Walking Methods: Research on the Move

286 Pages·2020·11.536 MB·English

by  Maggie O'Neill and Brian Roberts.

WALKING METHODS
Research on the Move
Maggie O’Neill and Brian Roberts
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2020 Maggie O’Neill and Brian Roberts
The right of Maggie O’Neill and Brian Roberts to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN: 978 - 1 - 138 - 18247- 9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978 - 1 -138-18248-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-64644-2 (ebk)
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CONTENTS
List of figures ix
Introduction 1
PART I
Theorising/observing/thinking 13
1 Methods on the move: Moving methods 15
2 Theorising walking in the sociological imagination:
Walking in context 46
3 Walking, art-making, and biographical research 71
Exercise One: Walking and theorising:
Observing/thinking 94
PART II
Experiencing 97
4 Migration, memory, and place: Connecting with memory
and place in urban landscapes 99
5 Walking as re-formative and transgressive:
Health, pilgrimage, trespass, marching 118
viii Contents
6 Walking in the Downtown Eastside: Experiencing the
WIBM as participatory, visual, and ethnographic 139
Exercise Two: Walking, sensing, experiencing 158
PART III
Imagination 161
7 Walking, sex work, and community: Towards a radical
democratic and imaginative space for addressing sexual
and social inequalities 163
8 The phenomenology of walking in a garden 184
9 Walking artists: Critical dialogues and imaginaries 210
10 Auto/biographical encounters in time and space:
Roots and routes 231
Exercise Three: Walking and imagining:
Time/memory/making 249
Conclusion: The future of the Walking Interview
as a Biographical Method 251
E xercise Four: WIBM exercise: Observing,
experiencing, imagining 262
The Walking Interview as a Biographical Method 265
Index 271
FIGURES
3.1 Donie’s route to school 86
4.1 Robert Miller’s route map 103
4.2 Robert Miller in the communal garden 105
4.3 Risky places 109
4.4 Shopping area 111
4.5 C ommon Grounds Coffee Shop 113
4.6 View of the route from Robert Miller’s house to
his office ‘I’ve been up and down this street at least
thirty thousand times’ 114
6.1 M ap of Steve’s walk 149
6.2 Food line 150
6.3 The Women’s Memorial, CRAB Park 155
7.1 Sharing a walk 171
7.2 Kerry sharing her map 177
9.1 Nomadic Gardens 219
9.2 Community space between the tube and railways lines 220
9.3 Canalside 220
9.4 Decorated railway arch 221
9.5 A borderspace 222
9.6 ‘Spectacular cash-and-carry’ 223
10.1 Maggie’s map of her childhood walks in Consett 233
10.2 Consett Iron Company 238

INTRODUCTION
Maggie O’Neill and Brian Roberts
Walking Methods: Research on the Move is a text which is very opportune – com-
ing at a time of increasing emphasis on methodologies at the boundaries of the
arts and social sciences, including explorations of the role of space, movement,
and the senses in research practice, and associated social intervention or ‘policy
impact’. ‘Walking’, in particular, is the focus for the authors’ innovatory research
practices within biographical research, utilising ‘life story’, ethnographic, visual,
and participatory approaches in exploring lived experiences (‘lived lives’) within
the broader social structures, contexts, and processes of our social worlds (cf.
Mills 1970). This monograph combines biographical study and the ‘walking
interview’, supported with stimulating examples from our primary research, and
our long history in the field of both biographical research and artsbased methods.
Walking is something we do every day and yet we reflect little upon it – as
an experience, source of knowledge, personal sharing, and memory. Beyond the
few histories of walking and its use as part of artistic practice, there has been little
application of the ‘walking interview’ until recently in the social sciences. The
long tradition of walking in arts practice (Morris 2017; Hind and Qualmann
2015; Heddon 2007; Long 1984; Fulton 2010 – see Chapters 3 and 9), is now
being complemented by increasing work in ethnographic and anthropologi-
cal research (Ingold 2007; Ingold and Vergunst 2008; Pink et al. 2010; Irving
2010; Edensor 2010), but in areas such as biographical sociology and criminol-
ogy, there is still relatively little contribution (see O’Neill 2015, O’Neill 2017;
O’Neill 2018, Roberts 2015).
