Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World demonstrates that walking-with is an important methodology for thinking ethically and politically. Yet, Springgay and Truman assure us that ‘walking-with’ is best practiced with a method that betrays any strict adherence to method. While there is no stone left unturned (and if there is, it is because they have chosen to leave it there for the reader to engage with), their thinking is certainly not one that aims for an anchor. On the contrary, it is thought as provocation, as ‘research-creation’ of frictions, engagements (in)tension with the world. What a courageous intent given the spacetime in which they practice this endeavor, when global affect has reached a point of hatred with horrifying implications.–Patricia Ticiento Clough and Bibi Calderaro, Foreword to Walking Methodologies (2018)
Called back to Springgay and Truman’s 2018 Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, dialed to a yes-hopefully something taking shape for next fall’s Conference on Community Writing in Detroit, October 23-25. So I meander back in again, leafing in this book released seven years ago, just as I was moving from Michigan to Virginia, a book I later excerpted for the seminars on research design I taught in Spring 2020 and again in 2022. Back then, I thought the book would sew throughlines with method as mess, with embodied wayfinding, with writing on foot, with more-than-words (or more-than-strong-text) rhetorical velocities, and with localized, here we are now, personal geographies. I don’t know how much of any of this carried over into practices or projects, yet, these few years later, it all still feels like a vibrant accrual, a bundle of possibilities I am not finished with, even if I can’t quite pinpoint why.
Yesterday, after a mid-morning dental checkup, some odontal dialogue about how the early September root canal on #19 has not fully quieted, humming as it does through a bite guard tested lately by a grim political horizon and other unsurenesses, personal and professional. I went to the office to polish and print a planning document for this Friday’s food studies meet-up, which I happen to be leading (on foodplaces), and to check off a few other minor to-dos. I remembered to pick up Walking Methodologies, to carry it home for re-reading. And again, as before, it strikes chords. For example, from the Foreword, the doing without anchor, a nod to groundlessness, or the summoning of method to call for its discarding strict, replicable proceduralism. I nod. Yes, this. This makes sense, these dotted footfalls. I am also drawn this time to the verbal methodology, ‘to walk’ supplying splendid, sensorial abundance, lattices of affect and memory, a well of noviceness, or beginner’s mind along the lines of ‘you can never step into the same river twice.’ This reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness essentials series, verbed as it is with eleven How to titles: How to Listen, How to Smile, How to Focus, How to Connect, How to See, How to Fight, How to Relax, How to Love, How to Eat, How to Sit, and How to Walk.1I might wish for a twelfth title, How to Draw. I would also pose with this exercise a recasting each verb as x-ing to learn, e.g., Walking to Learn, Relaxing to Learn, Listening to Learn, Drawing to Learn, and so on. Springgay and Truman’s WalkingLab and related research, when paired with the context of Hanh’s essentials, blooms consideration of what would it be to sketch and to explore methodologies verbed across this set: Listening Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, or Smiling Methodologies, Fighting Methodologies, Eating Methodologies, and so on. I suppose that’s what this thread loops me back to, a question, as a teacher, that cares for whether someone, in the frame of writing, or in the frame of being, is aware, reflectively, of experiences named by these (and other verbs). It’s nothing grandiose, just a simple provocation, to bundle as a set of teacherly a prioris questions like these (how do you eat, how do you see, how do you fight) and then to know, thereby, patchworks existential and if we are lucky that collage a more-than-humanism worthy of fostering.
Notes
- 1I might wish for a twelfth title, How to Draw. I would also pose with this exercise a recasting each verb as x-ing to learn, e.g., Walking to Learn, Relaxing to Learn, Listening to Learn, Drawing to Learn, and so on.
