Paper short abstract:

This paper questions the possible implications of an onto-epistemological-methodological understanding of walking and storytelling as mutually constitutive knowledge practices in relation to walking methods, but also more generally to the understanding of human modes of relation to the environment.

Paper long abstract:

Mountains are often imagined and shaped as a counter-world in which humans are supposed to find and experience the wild and primal and become more self-aware than elsewhere. In the current climate crisis, however, these are also increasingly perceived as particularly endangered. In my dissertation project, I am exploring practices of walking and storytelling in the Swiss Alps to learn about the multiple onto-epistemological practices that are continuously and situationally negotiated, embodied, and materialized in processes and practices related to the " emergence of the mountain." By participating in various practices – hiking, farming, measuring, and mapping – I engage in various processes of movement in the broadest sense, all of which contribute to how a mountain is made, known, and shaped in relation to practice: These movements are always physical and material, but also narrative and semiotic. How do I and others enact mountain worlds in the practice of walking and storytelling, and how are forms of representation explored to mediate these movements between experience, interpretation, and description? To what extent does this make common assumptions about forms of knowing; the question of how acting, knowing, and being relate to each other, uncertain? I will discuss two examples from my first steps in the field (geomatic and geomantic practices of surveying mountain environments) to ask in what ways methods of walking can contribute to broadening and deepening understandings of both the epistemic practices of different actors and my own engagement in its relations to the field.