawing (graphy) with light (photo)— Adi’s drawing practice borrows conceptually and contextually from Klee’s assertion that drawing is simply taking a line for a walk. In Adi’s conceptualisations of walkingwith the more-than-human (Ingold, 2008), she takes up her practice as drawing-with. From the concept of walking-with, Adi has developed the posthuman practice of drawing-with as an authentic and agentic artmaking collaboration within, between and through the human and the posthuman. It is important to note that walking-with (and drawing-with, by implication) is not simply an account of individual human walking, but rather an ecology of ethics, politics and place. Therefore, the respectful position is that the Country5 of the Birrinburra and Wangerriburra people and other clans and families of the Yugambeh peoples of the Yuggera Nation are acknowledged in this walking-with. Drawing-with posthuman covid on Country documents and generates work from Adi’s immediate environment, in parallel to the propositional responses of the Chinese artist/students. Adi’s immediate environment is the bush near her home, partially scorched by the intense fires that destroyed many parts of Australia in the summer of 2019– 2020. These Black Summer bushfires, also an agentic posthuman event, stretched the length of the eastern seaboard of Australia from Queensland to Victoria, and emerged from exceptionally dry conditions, combined with intense heat and prevailing wind conditions. Droughts and climate change-driven warming are causing these more frequent fire events (Tang et al., 2021), including the mega blaze that burned west of Sydney, New South Wales, for 79 days and scorched one million hectares of land at the time.6 These fires contributed to a period of unprecedented fire activity in eastern Australia, with catastrophic impact. Three billion animals were killed or displaced; it was the single biggest wildlife catastrophe in Australia, likely to push some species to extinction (Slezak, 2020). More than 19 million hectares were burnt, and 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere, triggering vast algal blooms in the Southern Ocean (Tang et al., 2021). Thirty-three people lost their lives, and 3000 houses were destroyed. Adi’s home was one of these, including the surrounding bush. In September 2019, this bushland was severely impacted by the Sarrabah bushfire, one of the first to mark the beginning of the 2019–2020 Black Summer. In this iteration of her project therefore, Adi draws-with the fire-affected trees, whilst walking-with posthuman covid, on Country. It is a deeply entangled activity.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Australia know their land, places and territories as ‘Country’. 6 See https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-27/gospers-mountain-mega-blaze-investigation/124 72044?nw=0&r=HtmlFragment for an excellent and thorough account of the Gospers Mountain fire.

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Fig. 7 Walking-with posthuman covid proposition 2: Draw in Place. © A. Brown

Fig. 8 Posthuman drawing-with: Adi and tree. © A. Brown

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The walk, the drawing-with the fire wounded trees, and the documentation of these encounters were undertaken in the reserve behind Adi’s now repaired house, the actions and intra-actions documented by GPS, a GoPro camera mounted on Adi’s body, a handheld DSLR camera, and an iPhone to record video as she and the trees engaged in drawing-with together. The artworks are multiple: the walking performance itself as ephemeral and temporary; the documented forms of photography and video installation; and the works on paper. Adi, her memories and experiences of place, Country, posthuman covid, burnt trees, the now extinguished fires that burnt the trees, the artists’ quality paper—also made of trees—and myriad other matter and matterings are implicated in the artmaking processes. It is the trees-as-artists however, their skins darkened and charcoal-black, that are Adi’s material collaborators. The trees and Adi have thus co-created the body of work that emerged from Walking-with posthuman covid proposition 2: Draw in Place (Figs. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12). The mark-making by the trees is made possible by the fusain crust on their singed exterior—charcoal in fact, a traditional drawing material, first used on cave walls by early humans, and perhaps the earliest of all drawing mediums. The trees are eucalypts, not quite dead, despite their sooty skins. Many eucalypts have evolved to withstand fire, especially those with rough bark, as Adi has documented (Figs. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12). In fact, stringybark trees have dormant growth buds deep within, triggered to grow when the tree is burnt, and foliage removed. Other eucalypts can regenerate from lignotubers, or roots, buried deep underground, or gumnuts safe in the tree canopy, which are released after a fire, germinating only when conditions are suitable. The trees behind Adi’s mountain home have endured, now documenting their scarred surfaces in collaboration with Adi, with movement, with paper, with time, with fire, with Country and with posthuman covid. The artworks are a co-creation— a drawing-with. As the trees and Adi meet to collectively make marks on paper, a pedagogy of intra-action is engaged (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010), relationships that occur through subject and object that are performative and part of the everyday world (Barad, 2003). Lenz-Taguchi (2010) asserts an ‘intra-active pedagogy’ that is conceptual and practice-based is evident in the processes of this artmaking, which spirals out onto Country and into the world in a rhizome of connections, entanglements, readings and impacts. The curated photographs share images of place, process and product, all incomplete, all a drawing-with, and a walking-with posthuman covid.

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Fig. 9 Tree, paper (also once a tree), Adi: an intra-active pedagogy of drawing-with. © A. Brown

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Fig. 10 Drawing-with I: paper, charcoal, tree. © A. Brown

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Fig. 11 Drawing-with II: paper, charcoal, tree. © A. Brown

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Fig. 12 Drawing-with III: paper, charcoal, tree. © A. Brown

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8 Concluding Thoughts In this chapter, we have shared two speculative walking propositions and consider what walking-with and drawing-with might bring to pedagogy and practice in contemporary times as solitary/collaborative, direct/remote artmaking processes. The immersions and enmeshments of a posthuman covid world are strikingly present and absent in the Anthropo/Virocene, and by virtue of these entanglements, everywhere and nowhere at once. Present because the way humans now live is forever changed; absent because of the almost-invisibility of a virus so small, it is about 0.0001 of the width of a human hair (Appolonia et al., 2020). Yet the power of this virus’ impacts is at once simple and extraordinary. There is an uncanny elegance to posthuman covid. Adi’s initial findings gesture towards an emergence from the entanglements of the events and intra-active pedagogies, as well as the call of further explorations. When thinking diffractively, drawing-with and walking-with bring to attention the need to acknowledge the different human and more-than-human contributions to this research, posthuman covid being but one. Powerfully, without the Black Summer fires, and without the absent presence of posthuman covid, this research event would not have emerged or unfolded in the way that it has. Through the data collection and creation events of this walking inquiry, becomings and novelty have unfolded. The artist/students moved agentically and creatively through their learning environments, walking-with China, their more-than-human cameras, light, colour, shadow, design, urban spaces, and posthuman covid. What has emerged from the students’ practice is that walking-with disrupts what artist/students already know, usefully. For them, walking-with posthuman covid provided much needed social and performative aspects to practice and pedagogy. Providing impetus for students to walk-with and photograph provided them with an opportunity for the emergence of a dynamic inquiry, novelty and temporal links between practice and pedagogy. What emerged from Adi’s drawing practice is that the tree and she made images together as drawing-with, understanding that process philosophy highlights the continuous sense of becoming in the perpetual creations and perishings of actual entitles and actual occasions as well as non-hierarchical approaches to pedagogy and practice. These findings open a disruptive, continuous, creative, regenerative focus to the research through collaborative and collective artmakings as intra-active pedagogies. Intra-active pedagogy is a key learning approach that can be engaged in higher education art and design as has been affected in this study, iteratively and generatively. The classroom can operate as a work of art, where “students, technology, classroom and art are not distinct from each other” (Springgay & Rotas, 2015, p. 355). Such thinking encompasses a classroom where there can be no dualistic entities or others, there are only mutually intra-active agents (Barad, 2007). Because the inquiry is framed by (posthuman) process philosophy, ways of exploring educational research through a heightened awareness of more-than-human worlds become deeply relational. Art and design in this context is an affective event in its becomings as “a

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force of relations” that makes the “learning felt and in-articulable” (Springgay & Rotas, 2015, p. 335). Posthuman covid is therefore an actant that performs quite beyond its deadly force and opportunistic intentions. It is a microscopic change agent, powerfully controlling and altering the ways in which humans now live, work, learn, consume and behave. In perpetual dynamism, it infects and perverts all aspects of contemporary human life, in an ecology of unadulterated endurance. For posthuman covid, existence is simple and singular, as it walks-with the human and the more than human (Salmela & Valtonen, 2019). Its elegance is in its very purpose: replicate, mutate, survive—likely for eons to come. This doctoral inquiry is still in its genesis; further analyses and practices are being engaged currently and, in the future, so further findings are yet to become. However, it is clear from these early phases that Country, technologies, and artmaking through drawing, photography and walking inquiry offer useful intra-actions when teaching and making remotely in posthuman covid times. In this research, we (the human and the more-than-human) walk collectively in these entanglements and carry with us the intra-actions of knowledge, life, death, place, perception, memory, history, politics, and existential understandings. These entanglements and intra-actions are fertile spaces for the development of art and design practice and higher education pedagogy.

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Adrienne (Adi) Brown is a Visual Artist and Senior Lecturer in Creative Technologies. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate and member of the Sustainability, Environment, and the Arts in Education (SEAE) Research Cluster at Southern Cross University, Australia. Her current body of work Drawing-with was made in response to the 2019/2020 Black Summer of bushfires in Australia when she lost her home. Adi has exhibited widely in New Zealand and her work has been included in a national survey show at Pataka Gallery, Wellington and The Sargent Gallery, Wanganui. She has been a finalist in a range of national art awards, including New Zealand’s prestigious annual Wallace Awards. Alexandra Lasczik is Professor, Arts and Education, in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University, Australia. She is currently Research co-Leader of the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research Centre [SEAE]. Lexi is an expert educator with 40 years’ experience in the Visual Arts. She is also a practicing artist whose chosen mediums are painting, photography, poetry, walking and creative writing. Travel, movement and migrations are large themes in Lexi’s work, as are the Arts and Arts-based Educational Research [ABER], particularly A/r/tography. Lexi is an Artivist, committed to equity and social justice, and her spirited advocacy of a high quality Arts education for all spans across her entire career. Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles is a Professor of Sustainability, Environment and Education at Southern Cross University. She is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education, as well as the Research Leader of the ‘Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education’ (SEAE) Research Centre. Amy’s research centres on climate change, childhoodnature, posthuman philosophy, and child-framed research methodologies. She is particularly focussed on the pivot points between environmental education, science, philosophy, and the Arts. She has led over 40 national/international research projects and published more than 150 publications. Amy has been recognised for both her teaching and research excellence in environmental education, including an Australian Teaching Excellence Award (OLT) and an Australian Association for Environmental Education Fellowship (Life Achievement Award) for her outstanding contribution to environmental education research.

The Wonders of Wandering Through Magical Comic Territories: Towards a Feminist-Queer-Crip Laughter Melissa Caminha

Abstract This chapter explores how an arts-based research project moves from gender to the human question. Cunt Clown Show (Research, creation, performance and production: Melissa Caminha. Co-creation and direction: Jango Edwards. Assistant director: Cristi Garbo. Support: Cunt Clown Show was partially financed by the FUNARTE/Caixa Carequinha Award for Circus Support 2014 (Brazil)) starts from an anatomical symbol, the cunt, which through feminist-queer-crip theory and performance, makes room for others both in it and with it. The piece tells a story of a female clown, Lavandinha, who grows up and marries herself, then takes a science fiction honeymoon trip, experiencing futurist adventures and adopting posthuman bodies. The show is an experiment in worlding practice through sci-fi storytelling that roams across different comic territories: clowning, buffoonery and drag. Lavandinha goes beyond the “clown world” to establish contact with new material entities and inquire into gender construction, sexualities, motherhood, ableism, patriarchy, capitalism, transspecies relationships, adult-centrism and post-anthropocentrism. A critical genealogy of comicality is provided within the frame of a new materialist approach to self-construction. Wandering, the female clown finds wonderful possibilities for being and laughing in the world. Wondering, she critically deconstructs human forms and behaviours crystalized in clowning representations and comic performances. This posthuman show invites us to imagine possible new worlds and relationships that go beyond self and species. Keywords Arts-based research · Feminisms · Queer performance · Crip theory · Posthumanism · New materialisms

M. Caminha (B) ERAM University School, Girona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_13

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1 Introduction: Towards a Female Clown World that Goes Beyond Self and Species During my MA in Visual Arts and Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona, I had my first opportunity to encounter feminist arts and theories. At that time, I was astonished to realize my complete ignorance of gender questions and women’s herstories of their contributions to science, the arts and culture. This encounter with feminist, queer and crip arts and theories on identity and selfdeconstruction offered exciting possibilities for world-making, fantasy storytelling and new materialist visionary feminist philosophy (Haraway, 1995, 2008, 2016; Braidotti, 1994, 2002, 2013; Braidotti & Lykke, 1996), in the form of clowning encounters with other laughing and laughable bodies, practices and representations. The genealogical study of female clowns and gender in clowning led me to inquire into the humanistic discourses that have shaped the so-called modern “clown world” in the last few decades: a world made up of ideas based on original personhood, selfauthenticity and the anthropocentric human condition (Dream, 2012; Jara, 2007; Peacock, 2009). Modern clowning has practically erased traditions of laughter based on the grotesque, the bodily lower stratum (Bakhtin, 2002; Russo, 1995), the freakish and the monstrous (Thomson, 1996). In its recent history clowning has shifted from the grotesque body, explored in freak shows and circuses, to a poetics of humanity and the transparency of the self, created by contemporary clowns and inspired by naturalism in the cinema and theatre and by the Nouveau Cirque movement (Lecoq, 2009; Lipovsky, 1967), amongst other influences. As Bolognesi (2006) explains, the rapprochement between the circus and theatre, which led to the contemporary Nouveau Cirque movement, brought the weakening of the epic element in favour of dramatic illusionism, and the decline of the grotesque, which was replaced by a metaphysical, intellectual poetic ideal. Comparing this to the gentrification of Harlequin and other commedia dell’arte characters in France, Bolognesi writes that the clown underwent a similar process when appropriated by the theatre. Thus, the clown was civilized, naturalized, made plausible and framed in the mould of the contemporary stage and dramaturgy, of the game of spirit and intellect. Hence in Bolognesi’s account the clown abandoned the epic-communicative principle, typical of the circus, to adopt instead “a dramatic posture, exposing an exclusive individuality” (2006, p. 15).1 A critical and affective perspective on clowning emerged when women clowns from several countries, mostly Spain and Brazil, initiated a move to deconstruct patriarchal clown modes of representation, discourses and performances (Junqueira, 1

Free translation by the author, from the original in Portuguese.

