Going for a walk: a verbatim play

"Going for a Walk" is one outcome of an AHRC-funded research project, "Walking Interconnections: Performing Conversations of Sustainability". Led by an interdisciplinary team of academics from the Universities of Bristol, the West of England and Glasgow, "Walking Interconnections" responds to the fact that environmentalist discourses seem too readily and without awareness to place the unmarked, able body at their centre. And yet, in terms of daily practices of resilience, disabled people have experiences that are useful for planning towards more sustainable futures. Walking Interconnections aimed to identify and share those wisdoms. Walking was a key methodology of the research. Working with 19 co-researchers drawn from the disabled and sustainability communities, each participant was invited to take a partner on a walk of their choice. They were joined in some instances by Personal Assistants. The walks chosen by co-researchers included harbours, esplanades, national trust landscapes and parks. Co-researchers documented their walks with digital cameras whilst their conversations ‘on the move’ were audio-recorded. The audio-recorded material – more than 25 h in total – was subsequently transcribed and edited into a play by me. The script is presented here. All of the words in the play were spoken by the co-researchers or their Personal Assistants. This is just one possible story made from the conversations, the story I have chosen to tell. "Going for a Walk" provides the opportunity to walk as if in someone else’s shoes and to listen out for performances of planning, creativity, commitment and persistence, risk-taking, resilience and interdependency, as well as listen in to diverse bodies on the move

Walking women: interviews with artists on the move

No abstract available

The walking library: mobilising books, places, readers and reading

The Walking Library, inaugurated in 2012, has functioned as a mobile laboratory and art project for the ongoing exploration of the relationships between environments, books, reading and writing. In this essay, our focus turns to The Walking Library’s function as a library, asking: ‘What sort of library is a walking library? What does a walking library do—for its books and its borrowers and the places through which it moves? And what can it reveal or teach us about libraries, books, reading and environment?’ In a context in which data has become ‘mobile’, we explore the mobility of physical books through the Walking Library’s social and architextural designs and structures. The book on the move is recognised as the material of social bonding. The Walking Library depends upon and promotes the mobility of books through social networks by gifting, lending, borrowing and sharing; it is the social capacity—the social capital—of The Walking Library, and of walking and reading together, which concerns us most here. The Walking Library has offered temporary spaces for sociality, for shared contemplation, poetic spatiality and kinaesthetic comprehension. In doing so, it has generated a heightened sense of books’ sociability, spatiality and mobility through a stronger understanding of the inter-dependencies of reading, walking, time and place

Stories from the walking library

From August 17 to September 17, 2012, Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers created and carried a Walking Library, made for the Sideways Arts Festival. Sideways, a festival ‘in the open' and 'on the go', aimed to connect ecology and culture through using the 'slow ways' or ‘slow paths’ of Flanders. The Walking Library was comprised of more than 90 books suggested as books ‘good to take for a walk’ and functioned as a mobile library for Sideways’ artists and public participants. In addition to carrying a curated stock, the Library offered a peripatetic reading and writing group. Drawing on the Library’s resources and the experience of reading, writing and walking one’s way across Belgium, Heddon and Myers consider how reading in situ affects the experience of the journey and the experience of walking; how journeying affects the experience of reading; how reading affects the experience of writing; and how a walk, as a space of knowledge production, is written and read

On libraries: introduction

No abstract available

Walking women: shifting the tales and scales of mobility

Narratives attached to walking practices, influenced by the Romantic, Naturalist and avant-garde movements, continue to frame and prioritise aestheticised acts of walking as heroic, epic, individualist, and conquering. This reiteration of dominant knowledge risks obscuring certain types of walking and other ways to think about and recognise walking art’s potentialities. Encountering work by contemporary women artists and interviewing them about their motivations and experiences suggests the need for a radical mobilization of the rhetorics of scale, a task we begin here. The walking art works we introduce propose a destabilisation of values, unsettling familiar analytical and interpretative approaches: the local is magnified to the scale of the epic; the epic is one small step after another; the familiar is a site of risk; and walking a means for building relations rather than escaping them. Whilst assumptions about who walks, in what way and with what value are confronted, so too is the nature of the task in hand, as the walking body remains entangled in monumental historical and social structures, including the spatial

Confounding ecospectations: disappointment and hope in the forest

The task of this essay is to stage an encounter with disappointment. Though the ‘affective turn’ is manifest across many disciplines, there has been little reckoning with disappointment as a particular affect. In the over-lapping contexts of environmental catastrophe and environmentally or ecologically-oriented performance – where the global challenges are immense, solutions impossible, but action vital – disappointment is inevitable. It seems imperative that we begin to think through disappointment’s affective registers in order to understand where disappointment comes from and what it does. What sort of affect, or force, is disappointment? How does it work and what work does it do? Where does it go and what does it take with it? I argue that disappointment remains vital to hope. If disappointment is figured as the space created between expectation and disconfirmation, then that space in-between is the necessary place of hope’s reappearance

In search of the subject: locating the shifting politics of women's performance art

From the late 1960s to the present, women have utilised performance art as a 'form' with which to resist, transgress, contest or reveal the position of women within wider society. However, as both the nature of feminist politics and the contexts within which the work has been produced have changed, the enactment of such oppositional strategies has also shifted. This thesis aims to locate and account for such shifts by mapping multiple subjects, including performance art, feminism(s), contemporary theory, performers and women's performance art. In the late 1960s throughout the 1970s, the strategies most often utilised by women performance artists either offered alternative, supposedly more 'truthful' representations which drew on the real, material lives of women, or completely reimagined woman, locating her in a place before or outside of the patriarchal structure. From the 1980s onwards, however, the practice of women's performance art looks somewhat different. While performers continue to contest the material conditions and results of being positioned as female in Western society, such contestations are now often enacted from within what might be considered a 'deconstructive' or 'poststructuralist' frame. Acknowledging the impossibility of ever representing the 'real' woman, since 'woman' is always already a representation (and is always multiple), I suggest that the aim of this work is therefore not so much to reveal the 'real' woman behind the fiction, but to take apart the fiction itself, revealing the way in which the signifier 'woman' has been differentially constructed, for what purpose, and with what real effects. I have nominated this shift as a movement from a performance and politics of identity to a performance and politics of subjectivity

Adapting to the future: vulnerable bodies, resilient practices

In this chapter, we are concerned with the contribution of arts-based approaches to support participation in service of a fairer society. As illustration, we offer an account of the Walking Interconnections: Researching the Lived Experience of Disabled People for a Sustainable Society project and the interventions that the project and its outcomes have staged not only in environmental discourse and debate about inclusive public space, but also in representations of walking practices. We start by describing and contextualising the Walking Interconnections project, before going on to consider the arts based approaches used within the project and the research findings they enabled. Walking Interconnections brought disabled people and sustainability practitioners together to share walking encounters in public places. Through mapping, talking, walking and reflecting together they entered each other’s life-world’s. Their experiences are caught in photographs, maps and Going for a Walk, a verbatim play crafted by Deirdre Heddon from the recorded conversations of the walkers. Throughout the chapter, we include co-researchers’ voices using excerpts from Going for a Walk

Marcia Farquhar: divergent auto/biographies and lines of hope

No abstract available