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Journal of Public Pedagogies: WalkingLab
Journal of Public Pedagogies, Number 4, 2019, Guest Edited by WalkingLab: www.walkinglab.org
Published by Public Pedagogies Institute: www.publicpedagogies.org
Open Access article distributed under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license
URL http://jpp.vu.edu.au/
Walking in/as Publics:
Editors Introduction
Stephanie Springgay1 and Sarah E. Truman2
1University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada and 2University of Melbourne,
Melbourne, Australia
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
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Why Walking Now?
Walking has an extensive history in the arts, humanities and social sciences as an artistic
practice, as part of public programming and pedagogy in museums, schools and community
spaces, and as a research methodology that is attentive to place, situated knowledges, sensory
experiences and movement. More recently, there is a renewed interest in walking, as indicated
by the number of organizations, publications, symposia, research projects, and artistic events
that foreground walking. WalkingLab (www.walkinglab.org), a queer-feminist walking re-
search-creation collective co-directed by Stephanie Springgay (University of Toronto) and
Sarah E. Truman (University of Melbourne), has emerged as a leader in the area of walking
studies. WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse
publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-
specific research-creation eventsi that complicate and rupture the White-cis-hetero-ableist-
patriarchal canon of walking scholarship.
The sense of urgency and expediency surrounding walking is entangled with the desire
to generate research and knowledge in situ, that is community-based, and that is attuned to
more-than-human entanglements and encounters (Bates & Rhys-Taylor, 2017; O’Neill &
Roberts, 2019; Springgay & Truman, 2018). In an era of complex social and political is-
sues—such as climate change, capitalism, and forced migration, to name a few—there is an
increasing demand for public and community action. Further, academics continue to grapple
with ways to present research findings to non-academic audiences, while marginalized and
oppressed people take up ways to transform and decolonize social and political space and
institutions. To this end, walking has become more than a utilitarian or pedestrian mode of
getting from place to place; walking is an ethical and political call to collective action.
The renewed interest in the ethics and politics of walking is evident in the social sciences
through a range of theoretical frameworks and methods, including the walking interview,
which enables researchers to contextualize not only the lives of their research participants but
also the places where they live, work and are social. Charlotte Bates and Alex Rhys-Taylor
(2017) write: “By sharing conversations in place and at the participants’ pace, researchers are
beginning to more fully appreciate the transient, embodied and multisensual aspects of ‘the
social’” (p. 2). This attention to the corporeality of the walking interview is extended by
Maggie O’Neill and Brian Roberts’ (2019) ‘walking interview biographical method’ (see also
O’Neill & Einashe, this issue), which investigates participants’ daily life experiences ‘on the
move.’ Combining walking with biographical methods, researchers are able to think critically
about daily mobility in relation to issues of migration and borders, and the increasing ways
that people must move in order to survive.
Critical work on place studies has also had an impact on walking research. In particular,
Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie’s (2015) work, which brings together critical place inquiry
with Indigenous research methods and worldviews, has argued for the need to contextualize
participants’ understandings of place alongside an examination of place itself “in its social
and material manifestations” (p. 101). Critical place inquiry asks questions about the imbri-
cations of place with globalization, settler colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and environmen-
tal degradation. The concept of ‘emplacement’ has historically been linked to walking and
place-based research, mobilized through the work of Sarah Pink (2009/2015). Pink draws on
the work of David Howes (2005) who notes that emplacement “suggests the sensuous inter-
relationship of body-mind-environment” (p. 7). Yet, Tuck and McKenzie (2015) contend
that emplacement continues settler-colonial replacement of Indigenous peoples and land. As
such, they argue for a “deeper consideration of the land itself and its nonhuman inhabitants
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
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and characteristics as they determine and manifest place” (p. 40) in critical place inquiry.