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2012; Nascimento, 2014; Saavedra, 2011). They reclaimed a “feminine comicality” in clowning to counter a kind of masculine comicality supposedly attached to men’s bodies and patriarchal performances of laughter. A number of festivals, courses and researchers started creating this alternative “female clown world” in the theatre and circus. The women’s clown movement, however, still seems to be attached to Cartesian gender questions, falling back on binaries such as man-woman, masculinefeminine, culture-nature, human-animal, construction-essence, subject-object. With this arts-based research project (Leavy, 2017), I aimed to contribute to a female clown world that would decentre the gender question, inquiring also into what it means to be human, beyond self and species. For this project, I undertook a literature review of feminist, queer and crip theories and performances (Chicago, 2006; Balza, 2012; Butler, 1997, 2001, 2006; Halberstam, 1998, 2011; Halberstam & Volcano, 1999; Irigaray, 2009; Kristeva, 1980; McRuer, 2006; Sussman, 1998). My research revealed that all these sources shared a critical view of the human as constructed by adult, heterosexual, white, capitalist, Eurocentric, capable, autonomous men. For this reason, Cunt Clown Show plays with performances of identity and self-construction, so that the potential Others in and with us can be enacted through a sci-fi journey in which the female clown experiences bodily transformations and affections in relationships with human and non-human beings and objects, such as words, songs, costumes, props, animals, angels, flowers and bees. A posthuman and new materialist approach to this show not only helps us deconstruct human forms and behaviours but also contributes to revealing power and agency, which vibrate in the relationships among all the objects in the performance and in its whole atmosphere. An anthropocentric hierarchy that locates the human performer and her agency at the centre of the stage/discourse is displaced by the staging of human-object solidarity (Lucie, 2020). A detailed script enacts a material meaning-making exercise that vibrates with a range of different objects, props, lights, songs and voices, orchestrating the collaboration of all components of the performance in order to make “matter come to matter” (Barad, 2007). This script is an onto-ethico-epistemological attempt to make knowledge production visible through performance, and to show how our entanglements can be organized to make us response-able for the creation of new possible worlds. This brief introduction to my theoretical framework is followed below by a section presenting a reflexive script of the show, as evidence of my endeavour to make visible the invisible entanglements and affects involving different concepts and objects related to a posthuman feminist-queer-crip new materialist approach.

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2 Cunt Clown Show: A Brief Script of a Wonderful Fantasy Journey PART I—The clown, the flower and the bee The piece starts with a love story between the female clown, Lavandinha, her cunt flower and a rebel bee. [In this first part, I wear my red nose, a small mask representing my feminine, white, middle-class, vulnerable clown character]. Lavandinha comes onto the stage with a rope around her neck. [The image of suicide represents my own experience of clown self-deconstruction and all the mental and bodily confusion it brought into the beliefs that I had previously taken for granted]. But before Lavandinha jumps into the abyss, she finds a withered flower in an even worse situation than her. She suddenly forgets her suicidal intent and, throwing the rope away, desperately tries to bring the flower back to life. After several unsuccessful attempts Lavandinha starts crying. Her tears evoke a gentle rain. Merciful raindrops run together with her tears, touching the flower’s petals and its roots, now merged with the wet earth. Suddenly, magically, the flower revives, full of light and colour. Lavandinha can’t believe her eyes. She gently smells her new friend’s fresh scent, and, inspired by this fragrance of the flower’s life, devotes a beautiful clown waltz to her. By the end of the waltz, Lavandinha is completely dizzy with the flower’s perfume. She offers the flower at random to a woman in the audience, eager to share her sensory experience of fragrant abundance with someone. When the woman in the audience smells the flower, Lavandinha reveals the cunt flower hidden under her tutu. As the act of smelling the flower’s fragrance reverberates with Lavandinha’s cunt flower, invisible pollen spreads all over the stage, attracting an invisible swarm of bees eager to make honey. [The invisible pollen and swarm of bees are made visible through mime, performed in parallel with the music and bee noises]. Scared, Lavandinha runs away and hides. But one big bee just happens to be hiding in the same place. Although the female clown looks suspicious to the bee, it seduces her and invites her to a sweet kiss. After a charming game, Lavandinha accepts the bee’s wish. She closes her eyes and prepares her lips for the kiss, but the bee revolves around her and finally kisses her cunt flower. Lavandinha is offended and gets angry. She didn’t expect that! So, she starts to chase the bee. Clown and bee chase each other until Lavandinha finally seizes the rebel bee. But the bee tries once more to seduce her. After another charming bee-clown seductive conversation, the clown accepts the proposal, and Lavandinha lifts her tutu so the bee can easily get to the living point of this sensual bee-clown-flower entanglement. Finally, bee, flower and clown kiss together. [Blackout. Children’s laughter and singing mark the transition to the following scene. Lavandinha leaves her clown costume and red nose backstage and comes on again dishevelled, only in her white bodysuit and black leggings. She lies down on the bed left on stage, and wakes up when the lights fade in.]

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Lavandinha and the bee. Lavandinha wakes up looking for her bee lover. But the room is empty. After a night of love, the rebel bee has departed on a brave mission to help save her community of bees, which is being devastated by big human toxic corporations. The bee leaves a love letter with feminist advice and a bottle of honey, so that Lavandinha can feel cared for, nurtured and encouraged to go on. [The letter is read by a female clown voice off]: My dear Love, I’m sorry but I had to leave without saying goodbye. The bee community is being destroyed and we have to fight to survive. Without bees, the earth will disappear, as we are the universal pollinators who make things grow and live. Dear Love, beeing with you last night was a dream come true. I can still taste the honey from your sweet blossom. Forgive me for leaving without saying goodbye. To bee, or not to bee, that is the question. Making love with you was the most exciting experience of my life. I will never forget the lovely honey flavour of your xereca. I have an important mission, but as soon as I can, I’ll try to come back. Maybe I will come back and maybe I won’t. And if I don’t, I have left you this honey. So don’t be a fool. Don’t wait for me. I want you to have fun, enjoy life and find a good cause to fight for. But take care! From your rebel bee, with Love! xoxo2 ! (Bee letter, Cunt Clown Show, 2020).

Lavandinha experiences a range of feelings while reading the letter: frustration, sadness, loneliness and anger; but finally she feels empowered by bee’s words. She declaims a powerful speech of self-care, independence, and love: Ok! Ok Baybee! Ok…bee! Our love was beautiful and intense while it lasted. So…whatever must bee, must bee! Que será, será! No problem! It’s your right to stand up and fight for 2

In Brazilian Portuguese “xereca” means “cunt” or “pussy,” like “chocho” in Spanish and “txotxo” in Catalan. Thus, the English symbols “x” (kiss) and “o” (hug) are resignified to refer to the vagina.

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a cause…A bee cause! Because…Honey, don’t worry…bees come, and bees go! And…do you know what? [Points to someone in the audience] A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. [She laughs] So get up! Stand up! I won’t give up my rights! This bitch is wide awake! This nasty woman is independently owned and operated. No compromise! I’m all I’ve got! Call me a rebel, a queer, or a queen…but I have the pussy and I make the rules! That’s it! Better bee gone, and better bee me! Because today from now on and forever…I’ve found the love that I’ve longed for. Ladies and…ladies! Let me share with you my words of wisdom: Let it bee! Let it bee, let it bee! Here are my words of wisdom: I LOVE ME!

[At the end of the speech, she lip-syncs to the song I love myself in front of a mirror].

Lavandinha without the red nose, as a female buffoon with her cunt flower.

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The song ends with a masturbation-squirting-orgasmic act, the cunt flower squirting into the audience. This is the first transitional act and gesture. The shy, childish clown of the first act has grown up and turned into a female buffoon, discovering her own pleasure independently of any man, and seizing the power over her body’s lower stratum. It’s an empowering act in which the mirror gives her power. In it she can really see her beauty and sensuality, and she can also send Freud to hell with his penis envy theory. The final squirting gesture reproduces and resignifies a traditional clown act, but here, the flower is not attached to a male clown’s coat; instead, it is a cunt flower between the female clown’s legs. A cunt flower animated by a rebel bee, who is also…female!]. PART II—“Boda Payasa”. The female clown wedding Lavandinha decides, then, to marry herself. She puts on some makeup [This is also mimed, as she puts on powder, blush, mascara, lipstick and does her nails. She really enjoys her femininity here, celebrating it. This masquerade is fun and pleasurable. While making up, she also plays a piano and is really excited and happy. Nevertheless, she also recognizes that all this feminine apparatus can be harmful to women. She signals her awareness of this when, putting on her mascara, she discreetly points to the audience.] After making up she takes the bottle of honey that bee gave her and drinks a large amount of it. The audience sees how the honey goes from her full cheeks to her whole body, energizing all her pores and inner cells and organs. She suddenly gets into a frenzy and starts dancing to rave music, which merges with the traditional nuptial march. [While the nuptial march fades in, in slow motion she sets up the props for the wedding scene. After she has dressed and set the stage properly, she invites the audience to the ritual]. Dear ravers, I’m here today to celebrate my wedding to myself, a ritual and virtual act of getting married to myself, and you, dear friends, are the witnesses to this sacred-profane act, blessed by our vagina goddesses and the Holy Cunt who illuminates and bleeds upon us all. For me to consummate the union and celebrate my new civil status, I just need a volunteer to deliver my wedding vows.

She invites a woman from the public to conduct the ceremony. She puts a nun’s veil on the volunteer and gives her the following instructions: the nun has to read various cards, one by one, on which the wedding vows are written. [This scene continues with the erotic energy from the previous act, with the clown playing sensual gags with her own body and with the woman who is volunteering as a nun. It continues its flow as a buffoonish sexual act. The giving of the ring, for example, is performed with tongues and lips. And when the clown has finally put the ring on her own finger, she shows it to the audience while touching sensually one of her breasts, visible under the transparent white bodysuit. When the nun is too embarrassed to go on with the ceremony, the female buffoon encourages her: “Please, don’t stop! Go on, dear!”]. At the end of the ceremony, the nun takes the bridal bouquet and the clown waves goodbye to everyone, leaving the stage with her honeymoon luggage and bottle of honey. She’s going on a science fiction honeymoon trip, on which she

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will have futuristic adventures. On her journey, Lavandinha visits three planets: Planet Paradise, Planet CEO and Planet CunTree, where she will meet/adopt eccentric posthuman bodies. [Blackout. Lavandinha’s voice off: I’m off to see an angel, the wizard and King of Cuntree! The Captain’s voice off invites the audience to the first Port of Call).

Lavandinha drinking the bee’s honey.

PART III—Honeymoon On Planet Paradise, Lavandinha meets Angel, a great, shining, powerful light who helps her discover points of orgasmic sensitivity all over her body. Named Gabriel, the angel manifests herself as a golden light and female voice. She is Lavandinha’s guardian angel and can make one wish of hers come true. Lavandinha is utterly delighted with this wonderful vision and seductive voice [Angel is represented by a spotlight from the sky to the stage, moving to a seat by her side on the bed]. She starts thinking about what she could possibly wish, and after some somatic, vibrant suggestions from her cunt flower, she approaches Gabriel and says: “Angel, I know what I want! Please, kiss me!” Angel and Lavandinha kiss and sing to each other in a romantic karaoke performance of the song Angel of the Morning, and start making love under a large white piece of soft, heavenly cloth. The ecstasy of the movements is accompanied by erotic female-clown-angel-animal sounds enacting the wildness of the act. A meowing cat, a lowing cow, a clucking chicken, a howling wolf, a neighing horse and a snoring pig all sound out from under the heavenly bed linen. At the end of the song, we discover that all these clown-angel-animal noises are made

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by a golden high-tech robot dildo with white wings. [Blackout. The Captain’s voice off invites all to the next Port of Call]. On Planet CEO, Lavandinha transforms herself into Old Dick Donald, performing a toxic impersonation of Trump-Bolsonaro and other poisonous male capitalistcolonial beasts, who arrives on the stage singing a parody of Old Mac Donald had a Farm:

Old Dick Donald playing Monopoly Planet Earth: Lavandinha parodying toxic masculinity.

I’m Old Dick Donald the CEO C - E - C - E - O, I’m a tycoon, everything I own Everything I own Buy out here, take over there Here a merger, there a merger Mergers everywhere

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I’m Old Dick Donald the CEO C-E-C-E–O Old Dick Donald the CEO C-E-C-E–O I’m a tycoon, everything I own Everything I own Hotels here, casinos there Here a deal, there a deal I’m a big wheel Buyout here, take over there Here a merger, there a merger Mergers everywhere I’m Old Dick Donald the CEO C-E-C-E–O Old Dick Donald the CEO C-E-C-E–O I’m a tycoon, everything I own Everything I own Syndicate here, franchise there No loss! Cut costs! You’re fired! I’m the boss! Hotels here, casinos there Here a deal, there a deal I’m a big wheel Buy out here, take over there Here a merger, there a merger Mergers everywhere I’m Old Dick Donald the CEO C-E-C-E–O

After singing and dancing the song, the greedy tycoon plays his favourite game: Monopoly – Planet Earth. The big board game is placed in the middle of the stage,

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and as the two big dice roll, Dick Donald goes on with his colonizing project, pinning a gun, a sneaker, a Coke can and finally, the big Trump Tower on the board. After celebrating his fake victory, Old Dick leaves the stage, stealing all the planet’s money and resources. Lavandinha then enters as a terrorist clown and explodes a confetti bomb on the lethal game. [Old Dick Donald is an impersonation of toxic, egregious masculinity, a mixture of Donald Trump and Mr. Monopoly (Rich Uncle Pennybags, or the Monopoly Man). He represents patriarchy, capitalism, monopolism, anthropocentrism, adult-centrism, xenophobia, sexism and racism. The character’s construction plays with Trump’s political discourses and acts and adopts Mr. Monopoly’s costumes and props. Old Dick Donald explores women’s cross-dressing from a buffoonish perspective: he is a satirical impersonation of manhood and the capitalist anthropocentric masculinity that exercises a negative power over the rest of the world: women, poor people, immigrants, LGBTIQ + , non-white people, nature, animals, and children. The Captain’s voice off invites all to the next Port of Call]. The next space stop is Planet CunTree, a place somewhere over the cosmic rainbow. Here, Lavandinha plays the gothic Drag King Delicious Melicious, who looks for a Cinderfella to reign as the CunTree’s Drag Queen. After a triumphal mime sketch entrance to the tune of the British national anthem God Save the Queen, he makes a speech adapted from Chaplin in The Great Dictator; a short version aiming to include feminist-queer topics: My royal subjects, I’m the King, but not an emperor. To rule our CunTree is my business. But I don’t want to conquer anyone. I’d just like to help everyone: black, white, yellow, red, green, brown, blue… pink, lilac and purple people. [Points to someone in the audience while saying “purple people”]. We all should live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. The good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. Life can be free and beautiful, but some have lost the way. Greed, patriarchy, and prejudice have poisoned men’s souls and filled the world with hate, misery, competition and bloodshed. But we’ve always been moving, crossing all different borders. More than ever, we are closer together. Let’s stop this system that makes men torture, violate, kill and imprison people. Let’s believe that HU-WOMAN love, laughter and revolution is possible [Points to the same purple person while saying “revolution”]. We all have the power to make this life a wonderful adventure. Sweet soldiers! Let’s build together a world of peace, where everybody will have a chance to work, to play, to live and to fuck with joy. [Points to the same purple person while saying “fuck with joy”]. Sugar soldiers, let us all climb the rainbow together, and envision a brilliant future for us all! Let’s all unite and transgress.

