Paper short abstract:

This paper uses ethnographic research to explore encounters while walking and engagements with place on a long-distance walking trail, the Jordan Trail. I argue that examining a walking trail reorientates geographical accounts of Jordan to the everyday and intimate scale.

Paper long abstract:

The Jordan Trail is a 650km walking trail running the length of Jordan. This paper draws on 12-months of ethnographic research walking and volunteering on the Trail to argue that walking ethnographies enable alternative accounts of the Middle East to emerge. These alternative accounts are encounters between those walking on the Trail - both international tourists and Jordanians - and Bedouin and rural communities. These encounters enable storied accounts of place that are intimately experienced and made meaningful as the ground is used and walked along. Relationships with objects, animals, and the land on the Trail illustrate the means through which different walking bodies come against and value the land and negotiate their journeys through the use of objects, engagements with animals, and relationships with other bodies. For instance how animals such as donkeys help Bedouins with wayfinding and carrying heavy loads.

Walking is further explored in this paper as a practice with different meanings in different places. For instance, little research on walking has explored long-distance walking trails nor histories and contemporary practices of walking outside of Europe and North America. In Jordan, a history of walking is one connected with storied accounts of place: Bedouin nomadic movements, religious pilgrimages, colonial travel diaries, and Ottoman, Roman, and Nabatean trade routes (Mason, 2019). Walking on the Jordan Trail enables these storied accounts of place to emerge but also the noticing of how different groups dwell in place and engage and connect to place.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores young people's interactions with GoPros and microphones, going 'behind the scenes' of urban woodlands. Using walking ethnography and digital technologies, rich stories evolve from underwater and in the canopy - entangling humans and nonhumans in physical and digital relations.

Paper long abstract:

Dominant contemporary discourse positions young people as 'disconnected' from nature. Technology is often blamed; placed in opposition to nature. A growing body of literature, particularly within new materialist and post-qualitative approaches, intentionally complicates such binary narratives. This paper contributes to this body of literature, highlighting productive entanglements of young people, technology, materialities and nonhumans in outdoor engagements.

Critically reflecting on my ongoing PhD project, researching with young people in urban woodlands in Birmingham, this paper discusses the use of innovative methodologies (including walking ethnography, video and sound recordings and website co-construction) in examining interactions with(in) such environments. Presenting recorded excerpts of walking sessions, it draws on post-qualitative literatures to consider the role of the waterproof camera and the microphone in extending optic and sonic perspectives and in contributing to alternative educations. Stories emerge, entangling the sensory, physical and the digital. Told while walking, participants relate online videos to our engagements, bringing together pond algae, rusty underwater metals, decaying leaves and bugs found in tree trunks. They speak to the GoPro: 'What do you see guys? Comment down below', in direct dialogue with their imagined youtube audience, connecting their embodied interactions with the digital worlds they also inhabit.

This paper argues that technology and 'nature' should not be so easily placed in binary opposition. Instead, it highlights how young people connect environmental encounters with language and informal knowledge from online videos. As such, the human and nonhuman, the digital and the physical assemble to tell stories of and with the environment.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation will dwell on the differences between the Amerindian and the European perception of the environment while the former served as guides to the latter when walking in the Amazon forest.

Paper long abstract:

Since before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, indigenous systems have never been isolated, but were articulated locally and regionally through communication and trading routes which crisscrossed the entire continent and connected people (Levi-Strauss, 1952). The presentation is based in historical examples given by the European travelers and missionaries that walked through the Amazon forest accompanying indigenous guides along its routes. Supported by archival research it follows any trace of movement - paths, tracks and footprints - leading expeditions to negotiate with independent native groups and the way indigenous people perceive the spatial dimensions of the forest taking into account group dispersions and interethnic contacts. Since colonization, collaboration between indigenous guides, crewmen, hunters and interpreters with layman explorers was crucial for the colonization project to be carried out (Kok, 2009; Roller, 2012). This penetration of the terrestrial and fluvial routes within the forest was orientated by the ancient knowledge and significant mobility indigenous people already had about the environment and circulation in the surroundings. Inspired by Ingold (2000; 2010), I propose that walking was, and still is, an integral part of the lives of indigenous people in Amazonia leading to encounters and exchanges across vast distances with the neighboring groups. Amerindians walked ahead and the explorer followed (Burnett, 2002). For the Europeans however, these paths did not had the same connotation, being used only for its significance as infrastructure projects such as transportation routes or as ways to get in contact, explore and conquer indigenous territory and their natural resources.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is a reflection on the role of walking while listening to the different musical souls of a city in order to unveil the presence of its migrant communities and their struggles. It is based on an inter-disciplinary workshop held in the city of Tel Aviv with music and architecture students.

Paper long abstract:

The city of Tel Aviv is an uneven space inhabited by several local and migrant communities that are often made invisible and pushed at the margins for a variety of social, cultural and economic reasons. This paper aims at reflecting on a six-month inter-disciplinary workshop that took place in the periphery of the city with a mixed group of music, ethnomusicology and architecture students from Tel Aviv University. By walking across the margins of the city and listening to the music performed by its migrant communities both in private and public spaces - and in particular through the encounters enabled by these auditory walks - personal and collective stories come to light, enabling a new understanding of the urban space and its social and political frictions. In some cases, music and art reveal themselves as resistance practices able to give voice to the daily struggles and dreams of these invisibilized communities. In other cases, on the contrary, they become a catalyst for urban renewal and development processes that end up excluding them from their right to inhabit the city.