Moving from an emplaced understanding of walking, towards reciprocity and relationships,
requires what Sandra Styres (2019) conceptualizes, as an understanding of Land as more than
a physical or geographic place. Land, Styres writes, from an Indigenous worldview is both
“space (abstract) and place/land (concrete); it is also conceptual, experiential, relational, and
embodied” (p. 27); as such, “Land is spiritual, emotional, and relational” (p. 27). Storying
Land, Styres contends, is an important part of decolonization and reconciliation. Here, sto-
rying refers to Indigenous stories of place, but also the ways in which Indigenous and settler
people move with/on Land. Walking is a form of storying and counter-storying that disrupts
dominant narratives and representations of place. As White settler artists and scholars, our
work through WalkingLab has sought to highlight the erasure or invisibility of Indigenous
knowledges and methods in walking research and pedagogy.
Walking and land are deeply connected in Jon Johnson and Karyn Recollet’s (2019)
work with First Story, an Indigenous-led community-based organization that is focused on
researching, keeping, and sharing stories and knowledges of ongoing Indigenous presence in
Toronto. One of First Story Toronto’s most popular initiatives has been its walking tours of
Indigenous presence in places across the city. These tours constitute important opportunities
for participants and guides to engage in respectful conversations around Indigenous histories,
communities, places, perspectives and knowledges. Other walking and arts practices similarly
shift from a focus on an individual lone walker to collective walking practices that counter-
map, counter-archive, and speculatively re-story a different future (see Johnson & Recollet,
this issue). In addition to First Story and WalkingLab, other art-research hybrids are emerging
that interrogate and experiment at the intersections between creative practice and research.
For example, the Museum of Walking (MoW), directed by Angela Ellsworth at Arizona State
University, is concerned with the relations between people, land, action and site. MoW em-
phasizes group walking events that deepen an awareness of place through shared walking and
togetherness.
Significantly, amidst the urgency and renewed interest in walking, is a shift in the ethical
and political (in)tensions that are brought to bear on questions of who gets to walk where,
how we walk, under whose terms, and what kind of publics we can make (Springgay &
Truman, 2017a). This special issue, dedicated to Walking in/as Publics – released as a mobile
counterpart to the annual Public Pedagogies conference in Melbourne, Australia, takes these
questions seriously with research that engages and complicates the various pedagogical and
political dimensions that are at work in the construction of publics and commons. This issue
is available online, opensource, and accessible to broad publics interested in critical ap-
proaches to walking scholarship and public pedagogy.
Critical Walking Methods & ‘Walking-with’
Against the backdrop of health and well-being that promotes walking as a free and accessible
way to exercise, critical walking scholarship accounts for the ways that walking is imbricated in
legacies of settler-colonial harm, white supremacy, and functions to police and regulate bodies
(Springgay & Truman, 2017b; 2019a; Truman & Springgay, 2019). Alexis Shotwell (2016)
names the tendency to consider health as an individual and moral obligation “healthism,”
where “individuals are held responsible for their bodies, and obesity, diabetes, cancer, and other
chronic conditions are rendered as moral failings” (p. 29). While walking may lead to increased
exercise and have the potential to reduce stress, or be a mode of transportation that is less
environmentally harmful, healthism points to the ways that walking can be commodified, con-
vey moral judgements, and exclude particular bodies from access and mobility.
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
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In addition to the fraught ways in which walking and healthism are co-imbricated, walk-
ing is encumbered by the figure of the flâneur. The flâneur, we contend, is a problematic
walking trope in that he is conditioned by autonomy, ability, Whiteness and masculinity,
and as such he is able to walk anywhere, detached from the immediate surroundings (see
Chandler et. al., this issue; Heddon & Myers, this issue). In order to counter this overused
figure, we frame our research as critical walking methodologies that don’t assume walking is
a convivial, automatically embodied, inclusive and depoliticized mode of doing research and
teaching (Springgay & Truman, 2019b; 2019c). Theoretically aligned with feminist theories,
critical race theory, queer and trans theories, critical disability studies, affect studies, and anti-
colonialisms, we argue that walking methods must engage with the intersections of gender,
race, sexuality and disability. Critical walking methodologies attend to walking beyond health
or as an innovative method, and in particular take up walking with an attention to anti-
ableism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism. Critical walking methodologies insist that inter-
sectionality, the place where research takes place, and how one moves through space be crit-
ically complicated and accounted for.
