Special Issue WARP Walking Practices x Soapbox Journal edited by Alice Twemlow and Tânia A. Cardoso
Walking centres the body in a research practice. The body that gets cold, sweaty, thirsty, or blistered. The body that encompasses feelings, emotions, prejudices, as well as intellect. The body that gets impatient, bored, or overwhelmed. The body that, if we are lucky enough to have functioning locomotive and sensory faculties, is an instrument, as-yet-unparalleled in its potential for the sensing, sifting, and assimilation of data. Walking as a research practice is about consciously deciding how to put that instrument into motion within an environment, and which types of data to sense, sift, and assimilate. It is about the visceral exchanges between a sensing body in motion and the bodies of knowledge sequestered in the phenomena that make up a site of research. Whether they engage with pixels and memes, rocks, insects, birds, instruments, mud, other researchers, memories, clouds, microbes, shop signs, roasting coffee particles, emergency vehicle sirens, pages, or rats—walking allows a researcher to surface new layers of understanding about a physical, digital, or social environment, and sometimes about themselves. This special issue of Soapbox is the result of a collaboration with the “Walking as Research Practice” research group. It was compiled to share with a broader audience what was presented and discussed during the international conference of WARP in Amsterdam, with the hope of prompting new research collaborations and other research inquiries.