07.08.2023Intervention Set: Walking Methods in Political Geography

What role does walking play in how we produce ethnographic research in Political Geography and allied fields? Who gets to walk, witness, and write; who doesn't, where and why - these are all political and embodied questions mired in class, racial, caste, and gendered privileges; with long roots in psychogeography, ethnography, and civil/grassroots movements.

Reflecting on these questions in diverse settings, Jasnea Sarma published an intervention set on ‘walking methodologies’ with colleagues Olivia Mason and James Sidaway in the journal Political Geography. 

This set introduces the critical mobility histories and politics of walking as a form of ethnography and research in an introduction, followed by exciting essays by a brilliant group of urban researchers and scholars. The set features Alastair Bonnett writing on ‘green walks’ in Britain; Phil Hubbard writing on Kent county’s ‘EU borders’; Ghazala Jamil writing on and from New Delhi on research walking with walking as a means for political protests in Indian freedom struggle; Jennie Middleton reflecting on ‘differentiated nature of experiences on foot,’ Maggie O'Neill writing on ‘walking as an ethnographic practice for researching borders, risk and belonging’; James Riding’s reflections on the ‘mobilities of (the Srebrenica) genocide through marching with others as a form of walking to remember’ in current Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Rose Morag’s auto-ethnography of walking for politics rather than academics based on her founding work with the psychogeographical collective The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement) in Manchester, UK.

The set is open access in the journal Political Geography. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629823001154#sec7.1

Citation: Mason, O., Sarma, J., Sidaway, J. D., Bonnett, A., Hubbard, P., Jamil, G., Middleton, J., O’Neill, M., Riding, J., & Rose, M. (2023). Interventions in walking methods in political geography. Political Geography, 102937. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102937

Photo by Jasnea Sarma, New York City, 2023