Intersectionality has become a term used to describe and analyze intersecting identities.
However, as Jennifer Nash (2019) argues, the term must recognize its interdependent histo-
ries in black feminist scholarship, so as not to be “emptied of specific meaning” (p. 2). When
intersectionality, Nash contends, is mobilized in the name of diversity and inclusion then
intersectionality upholds existing structures rather than unsettling or undoing them. Inter-
sectionality, Nash writes, citing Vivian May, becomes “ripe for extraction or expropriation”
(as cited in Nash, 2019, p. 25). As editors, we recognize the ways that intersectionality is
often oversimplified with a long list of identity markers, or what Lisa Loutzenheiser (2010)
calls an “add and stir” effect. Bringing intersectionality to bear on walking studies demands
“unravelling the complexities of identities themselves” (Loutzenheiser & Erevelles, 2019, p.
381), and consequently the ways that walking materializes and manifests multiple, affective,
and entangled identities.
At WalkingLab, we approach critical walking methodologies as a practice of ‘walking-
with,’ informed by queer, feminist, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour scholarship, and
frictional engagements with theories such as the new materialisms, posthumanisms, and the
inhuman. Our practice of walking-with is informed by Indigenous scholars Juanita Sundberg
(2014), Bonnie Freeman (2015) and Jon Johnson (2015), who articulate with as a ‘more-
than’ orientation. Withness is not simply about group walking practices, but rather empha-
sizes complicated relations and entanglements with humans, non-humans, Land, and an eth-
ics of situatedness, solidarity and resistance. Walking-with is a deliberate strategy of unlearn-
ing, unsettling and queering how walking methods are framed and used in the social sciences
and arts.
Although many of the articles in this special issue responded to our call to think and
practice critical walking methodologies, we also recognize that most remain situated in West-
ern frameworks. Our aim is that this special issue will encourage more scholarship on critical
walking methodologies to flourish.
Publics
The field of public pedagogy considers the sites and instances of pedagogy that can occur
outside of formal schooling, including the educational, cultural and social affects and effects
of prevailing culture. Jennifer Sandlin, Jake Burdick and Michael O’Malley (2011) use the
term critical public pedagogy to describe the ways popular and everyday culture(s) can be
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
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used to “…decode and interrupt dominant ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, milita-
rism, and neo-liberalism” (p. 347). The papers in this journal are embedded in critical ap-
proaches to walking scholarship and pedagogy. In conversation with critical approaches to
public pedagogy, our ongoing work with affect theory, and feminist new materialisms, we
conceptualize the notion of ‘publics’ as not only formed between humans. Rather, ‘publics’
can refer to different kinds of commons and relations between humans and non-humans,
ideas, and land. Some of these publics are linked to larger public(s) discourses, while others
are activated as fugitive spaces or what might be considered an ‘undercommons’ (Harney &
Moten, 2013). Harney & Moten’s undercommons refers to a counter publics inhabited by
Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, and disabled and d/Deaf people, who refuse to ask for
recognition from a broken system, but rather “take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure
that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places
that we know lie outside its walls” (Halberstam, 2013, p. 6). Kathryn Yusoff (2018), drawing
on the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, offers geo-Poethics as a Black feminist praxis that
would ‘end the world as we know it.’ Yusoff (2018) writes: “Such an Anthropocene geo-
Poethics would turn against Man and the homogenizing impulse of humanist tropes into
and another world of matter that puts race as central to the geosocial and geo-Poethical for-
mations of the Anthropocene” (p. 104). What Yusoff and others are arguing for is not a better
future based on inclusivity and diversity, but rather that the way forward will be by creating
publics, spaces of collective defamiliarization that will radically tear apart and alter the world.
Publics need also encompass affects, emotions, and feelings that get constructed in a
range of ways. Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) work on the surfaces and textures of everyday life,
and Ann Cvetkovich’s (2012) writing about public feelings that attend to emotional registers
of social and political relations, are necessary for thinking-feeling Walking in/as Publics. So
too we might think about collaborative writing and scholarship as publics: a kind of recep-
tivity to become more-than through the writing process (Springgay & Truman, 2018).
