Walking Through Social Research

This interdisciplinary collection comprises a unique journey through a variety of walking methodologies. The book highlights a range of possibilities for enfolding sound, smell, emotion, movement, and memory into geographical and sociological accounts, illustrating the sensuousness, skill, pitfalls and rewards of walking as a research practice.

As an ethnographic method walking has a long history, but it has only recently begun to attract focused attention. By walking alongside participants, researchers have been able to observe, experience, and make sense of a broad range of everyday practices. At the same time, the idea of talking and walking with participants has enabled research to be informed by the landscapes in which it takes take place. By sharing conversations in place, and at the participants’ pace, geographers and sociologists are beginning to develop both a feel for, and a theoretical understanding of, the transient, embodied and multisensual aspects of walking. The result, as this collection demonstrates, is an understanding of the social world evermore congruent with people’s lived experiences of it.

Each chapter in the collection draws on original empirical research to present ways of walking and to discuss the conceptual, practical and technical issues that walking entails. Alongside feet on the ground, the devices and technologies that make up hybrid research mobilities are brought to attention, from audio recorders to GPS and video cameras. Interleaving these chapters a trilogy of short pedestrian essays takes the reader on illustrative urban walks, suggesting routes through the city, as well as ways in which the reader might make their own path through walking methods.

Charlotte Bates is a Post Doctoral Research Associate in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Alex Rhys-Taylor is a Sociologist at the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London.