[The gags in this serious speech help to introduce the following act, in which Delicious Melicious celebrates the traditional crowning of the CunTree’s Drag Queen. A lullaby version of a Star Wars song plays lightly in the background, helping create a special nostalgic sci-fi mood. As the lullaby starts, Drag King Delicious Melicious presents the traditional Cinderfella ritual to the audience. A black gothic high heel has been set atop one of the boxes since the King’s first entrance, but now the moment comes to use this queer prop].

220 I, your royal ruler of the CunTree Drag King Delicious Melicious Have gathered you My most loyal subjects To the court of the Drag King To join me In this historical tradition As all kings before me Have celebrated the selection of our Cinderfella I now celebrate the Drag Queen of our CunTree Thus, as the legend demands Of each and every past ruler of the realm I hold in my hands The shoe of who Now, I pass through The royal audience of all of you With the royal shoe of who To find the one of you Whose foot the shoe of who will fit And when I do find That one of you Who is able to wear The shoe of who You will be my Drag Queen And Cunt of our CunTree Gentlemen! Your King kindly demands, each one of you, please remove one shoe!

M. Caminha

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Drag King Delicious Melicious at the final striptease: Lavandinha reveals tits and cunt flower to her Drag Queen. The king looks for a man in the audience “whose foot the shoe of who will fit”. After finding the perfect fit, King Delicious Melicious invites the volunteer to sit on the throne onstage. The King gets down on his knees to put on the Queen’s shoe. He then takes different feminine-coloured props and plumes to dress the queen properly. Finally, the most special moment arrives: the crowning of the Queen of CunTree. A beautiful golden crown is set on the volunteer’s head. After the royal celebration, Delicious Melicious dedicates The Drag King’s Concert to his beloved wife. He leaves the stage and comes back in as Elvis Presley, performing a parody of masculinity and lip-synching Can’t help falling in love. This parodic homage culminates with the Drag King’s striptease before the Queen, revealing Lavandinha’s tits and cunt flower under the King’s black cape. King and Queen leave the stage. [The honeymoon is finished. Children’s laughter and singing mark the transition to the final scene]. PART IV—A beautiful, monstrous BayBee Lavandinha wakes up from her sci-fi honeymoon dream pregnant with a sweet monstrous being. She comes onstage with a big belly and bloody pants. Her vulnerable condition makes her mime a crip walk on an invisible crutch. [The public doesn’t know, but she had a complicated pregnancy that led her to a vulnerable state that she had never experienced before. She had to rest in bed for more than a month to save her baby from miscarrying. She had been afraid something could happen to her and to her baby. It was a moment of her life that she really felt crip and vulnerable, not able to do certain things she could do before: an experience close to the fear of death

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that, happily, ended up full of life and love.] Lavandinha feels pain, but she’s strong and she manages to walk to a chair in the centre of the stage. She undergoes a complicated labour. She cries and she suffers, but in the end her BayBee is born safe and healthy: a bee baby with a red nose, angel wings, a drag crown and hermaphrodite’s sex. The show ends with Lavandinha singing a beautiful lullaby to her cosmic child: Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Then the traveller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! In the dark blue sky you keep, And often through my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, till the sun is in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! As your bright and tiny spark, Lights the traveller in the dark, Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

The Wonders of Wandering Through Magical Comic Territories: … Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!

Lavandinha tries some meditation during her bloody labor.

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3 Multidimensional discussion Cunt Clown Show addresses an enormous range of objects and concepts that I have been dealing with during my PhD and postdoctoral arts-based research. It starts from a gender question and the empowering feminist symbol of the cunt. Starting from this feminist pussy power, during the performance the female clown comes to reveal all the affects and vibrations that connect humans with non-human bodies and entities. Lavandinha’s initial declaration of independence is in fact a rebellious act inspired by animal and nature spirits: bees, flowers, raindrops and honey. Her pseudoautonomous gesture is in fact a collective project of laughter and resistance, of resistance through laughter, a post-porn and post-solo clown show. There is no One-Woman Show, no One-Man Show. There are no solo performances. All performance is collective. The “ones” are plural and multiple, affected by myriad somatic, objectual and spiritual vibrations. The relationships between the diverse stage elements turn the human performer into just one more object on the stage. This collective potential agency is embodied by different intra-actions (Barad, 2007) and affects that unveil a new posthuman subjectivity that is feminist, queer, crip, eco and vibrantly affective. This post-solo woman show goes beyond the female clown performing, beyond human shape and power. It is wholly composed of magical movements where different performers (humans and non-humans) play together in order to let a matter-meaning roll and flow. To marry herself, Lavandinha needs the help of the nun from the audience; she needs the crazy energy provided by her bee lover and her nutritious honey; she needs her wedding dress, veil, bouquet, the magic lights and the blessing of the Vagina Goddesses and the Holy Cunt. She needs the nuptial march. She needs the Wizardof-Oz fantasy adventure for her honeymoon journey, a magical trip on which she can explore a range of performances of disidentifications, where she can experience and feel virtual and potentially material others in connection. With Angel, Lavandinha continues learning how multiple pleasure can be, and how interconnected we are with animals and technology. Post-porn theories and practices deconstruct heteronormative sexuality and advocate new ways of thinking about desire (Preciado, 2002; Wittig, 1992, 2006). This scene continues exploring the idea of sexual pleasure as much more than vaginal penetration by the penis, much more than man-woman relations. Here again, Lavandinha plays with multiple props and signifiers to deconstruct hegemonic porn. In the first scene of the show, she makes love with a bee. Like Annie Sprinkle’s ecosexual practices, Lavandinha delights herself with her flower, pollen, a bee and the honey. In fact, they make the honey together! Now, in Planet Paradise, she fucks an angel, but here she lets different animal noises ring out, reminding us that we are all animals too. This humananimal kinship is enacted by technology, however, in the form of an angelic high-tech dildo that flies to all her body parts: toes, the backs of her knees, her elbows, ears, hair…Lavandinha’s cunt pollen is spread all over her body, displacing the sexual organ onto a wider erotic surface.

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Old Dick Donald parodies toxic masculinity, endeavouring to make the poses and tricks of powerful rich men visible. At the same time, the figure reveals the links between masculinity, patriarchy, pornography and capitalism. It is a simple character and represents a hegemonic view of masculinity and its relationship with money, power and sex. While the character itself is a stereotype of a powerful man, it also reveals the artificiality of its construction, and the falsely natural appearance that masculinity tries to forge in contrast with femininity. Drag King Delicious Melicious, in contrast, is a complex character, at first also working by creating a relationship between masculinity and power. But masculinity here is not a monolithic and natural attribute. It is clearly fluid, and it embodies another type of power, evidencing collective agency and participatory democracy. It is a woman in drag, and since the figure of the Drag King is on top, it plays with the “woman on top” category that Davis (1978) explores in her study of comedy and the reversible world. With Delicious Melicious, the Drag Queen pop scene, culture and politics are challenged by the “Drag King on top”, who reclaims visibility, power and political equality for both drag queen and drag king scenes. The Drag Queen is called Cunt, the Cunt of the CunTree, inflating the meaning and displacing it in different directions. The word “cunt”, normally an insult, is resignified to become a Drag Queen’s positive symbol and power. But it is a female drag king who has the power to resignify it here. Drag King Delicious Melicious shows the artificiality of all genders, but at the same time, reclaims body differentiation, using the final striptease strategy to reveal the female body under the costume. Here I make use of Irigaray’s (2009) “strategic essentialism” and “transcendental sensible”, categories that I perform through this final striptease. My clown Lavandinha transcends gender with her Drag-King-sister persona but returns to her body differentiation with the striptease. By the end, both drag kings and queens reclaim the queer power of pussies, going beyond gender and the material body without denying them. Braidotti (2002), building on her philosophy of nomadism and new materialism, explains the importance of transcending the body and the material without necessarily going against them. Drawing on both Deleuze and the feminists of sexual difference, Braidotti explains: The “sensible transcendental” of Irigaray is fully inscribed and incarnated. As Goicoechea has argued, this “transcendental sensorial” is based on “the porosity and mucosity of a female desire that can initiate a desire and a rediscovery between the sexes”. In this sense, it marks a positive and happy terrain to meet the other. Goicoechea establishes a positive comparison between lrigaray and Deleuze’s rhizomatics, emphasizing that the mucosity / porosity desire dynamic of the former is not monodirectional and, consequently, is not incompatible with nomadic desire. The “virtual feminine” of lrigaray is also an open multiplicity, an immanent bodily singularity constitutively linked to the collectivity. (Braidotti, 2002, p. 143)

BayBee is a constant reminder to Lavandinha that her material body actually exists, with blood and placenta, milky breasts and big bellies; actually exists together with her unpaid and unrecognized reproductive and care work; actually exists together with social exclusion, xenophobia, racism and sexism.

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BayBee reminds us that bodies do matter. BayBee is like a star shining in the sky. Lavandinha doesn’t know exactly what it is, but she is sure about the deep love she has for her BayBee, and that her BayBee has the power to guide all travellers to new worlds where difference is a matter of care and love.

4 Stories yet to Come Cunt Clown Show explores the potential of sci-fi storytelling to create new possible worlds through clowning and laughter. Haraway explains that “SF is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, materialsemiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come.”(Haraway, 2016, p. 31). Cunt Clown Show started with a gender question centered on human relationships, but in its own sci-fi journey, discovered itself immersed in diverse practices of worlding that went beyond the human, to experience the potential agency of affect in human-non-human relationships. This posthuman and new materialist inquiry took and is still taking form through comic practices such as clowning, buffoonery and drag. A feminist-queer-crip laughter becomes a laughing, worlding artistic practice and form of research. In the final birth scene, the cunt dies and bleeds, to give birth to new life forms, to new worlding practices. The sci-fi journey does not end with a final scene. The lullaby that the clown mother sings to her BayBee is just another transition towards new stories, new insights, and new affections. It is also a final call to turn our inquiries towards children and childhood. The whole show plays with a children’s universe, using voices, songs, lullabies, and games. There exists in fact a children’s version, titled BayBee: A fairy tale between a flower and a bee, consisting of a shortened version including part one (up to the kiss between the clown, flower and bee) and part four. The whole show is appropriate for teens from 16 years old, however, or for children accompanied by their parents, who see it as a good way to introduce youth to sex education. This pedagogical potential is open for further exploration within the feminist-queer community of educators. The story of Cunt Clown Show started in 2012, and it took eight years to create and produce. It was not until January 2020 that we were able to premiere it in Barcelona. So many things happened in my life during this time: so many ups and downs that at various moments I was on the verge of abandoning the show. Fortunately, cunt power prevailed, and we were able to perform our premiere to a theatre full of friends and colleagues. Thus, Cunt Clown Show had also gone through a difficult pregnancy and labour, but finally it was born, and born beautifully. COVID has prevented our project travelling with the show and making broader contacts with other humans and non-human agents around the world. But while we are still waiting for opportunities to continue spreading the cunt pollen and its different aromas, songs, and cosmic orgasms, I am also able to find time to continue reimagining and rewriting the show, with its performative, material and discursive possibilities, and to make new ideas, insights and inquiries bloom.