As a pedestrian way of moving through space, walking is often overlooked as mundane
or regarded as an activity mobilized for leisure, adventure, or discovery. In an era of global
climate crisis and war, many migrating people are forced to walk out of fear for their lives,
not for pleasure or innovation, while other people walk in order to perform daily labour such
as carrying water or other commodities. We highlight these aspects of walking to embed our
discussions of walking as a research methodology in a milieu that understands both the pe-
destrian and political entanglement of this everyday activity.
Each of the essays in this journal describes the co-creation of counter publics, minor
publics, intimate publics, and different-kinds-of-undercommons through walking on five
different continents (Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America). The various essays
in this special issue complicate, interrogate and co-create different kinds of publics and com-
mons that can be created through walking in conversation with theories and scholarship from
critical race, disability, queer and trans, affect, inhuman, environmental humanities and
more-than-human, and pedagogy.
As an emerging public and different kind of common, this special issue prioritizes
voices from people who have positions outside of academia, including cultural workers and
artists, graduate students, and early career researchers, as well as established scholars that
utilize walking as a method, and educators who draw on public pedagogy in their scholar-
ship. The journal is open access and speaks to a ‘public’ beyond the academic paywall. The
issue came out of an open call, and includes different formats including long and short
form essays and visual essays.
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
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A Critical Syllabus for Walking in/as Publics:
Curated as a Mobile Compliment to the Annual Public Pedagogies Conference
Launched at the annual Public Pedagogies Conference in Melbourne, Australia in Novem-
ber, 2019 this special issue functions as an online, accessible, mobile element of the confer-
ence’s theme. The twenty-five contributions that co-compose this special issue take up walk-
ing in various forms. It wasn’t until we realized that we had curated twenty-five (way more
than we’d originally planned!) essays of varying lengths, including visual essays, that we
needed some kind of organizing principle. Rather than thinking about what each essay shared
in common with each other in order to be grouped together, we imagined a format where
the questions posed to each contribution was: what is ‘at work’ in the essay?; what is the
thinking-making-doing of the piece?; or, how is the pedagogical force operating? Imagining
our readers as constituting a public space of ‘study’ (Harney & Moten, 2013), or what Walk-
ingLab practices as an Itinerant Reading Salon, the contributions in this special issue are or-
ganized through five nodes—a syllabus in the making: walking and place; unlearning the
flâneur; walking and the Anthropocene; spatial politics and counter-mapping; and interro-
gating publics and pedagogies beyond the classroom.
The first set of contributions tune into the different ways that walking and place-making
are enmeshed. Margaret Somerville, writing with Leanne Tobin and Jacinta Tobin, considers
how we can come to know the Nepean River Trail through walking the contemporary song-
lines of Darug songwriters and artists that sing the country of the riverlands today. The essay
explores Somerville’s walking practice, alongside a public performance of art and spoken
word at the Circular Quay International Passenger Terminal in Sydney, Australia, to ques-
tion a historic site of colonial invasion that is also the place of arrival for immigrants. The
next piece is a poem by Wiradjuri writer Jeanine Leane drawn from her recent book Walk
Back Over. The imperative to ‘walk back over,’ a line in the poem Whitefellas (in this issue),
operates both literally and figuratively: referring to the need to revisit the past to see what has
been missed, and pointedly, for white settlers to critically interrogate gestures of reconcilia-
tion on Aboriginal lands, and with Aboriginal peoples. The next piece takes place in London,
UK where Margaret O’Neill and Ismail Einashe take up local places, such as shops, commu-
nity centres, spas, hotels and schools, through walking as a biographical interview method
(WIBM) in order to practice critical public pedagogy that engages in unsettling and troubling
the white male privilege and basis of walking. The authors build upon a long history of doing
social research using walking, participatory and arts-based methods on migration with mi-
grants; and the importance of creating space for stories of asylum, migration and marginali-
zation. The haunting images from Cathlin Goulding’s photo essay examine places of excep-
tion that take form in prisons, jails, concentration camps, immigration detention centers,
Indigenous boarding schools, suspension rooms in schools, and the refugee camp. Walking
the former Tule Lake Japanese prison camp in Northern California, Goulding knots herself
into the prisoners’ restless and persistent presence and her own family history. Robert Bean
and Barbara Lounder’s essay and images contextualize their collaborative art project, Breath-
ing-in-the-Breathable: An annotated walk, which took place among the ruins of a 19th-century
tuberculosis sanatorium in the Polish town of Sokołowsko. The participatory walking project
utilized an event score, objects, sound and embodied movement to explore how the atmos-
phere and environment became explicit and weaponized by the use of gas warfare during the
First and Second World Wars. Blister is a verbatim play that tells the story of Rosie, an Aus-
tralian woman who walks the Camino de Santiago, an 800km pilgrimage across Northern
Spain. Sarah Peters’ essay describes how walking methods merged with the situated, relational
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
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and material verbatim theatre practice of community immersion in order to experience and
represent the public pedagogy of the Camino in performance.