Paper short abstract:

A practical demonstration of the 'Role of Perception in Co-witnessing Generative Acts'. In this example, the skillful orchestration of ancient tools nurtured in a mountain village in Yunnan helped to reveal a comprehensive range of affective engineerings in the city.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a talk given on the 11th December 2018 to the Social Aesthetic Education/Practitioner Forum organised by the School of Art Management and Education at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China. The talk reflects on how my first stay with the He family in Jixiang Village, Yunnan, China which was hosted by Lijiang Studio back in 2006, affected my art practice. Witnessing a Dongba's skillful orchestration of mobile, modest techniques in order to weave a cognitive web enabled me to develop a methodology for a walking practice 'walk with me' which draws attention to a range of affective engineerings in the city. The outcome are geographies of affects or 'writings of earth' that visualise such small daily encounters, like an act of kindness; a sense of being out of place or simply another person waiting. These maps are based entirely on empirical fieldwork gathered during one to one walks along predetermined routes. They show how taking note of and visualising 'ordinary affects' as defined by anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (2007), can nudge our relationship with our environment toward a more fluid comprehension.

Paper short abstract:

Using a New Materialities approach, this paper offers an example of doing participant observation with water and explores how being in, and with, water provides insights into fieldwork and relationships.

Paper long abstract:

This paper outlines a series of brief fieldwork sessions completed with a Welsh stream and first year students over a period of 6 years. Following anthropological methods, the water in the stream was approached a community of water and the students engaging with the water were tasked with getting to know water by being with it.

By recording students' experiences, choices and conclusions, this paper will illustrate how materially engaging with the water (i.e.: being in the water) allowed insights about being anthropologists immersed in the 'field', and how it supported a more sophisticated understanding of complex ideas concerning subjectivity, relationships and reflexivity - or how events are co-produced through doing anthropological fieldwork.

This informal research shows that being-with (water) profoundly shapes what people think and understand (about water) and supports the value of learning by active creative practices.

Paper short abstract:

Through records of oral life stories, biographies or mythologies, the vivid homologous relationship between the aquatic Serpent, the body and the social environment is explained, so that if one is transgressed, the other two are affected in parallel (Héritier, 1995).

Paper long abstract:

Since September 2017, the Peruvian State is led the project Hidrovía Amazónica whose objective is to improve connectivity to the main Peruvian Amazon rivers to boost and/or achieve the development of the Amazon region, one of the poorest in Peru. Which implies dredging certain shallow beds of the Amazon, Marañón, Huallaga and Ucayali rivers. In this Project, two cosmologies proposed by Descola (2005) are contrasted. One, the official view of the naturalistic occidental science of the rivers offered by the Peruvian State, where the rivers and their ecosystems to intervene are presented as objects that can be manipulated without or with few negative consequences to both the aquatic environment and human beings. And, the other unofficial perspective of the fluvial environment, the animist cosmology of the natives or riverside mestizos. In this, the aquatic Snake, symbol of the river's ecosystem and emblem of the ancestral territory, is mother, owner or spirit of water; whose body fertilizes, (re) generates, (re) produces and nourishes aquatic life and the adjacent forest. Through records of oral life stories, biographies or mythologies, the vivid homologous relationship between the aquatic Serpent, the body and the social environment is explained, so that if one is transgressed, the other two are affected in parallel (Héritier, 1995). This systemic relationship, as part of the intangible heritage of the indigenous people, punctuates the ecological pedagogical patterns of their behavior with the aquatic environment.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines sail training experiences on board tall ships as a process of enskilment at sea. Education at sea entails attention not only to the environment, but also to the others and to the boat, entangling a bundle of relationships in which correspondences go together with responsiveness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines sail training experiences especially offered for the first time to young people through fundraising organisations and Erasmus + projects. Once on board any of the traditional rigged sailing boats, called tall ships, many different people, cultures, ages can meet at a time, being offered the experience of becoming crew members.

Becoming a crew member means participating in all the taskship aboard. Taskship, a term that is adapted from the term taskscape (Ingold 1993) for land to taskship at sea, means both, the shaping of the ship in the process of inhabiting an ever changing environment, and the quality of the relationships on doing so. 'Encouraging learners' own sensory-somatic engagement with the textures and qualities of the materials with which they work (Portisch 2010) is what entails quality in performing either skills or relationships.

What the sea environment offers together with a set of maritime skills on board these tall ships are transformative experiences in which attention becomes existential due to the lack of a grounded stability. Instability must be faced with a watch system for day and night sailing, arising in correspondences and close bonding not only between crew members but also between them, their boat and a much perceived and moving ocean.

Once at sea, dormant bodies of the land awake, no one can be hidden being affected by the risk taken. The sailing voyage entails 'to be present in the present' (Masschelein 2010), not intentionaly, but attentionally as a privilege and a gift sensing fully the goodness contained therein (Basso, 1996).