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Lavandinha with her beautiful BayBee in her arms

The beautiful BayBee

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References Bakhtin, M. (2002). A cultura popular na Idade Média e no Renascimento. O contexto de François Rabelais. Annablume. Balza, I. (2012). Crítica queer y sujetos (monstruosos) del postfeminismo.Arte, educación y cultura: Aportaciones desde la periferia. COLBAA. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Bolognesi, M. F. (2006). Circo e teatro: aproximações e conflito. Revista Sala Preta, 6, 9–19. USP. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2238-3867.v6i0p9-19 Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R., & Lykke, N. (Eds.). (1996). Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace. ZedBooks. Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorfosis: hacia una teoría materialista del devenir. Akal. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge. Butler, J. (2001). El género en disputa: el feminismo y la subversión de la identidad. Paidós. Butler, J. (2006). Deshacer el género. Paidós. Chicago, J. (2006). Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist. Authors Choice Press. Davis, N. Z. (1978). Women on top: symbolic sexual inversion and political disorder in early modern Europe. In B. Babcock, & V. Turner (Eds.), Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Symbol, Myth and Ritual). Cornell University Press. Dream, C. F. (2012). El payaso que hay en ti—Sé payaso, sé tú mismo. Bengar Gràfiques S.L. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female Masculinity. Durk University Press University Press. Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press. Halberstam, J., & Volcano, D. L. G. (1999). The Drag King Book. Serpent’s Tail. Haraway, D. (1995). Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres: la reinvención de la naturaleza. Cátedra. Haraway, D. (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Irigaray, L. (2009). Ese sexo que no es uno. Akal. Jara, J. (2007). El clown, un navegante de las emociones. PROEXDRA—Asociación de Profesores por la Expresión Dramática en España. Junqueira, M. R. (2012). Da graça ao riso: Contribuições de uma palhaça sobre a palhaçaria feminina. Unpublished master’s dissertation, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Kristeva, J. (1980). Poderes de la perversión. Siglo XXI. Leavy, P. (Ed.). (2017). Handbook of Arts-Based Research. The Guilford Press. Lecoq, J. (2009). El cuerpo poético: una pedagogía de la creación teatral (4th ed.). Alba Editorial. Lipovsky, A. (Comp.) (1967).The Soviet Circus: a Collection of Articles. Progress Publishers. Lucie, S. (2020). Acting objects: Staging new materialism, posthumanism and the ecocritical crisis in contemporary performance. Dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Theatre and Performance for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York (CUNY). McRuer, R. (2006). Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York University Press. Nascimento, E. C. M. (2014).Comicidade feminina: as possibilidades de construção do cômico no trabalho de mulheres palhaças. Unpublished master’s dissertation, Universidad Federal de Bahia. Peacock, L. (2009). Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance. Intellect Books. Preciado, B. P. (2002). Manifiesto contrasexual. Opera Prima. Russo, M. (1995). The Female Grotesque. Risk, Excess and Modernity. Routledge. Saavedra, R. F. (2011). Mulheres palhaças: a poética e a política da comicidade feminina. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

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Sussman, M. (1998). Queer circus: Amok in New York. Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (pp. 262–270). Routledge. Thomson, R. G. (Ed.). (1996). Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. University Press. Wittig, M. (1992). The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Beacon Press. Wittig, M. (2006). El pensamiento heterosexual y otros ensayos. Egales.

Melissa Caminha is a female clown, mother and researcher in Performing Arts, Cultural Pedagogies, Gender Studies and Arts-Based Research. She has a PhD in Arts and Education by University of Barcelona, and a BA in Performing Arts by the Federal Center of Education, Science and Technology of Ceará (CEFET-CE), in Brazil. She was awarded two Carequinha Prize on Circus Support by FUNARTE (National Foundation of the Arts), in Brazil, to develop her arts-based research and show on female clowning in 2012 and 2014. She is currently teaching at the BA in Performing Arts of ERAM University School (UdG).

Walking/Writing, Sensing Side-By-Side: A Decolonial Inquiry Alison L. Black, Catherine Manathunga, and Shelley Davidow

Abstract Engaging with sensory ethnography, we are walking on the beach and writing in embodied ways. Employed in a neo-liberal institution, our episodic travelling together along the seashores is inviting new ways of being, seeing and thinking in and beyond academe. We are interested in cultivating relationship, inquiring contemplatively and aesthetically, wandering/wondering, walking/working, and writing/representing lives/worlds/words. We are committed to processes of sensory learning, to creatively piecing/peace-ing together entangled sensory moments and meanings. In a spirit of listening and reconciliation, we are wondering deeply about the First Nations peoples who have walked these beaches since time immemorial. We are following pathways suggested by Truman and Springgay (The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research. Routledge, pp. 259–267, 2016) and tracing how walking is a radical and critical art of inquiry that opens spaces for creativity, de-familiarises our bodies, blends visual and non-visual senses, (re)creating belonging, place, feelings and relationships through movement. We reflect on our walking/writing as a source of resistance; a sensory archive; an inquiry of motion and meaning-making. Using memoir-like writing and arts-based artefacts we are blurring the boundaries between creative inquiry, activism, and everyday life, and attending to issues of settler colonisation, and gender, resisting commodification and quantification, and creating spaces for restorative, responsive and decolonial walking/writing expression. Keywords Sensory ethnography · Decolonial inquiry · Deep listening · Arts-based inquiry · Walking methodologies · Co-existing with environment

A. L. Black (B) · C. Manathunga · S. Davidow University of the Sunshine Coast, Sunshine Coast, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_14

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1 Introduction We are three academic women episodically walking the coastline at different times and in different seasons along Sunshine Beach, Sunrise Beach, Castaways Beach and Marcus Beach in Kabi Kabi Country on what Australians now call the Sunshine Coast. As women walking towards decolonisation, we recognise these beaches as Aboriginal land that was never ceded and we openly grapple with the colonisation of this Aboriginal land. The lands and beaches we walk upon always were and always will be Aboriginal land. Our walking is a place to consider deep time and those who have gone before us on these beaches. Inspired by the work of Pink (2015) on sensory ethnography, and Truman and Springgay (2016) on walking and movement as radical inquiry, we want to sense the deep histories of place on these beaches that were first walked upon by Aboriginal peoples and later by the European immigrants that we are (in two cases) the descendants of. Ali’s full name is Alison Lizette, named after her grandmothers Mary Alison Dawson and Pauline Lizette Wright. An adult orphan with no extended family and limited knowledge of her ancestry, she’s consoled by ideas one can ‘receive and feel history’ (Agosín, 1996) through their DNA. Ali’s mother, maternal grandparents, great- and great-great-grandparents are buried at the Rosedale/Tottenham cemetery, Goreng Goreng Country; her father’s ashes rest nearby. A family record tells her the Dawson brothers, emigrants from England in 1886, were early settlers to Murray’s Creek/Berajondo (a tiny rural township in Queensland, Australia, not far from the coastal town of Agnes Water). A family friend tells her that across generations, Aboriginal stockmen worked with the Dawson families, sharing their knowledge of place and springs, working on land never ceded. ‘Naroonie’ (the name ascribed to her grandfather’s cattle property) and ‘Berajondo’ are reportedly Aboriginal words— language and dialect unknown—Naroonie indicating a place of water or springs, Berajondo indicating a river across/through a flat. Named for both her grandmothers (Catherine and Elizabeth), Catherine is an Irish-Australian with an expanding transcultural family made up of Sri LankanIrish-Australians, Italian-Australians, Colombians and Scottish-Australians with Chippewa American First Nations heritage. Her ancestors fled the West Coast of Ireland as a result of colonialisation and famine, arriving in Sydney (Gadigal Country) and Geelong (Wadawurrung Country) in 1834 and 1858. A visceral sense of dispossession, loss of language and land and a longing for Ireland carried across her family’s generations played a role in igniting Catherine’s passion for history, decolonisation, social justice and inclusion. Shelley is a Jewish South African who grew up in a multiracial family during Apartheid. This made the family effectively, a ‘crime’ (Davidow, 2018). Three generations ago, her great-grandfathers fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe by boat, jumping on whichever one they could find; one settled in America, the other in South Africa, hoping to no longer be seen as tenth class citizens (Davidow, 2016). For five generations, her family has been running to find safety. Shelley ran from the violence of South Africa, retracing the migration patterns of her forebears in reverse, living on

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five continents before settling in Australia. Descended from recent refugees fleeing persecution, she is inspired by the South African ideal of ‘Ubuntu’.1 When we can, we are engaging in meditative movement and carving out time for sitting/stopping along beaches (and in our lounge rooms when coastal rains and wind prevent our beach-walking) in order to deepen our relationship with the landscape, seascape and timescapes of the lands on which we walk. With our experiential processes we are focused on sensing the more-than-human features of the land and waters we traverse—the animals, plants, weather, sand dunes, rocky outcrops, cliffs and hills. We are seeking to enact practices of dadirri (used with the permission of the Miriam Rose Foundation)—practices of deep listening to Country. Learning from the wisdom and knowledge of First Nations peoples, we are trying to listen more care-fully to the beaches, the sea, and the life forms (both past and present, visible, and invisible) that inhabit these land/sea/timescapes. As Gros (2015, p. 104) wrote, the Native [sic] Americans … regarded the Earth itself as a sacred source of energy. To stretch out on it brought repose, to sit on the ground ensured greater wisdom … to walk in contact with its gravity gave strength and endurance. The Earth was an inexhaustible well of strength: because it was the original mother, the feeder, but also because it enclosed in its bosom all the dead ancestors.

For these reasons we are drawing upon postfeminist, new materialist c/a/r/tographic (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017) theoretical influences and sensory ethnographic forms of memoir-like creative writing, poetry, photography, and sound recordings to engage deeply with the beaches that we walk and sense in and along. We walk as women heavily implicated, emplaced, and entangled in our environment (Pink, 2015) and not as detached white male colonial flâneurs. Van Leeuwen (2019, pp. 302 & 303) suggests that the flâneur was traditionally a “restless wandering … distracted” wealthy man of leisure who “stroll[ed] … loiter[ed] … [and] wander[ed] aimlessly through the streets” of Paris voyeuristically observing urban life with “fleeting and dispersed attention”. The demands of our lives mean our walking together is infrequent. But, when we do walk together, our walking could not be more different to this wealthy man of leisure. While we acknowledge we are privileged academic white women with full-time employment, we are not wealthy women; any leisure time is scarce; and, wandering aimlessly, whilst a shared longing, simply is not possible in our very full lives. We are incredibly busy women, mothers, daughters, juggling the complexities and responsibilities of full-time work, family, and an insatiable university. We race irregularly to the beach to carve out precious moments together. However, when we walk, we seek to connect deeply and respectfully with the beachscape and try to walk gently and mindfully in the footsteps of the Kabi Kabi people who have walked these beaches for eons.

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A Zulu word which translates as I am because we are.

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We see our methodology of intentionally walking beaches together as inviting aesthetic ways of knowing to lead us towards new and restorative ways of being, seeing and thinking—and not just as we walk beaches, but also as we walk the corridors of academe. We are in search of new forms of sociality, subjectivity, and expression—ways of resisting the dehumanising, disembodied, commodified and quantified world—a world where the neoliberal university thrives. As we argued in a recent paper, beach walking has enabled us to engage in more embodied, contemplative ways of living a valuable academic life—ways that seek to refuse and resist the frenetic digital academic machine and its ceaseless demands (Manathunga et al., 2020; Pick et al., 2017). The purpose of this piece is to use walking methodologies to engage in multisensory, aesthetic ways of knowing that challenge the dehumanising spaces of neoliberal universities and grapple on a deep, visceral level with acknowledging that, wherever we walk in Australia, we are located on Aboriginal land that was never ceded. While beaches are unique contact zones to engage in this rethinking on Aboriginal land (Dening, 2004), these walking methodologies are applicable to any types of terrain that readers might have access to. These walking interludes not only allow us and others to engage in caring for ourselves and each other but might encourage other academics to engage in similar and recurrent acts of quiet activism that point towards decolonisation and truth-telling, vital for Australia’s future. The tracks we traverse in this paper begin with an explanation of the post-feminist, new materialist c/a/r/tographic theoretical influences on our research. We then step towards the sensory ethnographic and arts-based methodologies we are employing to present our sensory engagement with our walking/working/writing/righting journeys. Then, we move towards the ways we engage in sensing side-by-side: sensing as women; sensing deep histories; sensing plants, animals, and weather. The artefacts of our arts-based and sensory inquiry through movement and digital media offer to the reader traces of how we witness co-existence and connection to Country, to nature, to deep histories, and to each other.

2 Post-feminist, New Materialist c/a/r/tographic Influences on our Walking/Writing In our previous walking/writing work, we have linked our thinking to postfeminist, new materialist c/a/r/tographical framings (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Lather, 2008). Because we have outlined the key considerations of these approaches in detail in this earlier article (Manathunga et al, 2020), in this chapter, we provide only a sketch. We seek to foreground the sensory ethnography we are engaging in (Pink, 2015). This work involves foregrounding the sights,

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sounds and feelings of walking through the land and seascapes. In this work, theory acts as an important but more implicit framing device to derive meaning from our senses (Pink, 2015). As a result, we seek here to identify strands of thinking that influence our writing/walking. We see these categories as contested, slippery and ever shifting. We have used the term ‘post-feminist’ because we recognise the need to deconstruct feminist concepts and grapple self-reflexively with the complex intersectionality that exists between gender, ethnicity, class, and other markers of subjectivity (Lather, 2008). Our walking is also new materialist in its appreciation of human and more-than-human agency of the people, plants, animals, landscapes, beachscapes, and weather features we encounter as we walk (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013). We engage in Deleuzo-Guattarian types of c/a/r/tography as we walk the beach in order to trace the “affective space or opening that enables experimentation, collaboration, and notations through interactions and eco-logical assemblages” (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017, p. 117). This involves the Deleuzo-Guattarian understanding of affect as “a suite of somatically and relationally experienced vibrations, perceptions, and energies that flow, drift, and emerge in, through and with (in this case) the acts of … walking” (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017, p. 117). As we outlined in our previous article (Manathunga et al., 2020), we are investigating what it means to experience walking as a feeling archive, an archive of the heart (Hirsch, 2018; Truman & Springgay, 2016).

3 Sensory Ethnography and Walking/Movement Arts-Based Methodologies We situate our work within Pink’s (2015) understandings of sensory ethnography. Sensory ethnography involves the “researcher self-consciously and reflexively attending to the senses in playing, reviewing, field work, analysis and representational processes” (Pink, 2015, p. 7). Perceiving the senses as fully interconnected, this methodology enables us to [re]construct understandings of place, time, and culture through different forms of knowing, including sensory memory-work and flights of multisensory imagination (Pink, 2015). In our research, we are therefore using memoir-like [auto]ethnographic writing, photography, poetry, art, sound, and video recordings to [re]present our entanglement with nature, histories, places, beaches, our bodies, and each other (Pink, 2015). Our methodology creates space for restorative and responsive listening and for our decolonial walking/writing. It offers a meditation space for engaging “art as witness” (Agosín, 1996, pp. 13– 15) and involves us as walkers/writers/artists/researchers in “witness consciousness” (Walsh & Bai, 2015, p.25).