This text will seek to develop the walking interview for biographical soci-
ology, by: raising awareness of the researcher and the ‘researched’ ‘within the
world’ as moving, interacting, experiencing beings; contributing a new approach
– the Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (WIBM). Meanwhile, the
text will critically reflect upon the theoretical, experiential, and imaginative
2 Introduction
application of the act of ‘walking’ as part of biographical research. ‘Walking’,
although an ‘ordinary’, familiar activity and relatively novel form of research
practice, is beginning to gain ‘momentum’ within social sciences as an attractive
and exciting form of sociological, criminological, and other exploration.
This text will also contribute to the emerging diverse range of texts on ‘walk-
ing’ as a field of experience (see e.g., Horvath and Szakolczai 2018; Gros 2015;
Springgay and Truman 2018), and to biographical and other areas of sociological
investigation, such as the expanding field of ‘mobilities’ research (Urry 2007;
Büscher et al. 2010; Smith and Hall 2016).
Social science research is increasingly ‘on the move’ – technological advances
in video and cameras, tablets, smartphones, and digital recorders are enabling
researchers to record, share, and transmit materials and reports in a wider vari-
ety of means across time and space. For instance, this development, as in the
employment of cameras, ranges from such research as Whyte’s (1988) application
(alongside direct observation) to study the public spaces of the city and how peo-
ple use them, to the time delay photography of Matos Wunderlich, who studied
the phenomenology of walking in city spaces, and how its rhythmic quality
‘forms an integrated and supportive part of place-rhythms and contributes to
the temporal continuity and distinctiveness of urban places’ (Matos Wunderlich
2008: 136; see Lyon 2016). In general, digital technology has very important
implications for contemporary and future biographical research practice, since
it allows the investigation of everyday routines, spaces, personal and group life,
and researcher experience – an ‘interactivity’ with participants and others – in
‘present time’ and ‘on the move’.
Overview of the field: Why this book and why now?
This book introduces, theorises, and shares walking as a method for doing social
exploration, specifically within biographical research.
Biographical research seeks to investigate individuals’ daily life experiences
and their past and future perspectives, using a variety of materials and interpre-
tive approaches (Roberts 2002: 2; Bertaux 1981). Biographical research meth-
ods are ‘an umbrella term for an assembly of loosely related, variously titled
activities: narrative, life history, oral history, autobiography, biographical inter-
pretative methods, storytelling, auto/biography, ethnography, reminiscence’
(Bornat 2008: 344). The many approaches to conducting biographical research
are rooted in a long and diverse genealogy from a focus upon one or more ‘per-
sonal documents’ – ‘life stories’, diaries, letters, autobiography, to archival and
(increasingly) multimedia and arts-based research using creative and performa-
tive methods (Chamberlayne et al. 2000; Roberts 2002; O’Neill et al. 2015).
Walking is not to be privileged as a way of ‘knowing’, but it has certain sensate,
kinaesthetic, and performative attributes that make it particularly ‘insightful’
for means for biographical, ethnographic, phenomenological, and psycho-social
research – in accessing the ‘routes’ and movement, and the use and interpretation
Introduction 3
of spaces by individuals, as well as for sharing research findings with various
publics (O’Neill and Hubbard 2010).
Innovations in research methods, especially artistic, sensory, digital, and
multi-modal methods are gaining ground in the social sciences, building upon
the various ‘turns’ in sociology, including the ‘narrative’ (Bruner 1987; Riessman
2008), ‘visual and sensory’ (Pink 2007, Pink 2008), ‘biographic’ (Roberts 2002),
and ‘performative’ (O’Neill et al. 2015). There are also important connections in
our approach, including with long and deeply embedded ways of doing sociolog-
ical research with marginalised peoples, as in urban sociology (cf. the Chicago
School); with urban geographers (cf. Massey 1994); critical theory (Benjamin
1992); and participatory methodologies (increasingly utilising art-based prac-
tices, including the work of walking artists).
Ethnographic studies are particularly important for the development of the
WIBM. Contemporary approaches to ethnographic research commonly high-
light, not merely a concern with ‘movement’ and spatial flows, but also visual and
sensory dimensions of ethnographic practice. New technologies are increasingly
relevant here: for instance, Evans and Jones (2011) used devices to track people’s
location, speed, and speech content and the timing of what participants said,
finding that environmental features were important in forming discussion, and
created a typology according to whether a setting was known to the interviewer
or respondent.
