Stephanie Springgay - Böcker

As a research methodology, walking has a diverse and extensive history in the social sciences and humanities, underscoring its value for conducting research that is situated, relational, and material. Building on the importance of place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and rhythm within walking research, this book offers four new concepts for walking methodologies that are accountable to an ethics and politics of the more-than-human: Land and geos, affect, transmaterial and movement. The book carefully considers the more-than-human dimensions of walking methodologies by engaging with feminist new materialisms, posthumanisms, affect theory, trans and queer theory, Indigenous theories, and critical race and disability scholarship. These more-than-human theories rub frictionally against the history of walking scholarship and offer crucial insights into the potential of walking as a qualitative research methodology in a more-than-human world. Theoretically innovative, the book is grounded in examples of walking research by WalkingLab, an international research network on walking (www.walkinglab.org).The book is rich in scope, engaging with a wide range of walking methods and forms including: long walks on hiking trails, geological walks, sensory walks, sonic art walks, processions, orienteering races, protest and activist walks, walking tours, dérives, peripatetic mapping, school-based walking projects, and propositional walks. The chapters draw on WalkingLab’s research-creation events to examine walking in relation to settler colonialism, affective labour, transspecies, participation, racial geographies and counter-cartographies, youth literacy, environmental education, and collaborative writing. The book outlines how more-than-human theories can influence and shape walking methodologies and provokes a critical mode of walking-with that engenders solidarity, accountability, and response-ability.This volume will appeal to graduate students, artists, and academics and researchers who are interested in Education, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Affect Studies, Geography, Anthropology, and (Post)Qualitative Research Methods.

As a research methodology, walking has a diverse and extensive history in the social sciences and humanities, underscoring its value for conducting research that is situated, relational, and material. Building on the importance of place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and rhythm within walking research, this book offers four new concepts for walking methodologies that are accountable to an ethics and politics of the more-than-human: Land and geos, affect, transmaterial and movement. The book carefully considers the more-than-human dimensions of walking methodologies by engaging with feminist new materialisms, posthumanisms, affect theory, trans and queer theory, Indigenous theories, and critical race and disability scholarship. These more-than-human theories rub frictionally against the history of walking scholarship and offer crucial insights into the potential of walking as a qualitative research methodology in a more-than-human world. Theoretically innovative, the book is grounded in examples of walking research by WalkingLab, an international research network on walking (www.walkinglab.org).The book is rich in scope, engaging with a wide range of walking methods and forms including: long walks on hiking trails, geological walks, sensory walks, sonic art walks, processions, orienteering races, protest and activist walks, walking tours, dérives, peripatetic mapping, school-based walking projects, and propositional walks. The chapters draw on WalkingLab’s research-creation events to examine walking in relation to settler colonialism, affective labour, transspecies, participation, racial geographies and counter-cartographies, youth literacy, environmental education, and collaborative writing. The book outlines how more-than-human theories can influence and shape walking methodologies and provokes a critical mode of walking-with that engenders solidarity, accountability, and response-ability.This volume will appeal to graduate students, artists, and academics and researchers who are interested in Education, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Affect Studies, Geography, Anthropology, and (Post)Qualitative Research Methods.

Body Knowledge and Curriculum examines student understandings of body knowledge in the context of creating and interrogating visual art and culture. It illustrates a six-month research study conducted in an alternative secondary school in a large urban city. During the research project, students created a number of visual art works using a diversity of material explorations as a means to think through the body as a process of exchange and as a bodied encounter. The book engages with feminist theories of touch and inter-embodiment, questioning the materiality and lived experiences of the body in knowledge production, in order to provoke different ways of theorizing self/other relations in teaching and learning. This volume is important because it explores the ways in which youth understand the complex, textured, and often contradictory discourses of body knowledge, and seeks to intentionally create alternative pedagogical and curricular practices to ones that subscribe to a healthy body model. Additionally, enacting educational research as living inquiry, this book is an exemplar of the arts-based methodology, a/r/tography. Body Knowledge and Curriculum is a valuable text for courses in curriculum theory, art education, qualitative research methodologies, visual culture and pedagogies, and feminist theory. Appropriate for advanced undergraduate students, pre-service teacher education students, and graduate students, the book provides an interdisciplinary investigation into body research.

This collection considers how embodiment, mothering, and curriculum theory are related to practices in education that silence, conceal, and limit gendered, raced, and sexual maternal bodies. Advancing a new understanding of the maternal body, it argues for a 'bodied curriculum' – a practice that attends to the relational, social, and ethical implications of ‘being-with’ other bodies differently, and to the different knowledges such bodily encounters produce.Contributors argue that the prevailing silence about the maternal body in educational scholarship reinforces the binary split between domestic and public spaces, family life and work, one's own children and others' children, and women's roles as ‘mothers’ or ‘others.’ Providing an interdisciplinary perspective in which postmodern ideas about the body interact with those of learning and teaching, Mothering a Bodied Curriculum brings theory and practice together into an ever-evolving conversation.

Stephanie Springgay’s concept of feltness-which emerges from affect theory, queer and feminist theory, and feminist conceptions of more-than-human entanglements-is a set of intimate practices of creating art based on touch, affect, relationality, love, and responsibility. In this book, she explores how feltness is a radical pedagogy that can be practiced with diverse publics, including children, who are often left out of conversations about who can learn in radical ways. Springgay examines the results of a decade-long project in which researchers, artists, students, and teachers participated in events in North American elementary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions. In projects that ranged from children learning to be critics and artists to university students experimenting with building “a public” through art, participants blended participatory art creation with academic research to address social justice issues. Springgay shows how feltness can redefine who is imagined to be capable of complex feeling, experiential learning, embodied practice, social engagement, and intimate care. In this way, feltness fosters learning that disrupts and defamiliarizes schools and institutions, knowledge systems, values, and the legibility of art and research.