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We have continued to seek “a more immersive, embodied, engagement” with the land, the sea, the more-than-human, the ephemeral (Widger, 2017, p. 1). We have sought to cultivate relationship, to breathe-with, “think-with” and explore the ethics of “walking-with” (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 3), “being-with” and “wi(t)hnessing” (Snowber & Bickel, 2015, pp. 76–77). By incorporating aural, visual, and creative artefacts in our chapter, we are seeking to engage in multisensory artsbased frameworks (Knowles & Cole, 2008) and deep listening (dadirri)—sitting, slowing down, laying down, closing our western eyes, and listening to, breathingwith, Country. Like Pink (2015), and Barclay (2016), we use multisensory digital media to help us listen, record our engagement with the more-than-human, and “piece/peace” together relationships (Black, 2017). Digital media enables us to share with readers some of our sensory movements through sound, space, and time. We are also walking beyond physical landscapes and wandering ‘metaphorically’ through histories, books, stories, feelings, fleeting thoughts and the “grooves of [our] … minds … outside the range of an administrative and purportedly enlightened gaze” (Cervenak, 2014. p. 6). We are journeying in and beyond place, exploring the social, sensory, ecological, and spiritual pieces/peaces that make up our archive of the heart. We are inviting other ways of knowing/ being/ seeing/ thinking/ feeling/ working/ writing as we attend to issues of settler colonisation, gender, and neoliberal cultures. COVID-19 challenged the frequency of our gathering at cafes to sit and talk about our walking/writing. But we were still able to walk, 1.5 m apart. We brought ourselves, our lives as they were, our phones to record image and sound. Making time for reflection, and engaging with curiosity and wonder, we repositioned walking as experiential, walking as going beyond physical movement to include walking as dreaming, contemplating, imagining. We created “time and space for surprises and changes of direction: time to wander and wonder” and feel the sun and breeze on our bodies (Pyyry, 2016, p. 103). Sometimes, we set ourselves listening/sitting/writing exercises which became “researchcreation walking events” (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 2) and a source for the generation of idea fragments, poetry, and photography—artefacts for our feeling archive (Truman & Springgay, 2016). These were records of not just our physical movement, but of our making of meaning, and our responding—our internal journeying. Our encounters with the more-than-human building our “relational understanding of the world”, affecting us, “enchanting” us, “taking part” in our beach walking, offering invitations for “meaningful multisensory” interactions and connections (Pyyry, 2016, pp. 102, 103). Remembering Dening’s (2004) perspective that beaches act as “thresholds to some other place, some other time, some other condition” (p. 31), we paused to hear the voices of children, real and imagined, forgotten stories of ceremony, atrocity,

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terrain. We paused to recognise our intuition, to properly feel our emotions, closing our eyes, turning off our western gaze, knowing that beaches are creative spaces where “it is possible to see beyond one’s horizon” (Dening, 2004, p. 19). Walking/writing beaches, we wandered and sensed the danger and the safety, the layers of present and past, the “embodied dispositions, endorphins, pace and rhythm, terrain, cultural practices and symbolic histories” (Macpherson, 2016, p. 431). Sensing side-by-side.

4 Sensing Side-By-Side: Sensing as Women We are three friends, colleagues, mothers, academic women who value relationship, reciprocity, respect, connection, contemplation, creativity. In the afternoons of our lives, we recognise the gifts that age can bring, the value of co-inquiry, companionship, and relational ways of knowing. We each know the impact of the isolating customs of the patriarchal institution, of the narrow metrics that dismiss our intuition and experience. Walking side-by-side as women, we dream from the dunes: writing creative pieces; taking photos; holding words and herstories; noticing; sitting down in different places along the beach. We are sensing together, in the midst of responsibilities, demands, and university restructures, creating “a protected workspace”, a “laboratory of the soul”, building our awareness muscles, attending “to one another, to ourselves, and to the world” (Walsh & Bai, 2015, p. 25). We find ourselves enacting more embodied, contemplative ways of writing/working. As I sit in my chair, feet outstretched, what do I hear? The gentle clicking of Shelley’s typing, Ali’s breathing, her pen moving scratching her page, the heater creaking in the cold air, the rattling house protecting us from the howling winds outside, the hush and rustle of trees bending, swaying in the wind. My stomach rumbles. I feel sleepy, meditative … (Catherine)

We are sensing through stillness, bodies, imagination, and poetry. Sitting side-byside, in shared recognition we have lost the language of trees, sounds, bodies, feelings. With our listening together, we are learning to face our disembodiment, to learn again forgotten stories. Walking beaches we find ourselves feeling and perceiving, trusting our instincts, finding wells of strength, calm and intimacy. Walking beaches together, sitting/walking/working/writing side-by-side is healing and restorative. This somatic and sensory companionship is helping us piece/peace together what is true for us, relationships between people and place, feelings of belonging, deep calling to deep, showing us what matters. Imprints of sitting, listening, dreaming from the dunes.

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With our multisensory [auto]ethnography we are seeking to amplify our witnessing capacities, to turn on “our gaze of consciousness” in gestures of “holding”, “attuning” to, “being there”, and “sharing” (Walsh & Bai, 2015, p. 26). Moving from the hard sand by the water’s edge, we walk through the soft powdery sand up to the dunes that fringe the beach with green. Dune grasses cling to the curved grooves that slope down to the beach. We sit along the ridge of the dune, our bottoms and feet sinking in the welcoming sand. We close our eyes and listen. Breathe. Wait. Wait for Country to speak to us. Behind us a loud bird call echoes through the gently swaying Casuarina needles waving slowly in the breeze. To the side of us, other birds utter short tweets and chirps. The waves crash onto the shore and the tides sigh backwards and forwards – the earth breathes. Time Stands still. The sun warms our bodies, and a soft breeze ruffles our hair in a gentle caress.

Walking/Writing, Sensing Side-By-Side: A Decolonial Inquiry My hands rest on the sand seeking the earth’s pulse. My muscles twitch slightly from the walk. I breathe the salty sea air in and out. I feel fully awakened and alive – a pulsing, sensory being seeking the corresponding pulse of this ancient land. (Catherine)

Disconnecting. Disconnecting from the monkey mind, the perpetual production. Slowing down. Stopping. Connecting.

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5 Sensing Side-By-Side: Deep Histories from Archives, Books, Feelings, and Fleeting Thoughts We walk side-by-side deep histories that seep into the shifting sands, flowing in and out with the frothing tide. We have sought to invite movement and motion of thinking and feeling, to allow and create authentic, experiential, and experimental spaces for being-with, for listening, writing and witnessing together. We have sought, as Springgay and Truman (2018, p. 83) encourage, to “shift from thinking about methods

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as processes of gathering data” and “towards methods as a becoming entangled in relations” (p. 84). Relations of “inner deep listening” and “quiet still awareness” (dadirri), the finding of “a prayer”, that is “in everyone … it’s not just an Aboriginal thing” (Ungunmerr-Bauman, 2010). The waves today against the shore are music pounding the continent a bass so ancient that those Ancients must have heard it too the rumbling punctuated by crescendo whipped by wind a sound from before language rippling into saline spray through time whispering without words telling me, this is your mother this is where you all began. (Shelley)

Walking metaphorically, we have engaged traditional historical methodologies, reading the histories of Sunshine Beach (once called Golden Beach), Sunrise Beach, Castaways Beach and Marcus Beach. In doing this work, we have been guided by the principles of reconciliation and truth-telling. Our First Nations colleagues have told us that First Nations peoples want non-Indigenous Australians to do the work for themselves in seeking out the historical details and engaging in truth-telling as an important way to decolonise. This chapter represents us doing this work, researching these histories ourselves (not waiting to be told) and grappling with them using the personalised and deeply reflexive processes of sensory ethnography and arts-based inquiry. We have sought to analyse and theorise from these historical data through our memoir-like artefacts and arts-based inquiries scattered across our chapter. Catherine, an historian, has walked the pages of these histories in the local library; talked with the Heritage Coordinator, Jane Harding; read primary and secondary sources; mused about the euphemism of land being ‘taken up’ as opposed to just taken/stolen from First Nations peoples who have walked these beaches for millennia. Catherine has sat, head bowed over books in the Heritage Room at the Noosaville Library, sighing deeply as she reads of poisoned flour atrocities at Kilcoy and in other locations in the region and massacres at Murdering Creek in Lake Weyba. Her eyes

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filling with tears and her heart pounding as she reads first-hand accounts of people writhing in poisoned agony or collapsing, shot, into shallow waters. Her body sits still but her mind and heart travel across time and space. The wind howls outside, the windows rattle and shudder. The sea is full of white foaming peaks chopped up by the wind. It’s not a beach walking day. Rain squalls track across in the seas and over the sand dunes and Casuarina and Banksia trees. We are sitting in my lounge room working on our walking chapter though it does not feel like work – a quiet, gentle, relaxing space. We throw around ideas, historical extracts, methodological imaginings. We read notes to each other about first contact between the Kabi Kabi and the Europeans. Absconded convicts living and travelling with the Kabi Kabi some accepted and given fond names like ‘Wandi’ [good talker] Bracefell/Bracewell. We read with horror about poisoned flour and meat left for Aboriginal people at Kilcoy in the 1840s and 30 km west of Noosa in the 1850s. We read of the resulting warfare after the poisoned pudding episode when brave Aboriginal warriors declare war on European invaders and their early success at keeping the Europeans at bay. We read accounts from the Gympie Times about ‘wonton cattle killing’as Aboriginal peoples turn to other food sources as the land is cleared.What would it feel like to see your whole world destroyed – to have your land ‘taken up’ (a euphemism for just taken), to hold your child as they choke on poisoned pudding, to watch your family grip their stomachs as poisoned meat wreaks havoc on their bodies. Trapped on Lake Weyba, in Murdering Creek, your body falls lifeless into the shallow waters, shot in a pincer movement by socalled ‘settlers’. Your people eventually rounded up and taken to Cherbourg. (Catherine) In the spirit of dadirri, we step softly across the sands. We wish to walk quietly in the footsteps of those First Australians who came before, and feel the heat left behind in those imprints. We want to listen to the wisdom that was the story of this land and its people prior to invasion. It is obvious that our human survival is tied to the sustainability of living things on this ancient continent. We imagine that each footstep we take, lifts us out of time, allows us into that other time before colonisation, where there was an intimate connection between the Earth and the walkers on that Earth. And if we could follow in those footsteps, would we learn to see the world as an extension of our own bodies and souls in intricate and miraculous detail? As we walk side-by-side as women, side-by-side deep histories, we sense that we don’t walk alone. Time is not linear. It appears as a montage, a palimpsest—histories and stories are still there, layered in the silences left behind, around us and in front of us.

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We wish to learn how to listen deeply enough to those who came before, though their voices have been made faint by invasion, by machines and high rises and concrete that stop the wind whispering in the trees and shut out the heartbeat of the earth from our bare feet. We seek to learn respectfully from Aboriginal understandings of time as infinite, eternal and multidirectional; as intrinsically bound up in the life world and the body; as related to Country and as represented through songlines and stories (Moreton, 2006). In this part of the project, we have done this by researching historical data and exploring it through our memoir-like writing and arts-based inquiry. In a later phase of the research, we plan to work with Kabi Kabi Elders and community members to take these understandings further in which ever ways they determine are appropriate. Moreton (2006) suggests that Aboriginal peoples understand time as the “everywhen” or the “ever present now”; the “eternal now”; the “infinite present” (Moreton, 2006, pp. 181; 232, 276). In Aboriginal philosophy, time has “no direction”, is “cyclical” and “circular” and can “move both forward and backwards” (Moreton, 2006, pp. 231, 452, 53 and 347). “Time is but a moment which encapsulates past and future not as different opposing temporalities as in western time, but all exists right here, right now” (Moreton, 2006, p. 42). For Aboriginal peoples, time connects those in the present with “ancient wisdom” and “cosmologies” through the Dreaming or Tjukurrpa which is “ongoing and current” (Moreton, 2006, p. 161). And when we walk and listen as three women, rather than just one, does our combined listening and walking allow this deep history and dreaming to speak a little louder? If there is a whisper in the wind and more of us are there to hear it, can that mean something for us as women walking against colonisation? Please listen to sound file—Sensing deep histories2 Walking/working/writing/righting bodies wandering/wondering piecing/peace-ing lives/worlds/words histories/herstories seeped in ancient sands.

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Hear our SoundCloud recording ‘Sensing deep histories’ https://soundcloud.com/ali-black-980 410122/sensing-deep-histories.

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Sensing side-by-side in Catherine’s lounge-room. The wild ocean surrounds us, waving through the windows. Trees and bushes move frantically in my peripheral vision My eyes have read sad histories today. Massacres. Deceit. Tricking curious warriors to their death. White men poisoning flour. Death and pudding. Dancers no longer dancing. Children no longer playing Ghostly footprints and traces travelling into our hearts, troubling, reminding, asking us to listen. (Ali)

Walking/Writing, Sensing Side-By-Side: A Decolonial Inquiry

We are sitting. Talking. Not talking. Contemplating these complex things while the wind roars and pushes hard against the glass, rattling objects, rattling consciences. Listen. Are you listening? Lands stolen. Lands still being stolen. Hope taken again and again. Blown up to smithereens by evil greed. The white man has not changed. Ecosystems dying everywhere. The rich white man is wreaking havoc. Corporations dupe the vulnerable while smiling down on million-dollar bonuses. The rain beats down hard now. Heaven’s tears. Just this morning I read about an Aunty dying overnight in the watch-house. The death of Aboriginal people, the decimation of their culture continues. How much have they borne? We are sitting side-by-side. Sensing. Grieving. Remembering. Acknowledging past and present. (Ali)

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6 Sensing Side-By-Side: Plants, Animals, Weather We each have ongoing relations of various kinds to the beaches we walk. We are engaged in interplay over time, our childhoods and memories travelling with us into current moments with the environment and the more-than-human world. In our sensing side-by-side we have been trying to attend, notice, document our “co-existence in shared time and space”, “seeking to engage in relation with [our] surroundings”, seeking to “build a relationship”, to get better “acquainted with whom [we] coexist” (Rautio, 2011, p.112, 113). In these processes of relating, we don’t know the proper names of species, our relating is not scientific or objective. Perhaps due to our lack of knowledge or our aesthetic preferences as arts-based researchers, we find beauty a meaningful reference point, a creative way to relate to the seascape/ landscape /environment where we walk. “Beauty is the effortless

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co-existence of everyone” (Rautio, p. 104), a site of communion between us and our more-than-human world. Our poetry and digital media artefacts capture glimpses of our co-existence, this interplay of meaningful relation, of our “coming to understand who one is in relation to where one is, and with whom one co-exists” (Rautio, 2011, p. 117). We sit on the dunes. We sit side-by-side, meditatively, quietly, eyes closed. Sensing-with, being-with, co-existing with. When we open our eyes, we sit in stillness for minutes, more attuned to our co-existence—our interspecies communication has quieted us. Air, space, sounds, warmth, smells all helping us engage in relation. We began with so many words. But now the words on our lips and in the tips of our pens rest, unspoken, unwritten. Is this what communion feels/sounds like? In this stillness we are somehow more awake, awakening. And all the while the weather around us is changing. Blue emerges in the distant sky. Clouds are parting. (Ali).

