Inquiry While Being in Relation: Flaneurial Walking as a Creative Practice and Research Method

• In Event: 70.018 - The Not-So-Idle Flaneur: A Metaphor for Knowing, Being Ethical, and Negotiating New Data Production

Abstract

Purpose
To address the generative nature of the flâneur as a metaphor in research, in this paper I examine multi-paradigmatic scholarship about walking as a research method. I investigate the flâneur as a metaphor while considering how walking as a creative practice and research method invites sensorial experience and functions as a relational and place-making practice. In order to consider the generativity of the flâneur in relation to current scholarship, I draw on researchers who utilize walking methods and practices in their research methodologies.

Theoretical framework
Guided by the work of scholars inquiring into walking as a creative practice and research method, I consider how qualitative and arts-based researchers employ walking as a mode of inquiry (Irwin, 2006; Jung, 2014; Kuntz & Presnall, 2012; Ruitenberg, 2012; Spinggay, 2011; Veronesi & Gemeinboeck, 2009). These scholars address walking as a relational practice, considering the question, “Why is it that walking with another person should allow researchers to learn empathetically about their experiences?” (Pink, 2007, p. 243). In response, multiple scholars propose that walking in relation opens pathways of coming to new understandings of each other through place-based, movement-oriented, shared experiences. Further, walking brings researchers in relation to emplaced historical narratives that address social injustices, such as colonizing events on particular lands (Veronesi & Gemeinboeck, 2009). Through “mindful walking” practices (Jung, 2014) place-as-route and place-as-event (Pink, 2007) engage the ongoing process of place-making, attaching meaning to spaces so that sensory-based relational wanderings, become affective, storied, and personal places. As a research practice, walking is a shared mode between research, artistic, educational, and flaneurial practices, all activated in everyday ambulation that brings researchers into relation.

Modes of inquiry and data sources
To inquire into the generative possibilities of scholarship around walking as research, I utilize juxtaposition (Metcalfe, 2013; Pinar, 2009) of written texts and works of art that focus on walking as a medium (Horodner, 2002; O’Rourke, 2013). I juxtapose works of art with scholarly work in order to “[draw] out the similarities, as we desire to make meaning from the space between the ...image-events” (Metcalfe, 2013, p. 5) and the written text.

Scholarly significance
Walking as a practice and research method draws upon the capacity of the flaneurial figure in that these methods and practices attend to relationships between people and places, maintain curiosity and openness in research practices, embrace creative practices in research, and find means to express sensorial experiences in research. The recent attention to walking as a research method and practice highlights that in walking practices, the flâneur as a research metaphor “stands in a relation: to people; to text; to fact and to tradition” (Jenks and Neves, 2000, p. 3). Therefore, those who write about walking as method and practice draw attention to being in relation in research inquiries, whether that is a relation between the researcher and other people, or being in relation to the environment, to ideas, or to the history of a particular place.

Author

• Elsa Lenz Kothe, The University of British Columbia