As biographical sociologists, we are both inspired by walking ethnographies as
well as walking histories as linking ‘the imagination and culture’ or the ‘rhythm
of walking’ as it ‘generates a kind of rhythm of thinking’ (Solnit 2001: 4–5). The
pursuit of walking as constitutive of the history of imagination and culture can
be variously captured in the study of pilgrimage and settlement (Horvath and
Szakolczai 2018) and protest, as so clearly evidenced in such events as the early
20th century women’s suffrage marches; the Annual Miners’ Gala and march
in Durham, UK; the annual march in honour of missing and murdered women
in Vancouver, Canada; and the global women’s marches in solidarity with the
women’s march in Washington, 2017. It can be shown in examining walking
as carnival; as creative, ‘meditative, contemplative and educative’; as connected
to experience of the natural world (cf. Wordsworth) (Coverley 2012: 23; Evans
2012). The history and philosophy of walking reveals how we conceive the
interconnections between our bodily movement, our consciousness, and our
surrounding environment – how knowledge and responses of each these are
related (Solnit 2001: 27, 29).
The history of walking as an activity is deeply embedded in broader social
contexts, social relations, and social structural differences: for example, class
politics and inequalities in the work of Engels, Mayhew, and Orwell; gender
politics in the writings of Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft; the history
of suffrage marches and the figure of the flâneuse (in contrast to the flâneur);
and the politics of race in the migratory movements from South to North, and
the slave trade. In the UK, social movement, social mobility, migration, and
4 Introduction
race relations are inextricably connected in immigration law and the governance
of migration and social space (O’Neill 2010). The Vagrancy Acts (for instance,
the Act of 1824) and the formation of the modern police in London (1829) to
‘oversee the street’ were designed to eradicate or deter the poor from walking in
certain urban areas, while the subsequent Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866,
and 1869) were aimed not merely to protect men’s health from the perceived risk
from street ‘prostitutes’, but served also to sanction and ‘police’ poor women and
the urban ‘underclasses’ (see Walkowitz 1980).
The gendered and racialised aspects of walking are important to consider in
the development and application of walking methods in biographical research.
Female walkers feature relatively little in the histories of walking – a lack of
recognition that is now being addressed in accounts of work by women art-
ists (see Heddon and Turner 2010) and the ‘recovery’ of ‘walking women’;
for instance, Virginia Woolf (like others) undertook a great deal of her crea-
tive work as she walked, drawing on her memories, and shaping her thoughts
(Coverley 2012: 170).
The recent work within ethnography emphasising the visual and other sen-
sory ‘realms’ and their relations, the growing attention to the history and forms
of walking and its experiential importance, and how walking is regulated or
constrained, all give a focus to how we live our daily lives – its context and its
movement. For our purposes, all these concerns point to how we form a sense of
who we are, our past, present, and future – how we create our ‘biography/biog-
raphies’, shaped through and within our ongoing social and other circumstances.
It is in this sense – the attention to ‘daily biographical formation’ – in using the
WIBM, which makes this book timely as a contribution to a rapidly developing
biographical sociology.
Biographical Research: Walking – thinking,
experiencing and imagining
The use of the Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (WIBM) is a pow-
erful means for understanding the lives and experiences of others. Walking is
not just what we do to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’, but is integral to our perception of
an environment. Taking a walk with someone is a significant way of commu-
nicating about experiences: one can become ‘attuned’ to another (Scheff 2006),
connecting in a ‘lived’ (embodied, related) way with the feelings and corporeal
presence of someone else. Walking with another opens up a space for dialogue
where embodied knowledge, experience, and memories can be shared (O’Neill
and Hubbard 2010; Pink et al. 2010; O’Neill and Stenning 2013; O’Neill and
McHugh 2017; Roy 2016). Interviewing while walking has particular benefits
for understanding another’s life and experience, otherwise one ‘cannot effec-
tively capture the momentary impressions confronted, the peculiar evanescent
atmospheres, the rhythms, immanent sensations and physical effects of walking’
(Edensor 2008: 136; see also Myers 2010, Heddon and Turner 2010).