After a while, we turn to look at the plants behind us—Pandanus palms, Casuarina trees, coastal Banksias, different forms of dune grasses, vibrant green creeper carpeting the ground. Pandanus stories call to me and I remember my mother, remember the day her bones were buried in the ground. The Pandanus, strong and sturdy, growing behind us, on sea cliffs, and precarious edges, withstanding drought, buffeting seas, cyclonic winds, endless salt spray assaults. Pandanus, the minister’s metaphor for my mother’s tenacity across her life, her will to live, her capacity to love in harsh environments. In relation: memories, my mother, mother earth. So meaningful. These sensory gifts. Sensing side-by-side. (Ali)

If we could walk along the coastline and look at every windswept tree as an entire ecosystem, understand the myriad ways those trees support each other, support the birds, the snakes, the ants, would we understand finally that our existence depends on us not decimating these dunes, these trees, this shoreline; because we are a living breathing part of this living breathing world. As Uncle Bob said in his 2008 film

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Kanyini (Hogan & Randall, 2008): “The purpose of life is to be part of all that there is…we are connected to everything else, and the proof is being alive.” Sensing side-by-side. These sensing and relating spaces are so important. Essential for wise and care-full work/lives. Essential for listening. We connect to shared desires to better know the beachscape, the coastal Banksias and Casuarinas, the Bunya, to feel the sharp needles and smell the fragrance of the land that is both un/familiar. This land we live upon, walk upon, co-exist with, that we struggle to get to know intimately because our academic work keeps us sitting/standing long hours at our desks. I tell the story that I heard on an Aboriginal tour of Sydney about how Aboriginal children were encouraged to sit under Casuarina trees if they got lost because snakes do not like sliding their sensitive bellies over Casuarina needles. “Someone will come and find you under the Casuarina trees”, the Elders would say. (Catherine)

We want to sit together under these trees, now and when we are lost. Come sit with us here.

I tell the story of how my friends, Claire, Marguerite and Sandie made me a gift of glass and wood, deliberately using Casuarina after discovering the name She-Oak was adopted for the Casuarina in Australia because the prefix ‘she’ symbolised ‘inferiority’ and the She-Oak was considered an inferior timber to British Oak. (Ali)

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Casuarinas, native to Australia, are commonly referred to as ‘She-Oaks’. In a 1914 Perth newspaper column3 in response to a reader curious to know the origin of this term, numerous references are given to show that from as early as Captain Cook’s journal in 1770, colonists gave the name ‘oak’ and ‘she-oak’ to this coastal tree. ‘Professor Morris’, a professor of English, French and German Languages and Literatures and the author of the 1898 publication ‘A Dictionary of Austral English’4 and his dictionary are quoted, “The prefix she is used in Australia to indicate an inferiority of timber in respect of texture, colour, or other character; e.g. She-beech, She-pine.” We are three she-s, three women sensing side-by-side. We are writing/righting, celebrating women’s strength/tenacity/ingenuity in surviving. Sensing side-by-side with She-Oak we are co-existing, creating archives of the heart, engaging methods and research that speak back to patriarchal structures and neoliberal oppression where ‘she’ is still considered inferior. Eyes open, noticing vines and purple flowers. Imagining lost children waiting under needle-beds of Casuarina trees – She-Oaks protecting the young. (Ali)

Trees, grasses, animals and creatures mediate to us the joy and beauty of this place. Dogs run up to greet us, wet noses and tongues welcoming strangers, happy smiles all round. Their love of the beach somehow instinctual, their joyous jumping and splashing and romping along the ‘off-leash’ stretches of beach we walk inviting our own rushes of delight. We walk-with butterflies, crabs, and jellies, with unseen underwater creatures. Sightings of dolphins and whales filling us with awe and gratitude. From Catherine’s balcony, like some kind of sign, we see a whale breaching towards the end of our first writing session together. We laugh like little girls. We walk-with birds and relish the joy of being here in this place. Alive. Catherine’s mother always said she would be reincarnated as a seagull because they always looked so free and joyful. Is that you Phyllis? We watch in delight as seagulls swoop and play, deciding to accompany us on our journey, outward on the sands, and inward in our hearts where mother memories dwell. Walking-with bird/s. Please view our clip of walking with birds5 .

3

See https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/37970254. See http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900231h.html. 5 See our video recording of walking with birds https://youtu.be/dVio58b5VH0. 4

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The changing weather and tides determine our walking/writing approaches. We walk-with rainbow, storms, wind and clouds. Beauty surrounds us. The relations, relating so dynamic, changing as we change, changing as sands change, tides change, skies change. Please listen to sound file—Sensing with the weather6 .

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Hear our SoundCloud recording ‘Sensing with the weather’ https://soundcloud.com/ali-black-980 410122/sensing-with-the-weather.

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7 Recreating Belonging and Connection to Country, to Nature, to Deep Histories, to Each Other This walking/writing work is influenced by post-feminist, new materialist theories (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), sensory ethnography (Barclay, 2016; Pink, 2015) and walking/movement arts-based methodologies (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017; Springgay & Truman, 2018). It enables us to recreate belonging and connection to Country, to nature, to deep histories and to each other. Through our experiential sensory inquiry, our movement as method, and our efforts to listen deeply (dadirri), we are building an archive of the heart. In sensing side-byside as women attuned to deep histories, and plants, animals, and weather, we have opened our hearts to different ways of knowing. This is enabling us to reconstruct our understandings of place, time, and culture. As non-Indigenous women, we are seeking to attend especially to settler colonisation and gender. We are seeking to walk softly and carefully, listening deeply with all our senses to the histories of First Nations peoples whose wisdom remains in the curved dunes, the powdery sands, and frothing tides. We sit with the bitter truths of invasion, massacre and poisoning in the archives. Time slips and warps and becomes an “everywhen”, moving “both forward and backwards” (Moreton, 2006, pp. 181 and 347). As academic women, we value relationship, reciprocity, respect, connection, contemplation and creativity. We are enacting embodied ways of walking/writing/working, our sensory companionship helping us piece/peace together relational ways of knowing, deep calling to deep. Our walking/writing/righting journeys with the physical, metaphorical and the more-than-human is blurring boundaries between creative inquiry, activism, and everyday life. We are resisting the empty commodification and quantification of the neo-liberal world that academe is currently overtaken by. In [re]connecting to Kabi Kabi Country, to plants animals and weather and to each other as non-Indigenous women, we are creating for ourselves intense places and feelings of belonging on Aboriginal land that was never ceded. The natural world, our bodies, our friendship and the deep histories that rest in all these elements offer healing from the patriarchal, metric-obsessed spaces that academe would have us dwell in (Walsh & Bai, 2015). We are dreaming, creating poetry, taking photographs, and recording sounds—[re]constructing our artefacts of the heart; our feeling archive (Hirsch, 2018). In these ways, we are creating spaces for restorative, responsive and decolonial walking/writing expression. This feeling archive of the temporal and ephemeral, illuminated by poetry, photography, recordings, and felt through sensations and emotions stored in and on our bodies, is helping us attend to co-existence and connection, to engage in witness consciousness and reflect on entangled internal, spiritual, physical, sensory, ecological, and historical relationships. Such expression, relations of inner deep listening, and realisations and representations of co-existence and belonging are much needed in these times. Our experience has been that walking/writing, sensing side-by-side has supported our “quests to find relations in this world” (Rautio, 2011, p. 117). This giving of attention to understanding who we are in relation to

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where we are is deepening our political and ethical commitments to the environment, to decolonisation, to resisting neoliberal agendas, and to more sustainable and restorative ways of being, thinking, working and living.

References Agosín, M. (1996). Tapestries of hope, threads of love: The Arpillera Movement in Chile 1974–1994. University of New Mexico Press. Barclay, L. (2016). River listening. In F. Bianchi, & V. Manzo (Eds.), Environmental sound artists. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. Black, A. (2017). I am Keith Wright’s daughter: Writing things I ‘almost’ cannot say. Life Writing, Reflections Section, 14(1), 99–111. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press. Cervenak, S. (2014). Wandering: Philosophical performances of racial and sexual freedom. Duke University Press. Davidow, S. (2016). Whisperings in the blood: A memoir. University of Queensland Press. Davidow, S. (2018). Shadow Sisters. University of Queensland Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Athlone Press. Dening, G. (2004). Beach crossings: Voyaging across times, cultures and self . University of Pennsylvania Press. Gros, F. (2015). A philosophy of walking. Translated by J. Howe. Verso. Hirsch, M. (2018). Feminist archives of possibility. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 29(1), 173–188. In J. Ho (Ed.), Nation and citizenship in the twentieth-century British novel. Cambridge University Press. Hogan, M., & Randall, B. (2008). Kanyini (Movie 2008). Knowles, J. G., & Cole, A. L. (2008). Handbook of Arts in qualitative research. Sage Publications. Lasczik Cutcher, A., & Irwin, R. L. (2017). Walkings-through paint: A C/A/R/Tography of slow scholarship. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 14(2), 116–124. Lather, P. (2008). (Post)Feminist methodology: Getting lost OR a scientificity we can bear to learn from. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(1), 55–64. Macpherson, H. (2016). Walking methods in landscape research: Moving bodies, spaces of disclosure and rapport. Landscape Research, 41(4), 425–432. Manathunga, C., Black, A. L., Davidow, S. (2020). Walking: Towards a valuable academic life. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306. 2020.1827222 Moreton, R. (2006). The right to dream. Ph.D. thesis, University of Western Sydney. https://www. austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A2687 Pick, D., Symons, C., & Teo, S. (2017). Chronotopes and timespace contexts: Academic identity work revealed in narrative fiction. Studies in Higher Education, 42(7), 1174–1193. Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography (2nd ed.). Sage. Pyyry, N. (2016). Learning with the city via enchantment: Photo-walks as creative encounters. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(1), 102–115. Rautio, P. (2011). Writing about everyday beauty: Anthropomorphizing and distancing as literary practices. Environmental Communication, 5(1), 104–123. Snowber, C., & Bickel, B. (2015). Companions with mystery: Arts, spirit, and the ecstatic. In C. Leggo, S. Walsh, & B. Bickel (Eds.), Arts-based and contemplative practices in research and teaching: Honoring presence (pp. 67–87). Routledge.

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Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: Walking lab. Routledge. Truman, S., & Springgay, S. (2016). Propositions for walking research. In P. Burnard, E. Mackinlay, & K. Powell (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of intercultural arts research (pp. 259–267). Routledge. Ungunmerr-Bauman, M. (2010). Dreaming a new earth. In Indigenous theology symposium. Australian Catholic University, Brisbane Campus, June, interview captured by Eureka Street TV. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2YMnmrmBg8, Accessed 11 Mar 2021 Van Leeuwen, B. (2019). If we are flâneurs, can we be cosmopolitans? Urban Studies, 56(2), 301–316. Walsh, S., & Bai, H. (2015). Writing witness consciousness. In C. Leggo, S. Walsh, & B. Bickel (Eds.), Arts-based and contemplative practices in research and teaching: Honoring presence (pp. 24–44). Routledge. Widger, E. (2017). Walking women: Embodied perception in romantic and contemporary radical landscape poetry. Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 9(1), 1–31.

Alison L. Black is an arts-based and narrative researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her research fosters connectedness, community, well-being, and meaning making through the building of reflective and creative lives and identities. Ali is interested in storied and visual approaches for making meaning, and the power and impact of collaborative and relational knowledge construction. Catherine Manathunga is a professor of Education Research at the University of the Sunshine Coast. She is an historian who draws together expertise in historical, sociological and cultural studies research to bring an innovative perspective to higher educational research. Catherine has current research projects on doctoral education; the history of universities in Ireland, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand and academic identities. Shelley Davidow is a senior lecturer and researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast and the international author of 44 books. Her research areas are in creative writing as a methodology for literacy development, and in mitigating the effects of stress through restorative approaches. Many of Shelley’s book ideas were born and nurtured while walking on beaches in South Africa, America, England and Australia.