Our next syllabus entry is a series of compositions that critique the ableist, masculinist
and heteronormative ways that walking has historically been inscribed in research. Eliza
Chandler, Megan Johnson, Becky Gold, Carla Rice and Alex Bulmer take up works by disa-
bility artists, whose practices engage with the act of walking/traversing as a method and form
of sense-making. ‘Cripping the flâneur,’ they ask how we might come to know ourselves, our
cities, our neighbours, and blindness through the epistemological vantage-point of blindness.
David Ben Shannon’s essay provides a critical analysis of soundwalks through four methods:
soundwalks, listening walks, phonographic walks, and audio walks, using exemplifications
from his doctoral research project in an early childhood classroom, to suggest that a compo-
sitional attention to voice, music and inaudibility might make audible those populations
whose oppression is enacted through their very inaudibility. Some of the earliest and most
pivotal contributions by feminist scholars to walking is the work of Dee Heddon and Misha
Myers, and in particular their work in dismantling the over-used trope of the flâneur. Their
photo essay describes their Walking Library for Women Walking project, which explores the
multiple relationships between walking, literature and environment. The Walking Library
strategically intervenes into a walking art discourse in which women remain largely invisible.
Georgina Perryman narrates her experience of participating in the Queer History Walking
Tour, an annually recurring event during Dublin’s official Pride festivities. As an activist form
of public pedagogy, the walking tour encourages a relational understanding of queer cultural
heritage through mobile, embodied and emotional interactions. Perryman argues that the
walking tour works as an ‘anarchive’ that contributes to a growing, intersectional understand-
ing of LGBTQ+ experiences and queer futures, facilitated by peripatetic practices.
The catastrophic consequences of climate change, toxic waste and water, extractive in-
dustries and capitalism theoretically inform the settings of the next section of walking meth-
odologies. Astrida Neimanis and Perdita Phillips explicate a walkshop in a park dedicated to
former coal-based infrastructures. The walkshop aimed to better understand the tensions
around groundwater and extraction in Australia. The essay and accompanying images grapple
with the attempt to engage bodily with groundwater, which for the most part is inaccessible
to human experience. To do so they draw on the practice of posthuman phenomenology to
explain how bodily attunement to wateriness, alongside the ‘proxy stories’ of arts and sciences
expertise, can aid in bringing groundwater into lived experience. Randy Lee Cutler’s visual
essay details an ongoing performative walking project, SaltWalks, which takes participants on
site-specific salt-tasting walks through different city neighborhoods. Through an engagement
with this elemental mineral, these walks become a pedagogical platform that embodies aes-
thetic and philosophical enquiries into the importance of this substance to ritual, survival,
health, industry and the imagination. As the many permutations of salt’s diverse implications
unfold, participants explore this crystalized mineral for its omnipresence in daily life, from
modern plastics, cleaning agents, ceramics and leather, to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
Another walkshop method is analyzed in Susanne Pratt and Kate Johnston’s essay; Speculative
Harbouring reflects on a postgraduate workshop in which students from different disciplines
came together over an intent to care for, and with, urban harbours. Drawing on feminist
practices and politics of care, in particular Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s articulation of ‘matters
of care,’ alongside Anna Tsing’s ‘arts of noticing’, the authors examine the ways in which
walking and reflecting can attune people to learn to care. Karen Malone’s essay concerns
walking on blasted landscapes with children in Semipalatinsk, a city on the outskirts of the
Polygon nuclear test site, on the ‘Steppes’ in eastern Kazakhstan. Through writing with with
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
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the past, she steps into an entangled set of uneasy encounters, remembering walking-with
those who are deemed unworthy of recognition and are invisible in the obscene manifesta-
tions of capitalism, the arms race, and the cold war. In a visual essay, Mindy Blaise, Tonya
Rooney and Jo Pollitt discuss their ongoing ‘wanderings’ with young children, problematiz-
ing the dominant discourse of developmentally appropriate practices that regulate children’s
bodies and their environments. Their weather wanderings rupture and intervene into the
stronghold that child development and ‘discovery’ has on the field of early childhood educa-
tion. Weather wanderings insist that children are always on the move with-weather.
