Paper short abstract:

On the face of it, walking the dog is the least likely of outings to qualify as a journey. After all, the only place one is ever really going is home. Yet, on closer inspection, it is precisely these reductive fixities that make walking the dog the prototypic journey, one shared with the prototypic non-human companion, and open to the simplest kind of serendipity.

Paper long abstract:

On the face of it, walking the dog is the least likely of outings to qualify as a journey. After all, the only place one is ever really going is home. The number of routes one can take is hardly infinite. The routine occurs several times a day, and in some respects isn't really about the process of walking at all. Yet, on closer inspection, it is precisely these reductive fixities that make walking the dog the prototypic journey. Using theoretical observations of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau and others, the paper will begin by considering walking the dog as a kind of urban pastoral, with parks and pavements reconfigured through the shared experiences of small collectivities (what Kurt Vonnegut might call a duprass). This opens the way for ethnographically based observations about the passage of time, the social archaeology of community (that is, the neighbourhood as an open field, with layers of repeated meetings that build, over time, into friendships or remain as they are - tiny intimacies or nodding acquaintanceships), and the everyday serindipities that go along with simply being outside. The paper's intellectual excursion will conclude with thoughts about the abiding significant otherness to one another of dogs and people, and about our shared creaturely being as beasts.