Scores for Walking-with: Exploring Difference and Space Through Collective Practice Catalina Hernández-Cabal

Abstract Through this text, I present and discuss scores for collective walking, intended at interrogating our habitual ways of meeting others. Scores—creative prompts which I propose as pedagogical devices with political reverberations, can transform walking into a collective embodied exploration of tension and spacemaking, involving an active negotiation of individuality and difference. In this piece I understand social difference and space as relational configurations. Thus, I conceptualize walking as a creative and pedagogical practice that enables an embodied and relational study, to question easy assumptions about knowledge and knowing, about each other, and about space. Drawing from mixed arts practices, including contemporary dance and conceptual art, critical perspectives of education and pedagogy, feminist theory, and critical perspectives of somatics, the scores that I offer are called “Walk-me-through” and “Collective Slow Dwelling”. In this chapter, I present the conceptual, creative, and pedagogical referents of these materials and discuss two specific experiences where I have implemented them. The chapter is an invitation to attend to the nuanced but concrete relational and political implications of walking as a collective practice. Keywords Scores · Pedagogy · Knowledge · Space-place · Difference · Collective practice · Movement

C. Hernández-Cabal (B) Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, US e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_15

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1 Opening Exercise Remember that open hall that you have passed through so many times, located toward the end of your usual route home. You recognize the space as somewhat familiar, but you do not remember any particular details about it. This time, arriving to the hall from your usual route, you position yourself at the threshold, expectant. About twenty other people join you. Follow the following score:

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2 Introduction Have you ever asked anyone to “walk you through” something that you do not understand? Or, has anybody asked that from you? When you walk somebody through something, you are pointing at the main elements, challenges, processes, or implications of a matter that they want to learn. This could refer to a skill like using a machine, a specific technique for printmaking, or how to execute a dance movement. Eventually the person will get the hang of it and use this learning for their own purposes. You can also walk somebody through more layered issues, which may entail accepting that they might not get the hang of it at all. Unlike mastering a skill, here learning is a non-linear path that refers to building complexity around one’s certainties, and making peace with being unable to master certain matters (for instance, other people’s live experiences or beliefs substantively different from yours). Sometimes, you will never really know or grasp certain things but now, at least, you understand that you cannot know. And yet, I argue, you need to do the work of witnessing and even defending these other histories in their own right. Here, walking-through is not passing-by a matter that now you grasp, but rather, it is moving-with openness and questioning. It refers to a process of focused attention and shared commitment with shifting one’s usual views, positions (physical and figurative), ways of dwelling and moving together. And perhaps, in that process, walking-through and moving-with other bodies and stories may encourage us all to devise modified and more generous perspectives about others. In this chapter, I focus on the experience of walking-others-through contrasting arguments and different experiences and walking together through tense situations. Grounded in art practices, I propose movement-based art to attend to the embodied,

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spatial, affective, and social nuances of meeting others. I offer two scores for collective walking as a creative and pedagogic form to delve into the multiple layers embedded in these kinds of encounters. My use of scores is grounded on dance improvisation, conceptual art, and contemporary music composition. As I present later, scores can be understood as prompts to initiate a particular form of creative inquiry. The first score, called “Walk-me-through,” positions the tension of difficult communication as a material for creative exploration. The second score, “Collective Slow-Dwelling,” is a slow-walking activity that brings attention to the multidimensional effort of sustaining a shared practice and its spatial implications. The preamble to this chapter is a fragment of the second score that I also offer as an invitation to embark in this chapter with enhanced attention to nuanced movements. Both are performative scores, given that they are enacted with a group, and in public, acknowledging the political scope of practicing walking-with others. In my journey as creative practitioner in dance and contemporary art, and as feminist scholar and educator, I have encountered the richness of movement-based art and pedagogy for delving in the journey of meeting within difference. My attention to the politics of the embodied, the relational, the flesh, and the situated, is informed by critical and feminist theorizations of education, pedagogy, and knowledge. Scholars in these fields emphasize that we all know and learn from our particular (situated) positions (Haraway, 1988; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), and that learning is always ethically and politically shaped (Hooks, 1994; Freire, 1998; GaztambideFernandez & Arraiz-Matute, 2014). Sociocultural difference, as I understand it in this practice and pedagogy, examines how we are socially situated in relationship to others—a complex issue that I will briefly address in the next section (Ahmed, 2000, 2006; Kraehe & Lewis, 2018; Lewis, 2016; Mohanty, 2003). Space has a central role in this understanding of difference and pedagogy, functioning as part of its relational fabrics. In the walking practices I engage here, our exploration of space entails attending to the inherently social and political implications of—among others—its design, demarcations, and rules of inhabitation. As feminist Geographer Linda Peake writes, “space and identities are co-produced; the places people occupy... are constitutive of identities, and spaces are given meaning through the social practices of groups that repeatedly occupy them.” (Quoted in Saldaña Portillo, 2016, p. 21) Walking as a social practice for dwelling in space, therefore, is a fundamental component of place-making. Thus, I offer these performative scores as a provocation in research-creation to explore walking-with others, attending to its spatial, political, and relational implications. The arts-based approach to walking-through differences and tensions that I suggest here, of course, is not aimed at arriving at conclusive answers. Rather, as educators Eisner and Barone (2012) write, the arts as a form of knowledge and research do not intend to denote but adumbrate and invite people to ask and to notice.

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3 Moving-with Difference and not Knowing? In walking-though there is a process of learning—of making sense out of something—enabled through a relational exchange. This suggests that encounters between two or more bodies are intentionally taking place to expand or question what we know—or what we think we know. Encounters of teaching and learning—walkingsomeone-through something—however, are not necessarily a unidirectional flow of information between someone who “knows” and someone who does not. These encounters may unsettle certainties in all the participants, even more if they are exchanging experiences virtually “un-graspable” by their interlocutor. The modality of “walking-though” and “walking-with,” that interests me is a non-linear process of inquiry and learning, and most likely will not have a definite point of arrival. Feminist scholars like Haraway (1988) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) argue that knowing always takes place from specific locations and therefore, it is always partial and situated. Thus, we never get to fully and absolutely “know,” but we know only what we can from where we are positioned—socially, culturally, historically, geographically, and disciplinarily. Additionally, thinking we can fully “know” a different other participates of power imbalances; as Sara Ahmed (2000, 2006) writes, this assumes that we can “master” others’ lives in our terms. Accepting the impossibility of “fully knowing other” is linked to the relational understanding of social difference informing this practice. Rather than a characteristic of some people, social difference is a characteristic of how we meet others. Difference becomes criteria for exclusion, which also demarcates spaces, through long and complex histories of unequal distribution of power and resources (Ahmed, 2000, 2006; Mohanty, 2003). Remembering that we become different as we meet, activates a precious opportunity: to encounter each other in alternative ways that are not based on historical prejudices, stigmas, and unequitable power distribution. Encounters are certainly situated by their geographical and historical locations, and by the histories of power shaping the people that meet (Ahmed, 2000). Yet, as emerging sites and relationships, they are not fully prescribed. Therefore, I offer scores as a mode of encounter, where we can walk-with each other, exploring readjustments, shifts, and re-orientations in our positions and positionality. While of course all the previous histories, anticipation, and prejudices about other people and places will not disappear, by concentrating—together—on the tasks given by the score, the rigidity of such anticipation would yield to the dynamic of walking together and to the inquiry that unfolds. Artist-educator Jorge Lucero (2020) writes that pliability, a constitutive quality of art-making, “is the testing of how much something—anything—can bend” (p. 44). Trusting this premise, and the epistemic and political propositions of being ok with not mastering some matters, I suggest a walking-based art practice to interrogate taken-for-granted readings of difference, and to test its pliability and possibilities.

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4 On Scores Scores come from a long tradition mainly of music, contemporary dance, and conceptual art, and can be loosely understood as directives that initiate an action, used often in performance creative processes. Inspired mainly by movement prompts in dance improvisation (Barrios Solano & Nelson, 2008; Bryan-Wilson, 2015; Monson, 2017; Stark-Smith, 2012) and by conceptual and contemporary art (Kaprow, 2003; Ono, 1971/2000; Shalom, 2019), my use of scores invites a focused investigation with directives and tasks. They are precise enough to organize the practice and foreground a shared question, but always adaptable and open to be re-interpreted. I conceptualize scores as a creative and pedagogical form of inquiry that is grounded on the body and in collective presence, which allow study of—in an openended mode of wayfaring and experimentation (Lewis & Lucero, 2018; Monten & Harney, 2013)—the complexity of walking-through differences, relational struggles, and difficult conversations. My scores offer specific tasks and conditions for walking to call attention to, and interrupt, our normalized modes of meeting others, inhabiting space, and moving through it. Think for an instant of the short instructions and questions provided at the opening of this text. You can read those as a score, which suggests a movement prompt, a visual path, and brings forward a focused inquiry. They interrogate how we affect the places we inhabit, the movements with which we feel comfortable, how we read and navigate with others’ bodies and trajectories, the paths we create as we walk, what we take for granted when communicating with others, and the cognitive and perceptual work of paying attention to what is happening with us and around us. My reading of pedagogy draws from the work of critical scholars, who highlight the ethics and politics of the doing of education—its practice (Hooks, 1994, 2010; Freire, 1998; Gaztámbide-Fernández & Arraíz-Matute, 2014; Lewis, 2016; Kraehe & Lewis, 2018). If pedagogy is practiced through embodied encounters with sensitive ethical implications (Gaztámbide-Fernández & Arraíz-Matute, 2014), and our bodies and movements shape our spaces and affect how we meet, what kind of pedagogy can attend to the nuances of the embodied dimensions of meeting others as we inquire and learn? Scores for walking are my way to address this question. The relational and physical effort that movement-based scores foster is an intentional and caring invitation to experience and learn about the multiple shifts, disorientations, reorganization, variable forms of distance and proximity, and tensions that are the constitutive tissue of a challenging encounter where some degree of walking-someone-through needs to happen.

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5 Scores to Walk-with In this section, I share two scores for collective walking. The scores enact the questions and theoretical discussions about the ethics and politics of encounters, difference and space that I presented above. Simultaneously, they test whether space, walking, and difference itself can become pliable—as Lucero (2020) invites— through creative practice. Studying the potential pliability of otherwise rigid elements enable alternative forms of meeting, moving, and inhabiting habitual spaces.

5.1 Walk-Me-Through Dear reader, please think about the following questions: Who are your people? How do you tell who your people are? What spaces, movements, smells, and objects remind you of something “familiar”? When moving through the street, what unsettles you? How do you feel about public attention? And about silence? Think about these questions and imagine some possible answers, however blurry. Now, what if I told you that for the next thirty minutes, we will have a walking practice to address these questions with a partner, but simultaneously, with at least ten other people? And, what if I told you that we will address these questions in a way that is awkward, not only given the rather intimate or sensitive matters, but because we will work with the physical tension of meeting amplified with an artifact that I call “The Entangler.” You would need to walk, using The Entangler, to modulate the tension of your communication, and walk-your-partner-through your way of addressing the questions. Are you ready to know what “The Entangler” is? Ok, observe the next image (Fig. 1): Have you ever used one of these? The Entangler is a simple paper-cup telephone, which requires tension in the thread to serve as a communication device. It works as a mediating device for entering into a relationship with each other. The score and

Fig. 1 Illustration of The Entangler by Angela Inez Baldus, created for the first iteration of “Walk Me Through”

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device seek that participants actively feel tension as a relational force, expressed through the string of the paper cup as they make adjustments trying to communicate. Tension is present, as well, through the questions presented and the difficulty of communicating through this playful but rather uncomfortable medium. This object forces interlocutors to be aware and to negotiate tensions embedded in communication, to communicate. Feminist theorists of knowledge like Haraway (2016) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) argue that interdependency is an ontological condition of human and not-human lives. However, as Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) explains, “Interdependency is not a contract, nor a moral ideal—it is a condition… not necessarily a rewarding obligation.” (p. 70) This feminist approach calls us to do the work of holding difficult entanglements in active relational practices that compose and sustain our living. This, for Haraway, constitutes the challenge of “Staying With the Trouble” (2016).1 The Entangler is a mechanism that underscores and enhances the unavoidable challenges of being in relationship and trying to move in some direction together, in communication with one another. Using this device, and enacting the walking practice that I suggest here may be rather uncomfortable. But it is also generative. The Entangler and the score set up an encounter, taking participants through a convoluted path of learning to recognize discomfort, to find ways of working and learning-with it, and to compose our entanglement creatively. The pedagogical proposition here, therefore, is that communicating and moving together involves finding the right amount of tension to operate and walk together connected with The Entangler (not to “solve” the tension) and to walk-each other through the reflections prompted by the questions offered. The Entangler in Action I have used this score in several iterations, with different groups, asking questions which vary depending on the group. The questions are always unreasonably complex to fully discuss using such a restrictive medium. Remember, the goal is staying in connection through walking and tension, and focusing on the work of trying to communicate, rather than arriving to definitive conclusions. In 2018, I offered a workshop using this score at a social gathering within a conference in art, education, and qualitative research. I guided the surprised crowd to find a partner, and to each grab an end of one of The Entanglers hanging from a tree in the park across our venue (see Fig. 2). Then I proceeded presenting the guiding questions of the practice. To my surprise, fewer people than I expected had used paper cup telephones before. Participants walked with their strings hanging loose on the ground, yelling at each other over their ends of The Entangler. I had to often remind people to pay attention to the actual physical tension needed for operating a paper cup telephone. Progressively, people became less worried about addressing the responses intellectually and instead opened up to perceive their partners’ needs, to discover their own difficulties, to notice other groups’ strategies and sometimes also trying them. Participants grew

1

This is the title of Haraway’s (2016) book.

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Fig. 2 Entanglers installed for score “Walk-Me-Through”, 2018

more engaged with finding how to walk-with by walking together and negotiating the tension of their threads and their movements. Interestingly, the group anticipated the last part of my prompt: making the threads of all Entanglers touch. Each duet began gravitating towards each other’s threads and, finally, they all became a single meshwork (see Fig. 3). They continued to walk, more engaged in exploring their Entanglers and walking, than worried about claiming who their people were—as the questions prompted. Momentarily, through walking-with and negotiating tension (physical and emotional), they became part of the same people, the same group, the same meshwork. This walking practice made the park where we performed the score into a curious confluence of subtle

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Fig. 3 Last portion of score “Walk-Me-Through”, 2018

movement, negotiations, conversation, colors, struggles, and—perhaps what stole more gazes from passers-by—the scenario where a bunch of adults were meeting each other around this seemingly child-like object: The Entangler. Other iterations of this score have included academic presentations, classroom activities, and shorter performative workshops within other events. In this and other iterations of the score “Walk-Me-Through,” the practice initiates with surprise and awkwardness. After all, I am inviting participants to meet each other in a particular way, different from how they would attend a talk, listen to a teacher, or watch a performer. I am using The Entangler, the walking, and the prompt, to set up an encounter where our usual ways of approaching others are interrupted. Later, the practice evolves into focused exploration that momentarily suspended the weight of peoples’ socially determined positions. For the thirty minutes of the score, people were walking-through and walkingwith, more than they were professors, white men, white women, Latinxs, graduate students, and other labels that emphasize our positionality and have historically instrumentalized difference. This, of course, does not eliminate the histories behind these labels or the power differentials among us. People will bring to the practice their insecurities, struggles, or privilege and entitlement. Yet, The Entangler made things challenging for everyone, regardless of privilege. The score required that even people who are used to feeling “at home” (Ahmed, 2000) in the most exclusive (exclusionary) scenarios, assume the impossibility of being articulate, of not looking silly, or avoiding feeling the tension. This score offers specific rules of encounter seeking to question those previous taken-for-granted assumptions, and invites to be generous negotiating all these elements.