The fourth section of our syllabus is concerned with matters of spatial politics and coun-
ter-mapping. Many of these essays could have been framed under walking and place, but
there is always the challenge of assigning more than five readings per class! Swati Arora
analyses the walking practice of Delhi-based artist Mallika Taneja, in the context of its en-
gagement with, and intervention in, the contemporary conversations on sexualised violence,
gender, space and mobility in India. Taneja’s work is part of a variety of feminist activism
to take place in India since the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi in December 2012.
Taneja organises regular midnight walks in various parts of the city. Arora examines the
contours of embodied knowledge enabled by collective walking by women at midnight. She
discusses how walking can allow for a learning process that is lived, somatic and personal,
and which is rooted in specific spatial contexts based on listening and care. Jon Johnson and
Karyn Recollet draw on their work with First Story, an Indigenous-led community-based
organization that prioritizes stories and knowledges of ancient, ongoing, and future Indige-
nous presence in Tkaronto (Toronto). Their paper, and the walks they organize for First
Story challenge the voyeurism of white privilege’s entitlement to Indigenous lands, bodies,
experiences, and knowledges. Johnson and Recollet draw on Indigenous futurisms and spec-
ulative fiction to activate slipstream cartographies and choreographies as part of their land
based storytelling practices. Considering a precarious public pedagogy, Kimberly Powell’s es-
say returns us to the historic and ethnic neighborhood of San Jose Japantown, California
and her StoryWalks method. As a counter-mapping practice, StoryWalks gathers narratives
from residents living in San Jose to underscore the entanglement of US social and economic
infrastructures, discriminatory practices of spatialized place politics, and local narratives sit-
uated in place politics. Nazli Tümerdem’s essay focuses on counter-mapping and walking
in the precarious geographies of Northern Istanbul as experiential and place-based (un)learn-
ing, to produce multiple epistemologies, and generate a community that is critically engaged
with top-down approaches to urbanization. Walis Johnson’s visual essay explicates the prac-
tice of redlining in the United States, and her artistic research, The Red Line Archive Project
and the Red Line Labyrinth, which archives and counter-maps this ongoing practice of ge-
ographies of race. Red Line Maps were used to exclude People of Colour, usually Black
people, from the greatest source of wealth creation in America—homeownership. This in-
sidious policy played out over time, impeding Black homeownership, wealth accumulation,
and full participation in the US economy and political system. Yet, traces of redlining are
evident today in myriad forms of economic and housing discrimination, inequitable educa-
tion, policing, and poverty. Johnson’s various walking projects expose the trauma and vio-
lence of redlining in New York. In her arts-based intervention into mapping and walking,
Linda Knight outlines Inefficient Mapping in the next visual essay. Inefficient Mappings are
gestural markings that take place in situ. The mapping is produced while walking and mov-
ing. It is possible to engage technologies such as tablet-based drawing apps. Alternatively,
the mapping can be done using paper and conventional drawing tools. In each instance, the
mappings record affective relations and movements.
