Walking Neighbourhoods Hosted by Children

• In Event: Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Walking as Sensory Methodology

Abstract

Objectives
Walking Neighbourhood hosted by Children is an arts project developed by Brisbane based community cultural development organization, Contact Inc. The social provocation of child-led and curated walks of neighbourhoods was conceptualized to challenge social trends of increasing protection of children in public spaces, and explore how issues pertaining to child agency and child safety in public space can be negotiated, and foreground children’s views of public spaces. Research of the project uncovers how issues concerning children’s rights, responsibilities and identities influence children’s engagement and positioning in the public sphere. In addition, civic learning possibilities and diverging perceptions of children and public spaces are mapped along with shifts in adult and child roles when children have the opportunity to negotiate and make sense of public spaces in a leadership role.

Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework
Walking as a sensory and embodied relational experience enables whole body perception and circumambulatory knowing (Ingold, 2011) and a way of becoming a “citizen” that involves negotiation and regard for the Other (Springgay, 2011). Children are often more sensorially in tune with public spaces than adults (see Woolley, 2006), making walking as sensory ethnography particularly productive for this study. In accordance with Lefebvre (1991) spatial theory, the public spaces engaged with through the walks are recognized as produced and invested with varied meanings by the various participants.

Methods, Techniques or Modes of Inquiry
Through walking as an arts practice and research method, researchers, artists, child hosts, and adult audience members co-interpret knowledge gained through lived relational experiences of exploratory walks of local neighbourhoods. The principles for sensory ethnography (perception, place, knowing, memory and imagination) outlined by Pink (2009) offer a useful frame for sensory observation, documenting and storying the children’s walks from multiple intersecting perspectives (different generations, different cultural lenses, different senses). As Tilley (1994) aptly describes through walking, landscapes are woven into life and lives into landscapes.

Results
Narratives from child-led walks held in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Australia and Chiang Mai’s old city, Thailand will be shared making visible children’s neighbourhood perceptions, knowledge, imaginings, memories and connections along with how the child-led walks offer potential for intergenerational and intercultural civic engagement and learning.

Significance
This project uncovers how walking provides an opportunity for learning as a social act, and the negotiation of space and meaning produced across generations as a public pedagogy. The project contributes to emerging fields of children’s citizenship and children’s geographies to inform contemporary practice in education, the arts, community development, urban planning and design.

Author

• Louise Gwenneth Phillips, The University of Queensland