Walking as a radical and critical art of inquiry: Embodiment, place and entanglement

Guest Editors: Alexandra Lasczik, David Rousell & Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

The special issue seeks to map emerging ecologies of relation amongst walking practices from arts-based, indigenous, ecological, activist, decolonising, queer, critical and posthumanist modes of inquiry. We are particularly interested in the ways that artful modes of inquiry might open up practices and concepts of walking to the radically pluralistic outside of settler colonialism, resisting the gaze of privilege and the relentless commodification of the processes of everyday life (Cervenak 2014; Honeyford 2015; Rey and Harrison 2018; Truman 2019).

The figure of the ‘walk’ is deliberately left open to experimentation and speculative interpretation. It may take shape physically as the comportment of human and/or nonhuman bodies in and through multiple places and times. Here the physical ‘walk’ may become otherwise, variously attributable to rolling, sliding, swaggering, marching, galloping, swimming, floating, flying, crawling, wandering or virtually any other mode of comportment. We are also interested in less tangible accounts of ‘walking’, including contemplative, virtual, digital, dreaming, subconscious, or cosmonautical ‘journeys in place’; the peripatetic of a collective 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. As Cervenak (2014: 6) writes, “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”.

Deviating from the habits of frontal, facial, observational, and dialogic interactionism (Manning 2013), walking as an art of inquiry may introduce an alternative ethico-aesthetics of moving and sensing ‘side by side’, in differential relation (Ingold 2015; Manning 2009; Phillips 2016; Rousell et al. 2018). In resisting the reduction of walking to a humanist measure and privilege of ableism (Chandler 2014; Goodley 2014; Penketh 2017), we invite contributions that critically trouble and artfully re-imagine the figure of walking beyond reductive models and attributions of value, environmentality, and body capacity (Cutcher et al. 2015; Eddy and Moradian 2018; Kiefer-Boyd et al. 2018; Rooney 2019; Trafí-Prats 2018). Drawing on diverse perspectives, this Special Issue will focus on sharing innovative and critical uses of walking as a method for art-design-research-education. Submissions may respond to these prompts or others:

• How might walking take shape as a critical art of inquiry, blurring the boundaries between creative practice, inquiry, activism, and everyday life?

• How might we think walking beyond normative conceptions of the ‘human’, and indeed, beyond the habitual patterns of the ‘physical’?

• How does walking alter the materiality of the social, the sensory, and the subjective?

• How might walking enable experimentation with transversal modes of educational

  research and practice?

• What new modes of inquiry become possible when walking is augmented by sensory

  technologies and digital media?

IJETA welcomes contributions for the special issue on walking as a critical art of inquiry in art and design educational research

We welcome transdisciplinary submissions that engage the above concepts and more. Papers must adhere to the publisher’s house style (https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/559/intellect-style-guide- 2019.pdf) and may be either full length scholarly articles (between 4,500 and 6,000 words and ideally around 5,600 words in length) or visual essays (1,000 words limit).