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
9
The final section of our critical walking syllabus brings educational researchers who use
walking to inform their thinking about pedagogy, collaborative writing, and pedagogical ex-
ercises, and who invite students to move into publics beyond the confines of the classroom.
While David Ben Shannon and Susanne Pratt and Kate Johnston (above) also discuss walk-
ing with students, they were curated into a different section, but should be read alongside
these essays. Walking has always been mobilized in schools but is generally instrumentalized
as a way of moving student bodies or framed through discovery. Scholars in this section
think-with walking and pedagogy in different settings. Asilia Franklin-Phipps and Tristan
Gleason interrogate the limitations of reflection in teacher education practitioner research
that is solitary, ahistorical, and written in a particular academic register with an audience of
one in mind. Their essay explores walking with a group of pre-service educators and argue
that walking as reflective praxis produces different possibilities in the space of teacher educa-
tion, which challenge the treatment of teaching and learning as ahistorical and universal.
Nike Romano, Veronica Mitchell, and Vivienne Bozalek describe a walking-writing group
practice as academics and educators in South African higher education. Following Haraway's
(2016) ‘staying with the trouble’, and Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt’s (2017) ‘how to
live on a damaged planet’, the authors walked Rondebosch Common, a public space and
national heritage site, in order to grapple with the complexities and ambivalences of finding
common ground in a country devastated by colonial and apartheid violence. Wesam M. Sa-
lem, Leslee Bailey-Tarbett and Susan Naomi Nordstrom describe walks taken in a university
course in Memphis, United States outside the confinement of the physical classroom into
public spaces. By blurring boundaries and crossing limits, the authors displaced where and
how teaching and learning materialized.
We are inspired by the variety of contributors to this issue and the nuance and depth
that they take to thinking about walking and publics. In an era where academic publishing
is being squeezed into regulated echo-chambers of journals owned by multi-national corpo-
rations and locked behind paywalls that some universities can’t even afford, let alone indi-
viduals, it felt necessary to publish these conversations around walking in/with diverse publics
on an opensource platform. We’d like to thank Karen Charman and Mary Dixon from the
Public Pedagogy Institute for inviting WalkingLab to guest edit this issue. Special thanks to all
the contributors for taking the time to attend to revisions, edits, and our ongoing queries,
and for those who proposed articles that we couldn’t quite fit in. Particular thanks to Asso-
ciate Editor, David Ben Shannon for taking a major role in substantive editing; to managing
editors James Miles and Anise Truman; designer Claire Rafferty; our anonymous copy-edi-
tor; and to all the peer reviewers whose labour shapes another publics that is fundamental to
writing and learning. Stephanie would like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Human-
ities Research Council (SSHRC) Institutional Grant for funding the copy-editing of this
special issue.
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
10
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Stephanie Springgay is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. She is a leading
scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary
art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical
Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. With Dr.
Sarah Truman she co-directs WalkingLab – an international network of artists and scholars
committed to critical approaches to walking methods. Additionally, she is a stream lead on a
SSHRC partnership grant Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to
Life. Other curatorial projects include The Artist’s Soup Kitchen – a 6 week performance
project that explore food soveriegnty, queer feminist solidarity, and the communal act of
cooking and eating together. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum
studies, and qualitative research methodologies www.stephaniespringgay.com
Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4, 2019: WalkingLab Springgay and Truman
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Sarah E. Truman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne where
she researches English literary education, speculative fiction, and pedagogies of reading and
writing. Her research is informed by the feminist new materialisms, theories of affect, and
queer theory. Sarah is a researcher on the Teacher-Researchers Project (www.teacher-re-
searchers.org); co-director of WalkingLab (www.walkinglab.org) and one-half of the elec-
tronic music duo Oblique Curiosities (www.obliquecuriosities.com). Her research-creation
projects are detailed at www.sarahetruman.com.
i Research-creation is the interrelated practices of art, theory, and research. While many arts-based approaches to qualitative
research use the arts as a way of representing research findings, in research- creation the process of creative practice is under-
stood as an empirical and theoretical practice itself