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5.2 Collective Slow-Dwelling Allow me to go back a few steps, all the way to the opening of this text. This time, however, I will expand the short invitation that I constructed to—quite literally— “walk you into” my piece. The score for slow-walking that I offer next contains key prompts for participants—and you, reader—to keep present as we enact this walk.

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What is happening to your balance? Is it hard to transfer your weight? Are your eyes moving slow? Are you holding your breath? Your look up. Remember, you are not here alone. Twenty other people have joined you in this hall, and all seem to be having a struggle similar to yours. Maybe. You can only suppose. Are you clenching your jaw? You don’t even know these people. You speculate that they are also curious about this business of walking-as… Art? Practice? Performance? Pedagogy? Study? Protest? Are you becoming more visible? How does this impact your focus on moving inch-by-inch? Are you glad now that there are several others walking with you?

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A spontaneous audience has formed around this hall. Can you notice it from within your slow-dwelling in this place? After all, it is rather unconventional to see about twenty people, mostly adults in different age ranges, different ethnicities, body complexions, abilities, and gender expressions, taking over a dull public hallway just to walk in slow-motion. Can you tell where the rest of the group is going or what they are doing? How does that affect you? Are you trying to follow? How?

Again, look up… and outwards…open up your other perceptual systems. Again, look up… and outwards…open up your other perceptual systems. Notice others’ slow walks…Try to connect to their concentration… and their struggles. Follow their rhythm. Share yours with them. Thank their presence, and their efforts. Feel the space acquiring new cadences, shapes, orientation, meanings, and stories, just through how you and the others are dwelling here today. Open up… acknowledge… Your embodied and entangled self

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Studying Space Through Collective Slow-Walking This is a score that gives participants three main tasks. One, to move as slowly as possible—painstakingly slow—in a public and rather familiar space, and with a group. Two, it asks to be sensitive and attuned to the group’s movements and struggles—both the visible and the barely perceptible. And three, to be attentive to how the practice shifts our experience of the space where it takes place, as well as to how the collective walk affects the space’s dynamics and even its configuration. Intended also as a pedagogical practice, and with the interest of extending the experience beyond the instant of the practice without trying to fully “capture” it, I usually offer these tasks on visual material like a guide, a booklet, or even a wearable piece, which the participants take with them (Fig. 4 exemplifies these materials in a different collaborative action). With that same intention and to keep the inquiry present, this score generally includes a moment of “re-tracing” in which participants are asked to document the marks, discoveries, paths, moments of synchronicity, moments of struggle, and readings of the space, among others. I have called this score “Collective Slow Dwelling” to highlight that moving in a space is inhabiting in it, and that moving as a group constitutes a particular experience. To inhabit a space is to fill it with specific meanings, traces, and textures, and turning an impersonal space into a place of dwelling. This approach draws from re-conceptualizations of the notion of “place” not as concrete physical locations contained by discrete boundaries, but as the paths along which life is lived and our movements take places. Low (2017) discusses the long and complex genealogies of the conceptualizations of place and space showing that, above all, these are inherently social configurations, and their meanings are in constant flux. Anthropologist

Fig. 4 Example of wearable score. “Walking Self Portraits” collaboration with Ahu Yolaç and Jody Stokes-Casey at Krannert Art Museum, February 2020. Photograph by Patricia Leon

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Tim Ingold (2007, 2011) goes further in the impossibility of understanding spaces aside from its inhabitants and their practices, by arguing “against space”—the title of a chapter in his book.2 For him, “places, in short, are delineated by movement, not by the outer limits to movement.” (2011, p. 149) Rather than an enclosed area or an empty surface, places emerge and extend with the movement of their dwellers. Prompted to walk together, attending to our individual and shared struggles, and interrupting our dominant ways to occupy spaces, this score is a call for attention to our forms of making-place by being-in-space. “Collective Slow Dwelling,” is thus a gesture of place-revising and place-making. This score is inspired by a practice I have experienced through many years guided by the renowned dance improviser Kirstie Simson, who uses slow-walking as a mindfulness exercise and a performative gesture. There are several other engagements with group and slow-walking that have emerged from how performance, dance, and contemporary art have explored walking—see for example Ernesto Pujol’s performative walks as “Speaking in Silence” (2011) and “Time After Us” (2013), and prompts shared by the collective Elastic City in their 2019 publication. To me, it is important that this practice is enacted in public because the social configuration of place make is inherently political. Even when a space is considered public, meaning a common good of free use for all citizens, there are multiple forms of implicit and explicit exclusion of certain bodies and practices regulated by a society’s dominant values. While simple and non-confrontational, the score renders perceptible the implicit norms regulating the public space, as well as our own normalized way to existing in it. “Collective Slow Dwelling” directs the focus from walking itself to attending to the moment of practice as an encounter: to the relational configuration of differences and spaces. This is also a process of staying alert to how our being in space interweaves with politics of positionality: the politics and histories of the social and geographical positions we inhabit (Carillo Rowe & Licona, 2005). Without imposing particular conclusions, this practice invites to reflect upon apparently simple questions which, nonetheless involve our (positional) experience of embodiment, and the relational-political construction of spaces: do you feel more visible than usual? Why do you usually feel/not feel hyper visible—Do you usually “fit” comfortably? Etc., as presented above. Keeping these questions close, and re-tracing them at the end of the practice, participants reflect upon what they noticed from the process, and how their positionality, the politics of space and of embodiment were part of the experience. Paying attention, here, involves a multisensory exploration of the physical effort needed for enacting a walk that is unnecessarily and extremely slow, and holding the practice for a prolonged time. Additionally, it entails noticing that such effort is also emotional and cognitive, given that it is a form of walking that claims space and attention. The forms and norms of the spaces we inhabit—the marks left by our movements—are by no means innocent to power imbalances. Even if we think of places’ boundaries as determined by dwellers’ movements, our techniques and possibilities of movement constitute themselves “tight places” as performance studies 2

Ingold (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Taylor & Francis.

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Danielle Goldman (2010) writes. Goldman articulates how mobility has to do with the “social-historical and material conditions that affect how people move,” (2010, p. 8), which always begs the question for who moves, who doesn’t, where can and can’t we move, and with whom. Slow Dwelling with a Classroom I have enacted different versions of this score: with students in my classroom, as a graduate student with peers, in specific academic or art events, and as open workshops. One iteration I found particularly poignant is when my colleague Ahu Yolaç and I offered it for a session of the course Introduction to Art—a general education course of around 120 students each semester. In the spring of 2019, for the session on art involving time, ritual, and space, we enacted “Collective Slow Dwelling.” This time, we slow-walked for twenty minutes at our university’s art museum. Witnessing close to one hundred young students from diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, and gender expressions slow-walk through the art gallery was stunning. We created a new place within the physical space of the museum, by intervening the norms of behavior that constitute the museum as a social location. Rather than forming small groups and moving from artwork to artwork, one hundred people paraded in slow motion through the center of the main gallery. Our massive presence and unusual movement made security guards anxious—despite having permissions in order. Guards kept walking around us, interposing themselves between our group and the artwork, never losing sight of the boundaries of our group’s body in case it transgressed its accepted positions. Surprised visitors, used to find an empty gallery at a university museum, encountered young students just being there, together. Some students were stepping at the museum for the first time even if they had been at the university for months or years. Museums, some of them expressed, are not for them—an echo of the critique of the elitism of museums as spaces and institutions (Guthrie & Kraehe, 2018; Winchester, 2012). This time, for the brief moment of our practice, the main gallery of our university’s museum was all theirs. Using the guides that we created to re-trace the experience, students shared their perceptual shifts, their struggles with being visible or moving slowly, and their reinterpretation of the museum’s physical space through their walks (See Fig. 7). One student wrote, “I think we may have looked as a social movement because we are a large group of students committing to one unusual thing” (See Fig. 6). Others enjoyed the opportunity of observing the space with more time and care. Most felt supported by the group as they became more visible and doubted they would repeat this on their own. (See Figs. 5 and 6). Without the pretension of “knowing” each participant’s story, through this experience, the students, as well as Ahu and I, became a temporary collective. A “we” emerged to interrogate, exactly, the rules, circumstances, and impacts of how we existed as that collective and within the larger social location that we inhabited. While we might not usually see each other as “one of us,” during those long twenty minutes, as we intervened in the museum space in slow walking, we experienced the potency and support that others’ bodies (with their histories) represented.

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Fig. 5 Student descriptions: reflection about collective slow walking performance

Fig. 6 Student descriptions: reflection about experiencing the group as support

The assembly of bodies in public is a key factor of the political potential of movement for space-making. Because space constructed from a hegemonic framework can actively exclude some bodies, even when it is called “public”, Butler and Athanasiou (2013) point at the potency of the assembly of bodies—as used in various forms of civil disobedience and protest—as a corporeal politics in which even dispossessed people can make space for themselves and take place through “a contingent field of flows and forces, extension and intension” (p. 177). Our Slow-walk procession was clearly not a form of protest where participants’ livelihoods was at stake. Yet,

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Fig. 7 Student mappings of their experience of the group walk

even with the simplicity and relative safe gesture it was for everyone, our practice conveyed the disruption that emerges from inhabiting a space in a non-conventional way and doing it as a collective. Regardless of whether or not students “liked” it, their mapping, sculptures, words, and certainly, their collective embodied presence, revealed this score as an interruption (See Fig. 7). Slow-walking did not only disrupt the space of the museum as an external entity to us. It disrupted our experience of it, and our own sense of comfort with our usual use of the space as invisible visitors. Suddenly, we set the pace of the

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movements. We forced people to detour, or to stop and witness. We felt visible and had to grapple with our own visibility. This simple practice of walking reminded us of our part in making and holding space wherever we go. As Tim Ingold (2007, 2011), Sara Ahmed (2006), and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2016) write, space is not limited to a physical surface that we occupy but a complex entanglement of our histories and politics. As in “Walk-me-through,” this score was not intended at arriving to a conclusion or a destination. It is not a linear process of learning. This is a form of walkingwith, which is about the experience of shared effort and shifting perception. We walked, very slowly, with provocative questions close to our bodies engaged with the challenge of revisiting and re-inhabiting an otherwise taken-for-granted space.

6 Closing Walking as a collective creative practice—walking-with and walking-through—can emerge as an encounter with its own rules focused on the opportunity of studying and amplifying when and how our social positions—that we tend to experience as an unalterable given—came to be. And perhaps move them, slowly and non-linearly, as in our walking practice. For the purposes of my work, scores are devices that set up a mode of encounter, mediated by the pliability granted by art, the intensity of embodied encounters, and the ethical imperative of pedagogy. Walking scores, therefore, offer possibilities to engage in a shared effort—physical, creative, and pedagogical—of paying attention to how we meet and move as a group, revising and questioning our traditional engagement with others. I position this practice as a mode of research-creation as dancer and theorist Erin Manning (2016) proposes it; a speculative practice that is committed to its own process of making time and space in the practice itself. Research-creation, Manning (2016), invents problems that have no single home and no answer. Walking, as research-creation, need study in Moten and Harney’s (2013) sense of an open-ended relational practice without a defined goal, where you stay with the material, attending to it and its openings. From the process of study, in Manning words, “what emerges will be patient experimentation. What emerges will be another mode of encounter, another problem, another opening onto the political as a site yet undefined.” (2016, 13). The scores I propose here enact walking-with to study a process of walking each other through, trying to attend to the complex differences through which we arrive to our meeting today, now. Practicing “walking-through” and “walking-with” as a process of learning with and about others, is also to practice relinquishing the ambition of linear learning and of fully grasping others’ lives, struggles, and (social and embodied) positions. Here, I focused on the multiple layers embedded in a modality of “walking through,” which is not linear and does not have a point of arrival. I did this through two scores for practicing collective walks that enact the complexity and effort constitutive of encounters that come about through meeting others. Therefore, this chapter is about

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the many laborious steps—if you will—that are needed in these kinds of exchanges, and the potential of the arts and pedagogy in supporting their very slow movements. Repeating these alternative ways to dwell are an opportunity for re-inhabiting and re-signifying places, and giving them new histories.

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Low, S. M. (2017). Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Lucero, J. (2020). Teacher as Artist-in-Residence: The Most Radical Form of Expression to Ever Exist. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Lucero, J., & Lewis, T. E. (2018). Wallowing in weird passions: A conversation on art, collecting, and studying with Jorge Lucero and Tyson E. Lewis. Visual Arts Research, 44(1), 76–88. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press. Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke University Press. Monson, J. (2017). A Field Guide to iLANDing: Scores for Researching Urban Ecologies. 53rd State Press. Ono, Y. (1971/2000). Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings. Simon & Schuster. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in more than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press. Saldaña-Portillo, M. J. (2016). Introduction. It remains to be seen. Indians in the landscape of America. In Indian given: Racial geographies across Mexico and the United States (pp. 1–31). Duke University Press. Shalom, T. (2019). Elastic City: Prompts for Participatory Walks. Elastic City. Stark-Smith, N. (2012). An emergent underscore: A conversation with Nancy Stark Smith, London. [Video] [dancetechtv]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzG609NWp1Y Winchester, O. (2012). A book with its pages always open? In Museums, Equality and Social Justice. Routledge.

Catalina Hernández-Cabal is a Colombian-American feminist artist, educator, and contemporary dance and improvisation practitioner. Catalina studies the intersection of movement, critical and feminist pedagogies, and contemporary art practices, to challenge oppressive ideas about difference and to provoke generative ways to encounter others. As part of her commitment with feminist knowledge and pedagogy, Catalina’s research relies on partnerships, collaborations, and multiple forms of dialogue. She is particularly thankful to Ahu Yolaç with whom Catalina codirected a practice discussed in this chapter. Catalina is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Art Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. She earned her PhD in Art Education from the School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she also earned graduate certificates in Latino/Latina Studies and Gender and Women Studies. https:// www.catalinahc.com.