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Paper short abstract:

My paper explores research-creation as a more-than-human methodology, which I will bring to bear on walking research. I will perform an auto-ethnographic inquiry into walking as an epistemological process and generate new understandings of place, sensory experience, embodiment, and movement.

Paper long abstract:

Research-creation is an experimental site where art practice, theoretical concepts, and research coalesce to form new dimensions of knowledge. Movement is at the heart of research-creation and like a heart, the artist-scholar must expand and contract across disciplines, performing an uncanny dance that traverses notions of within and without, intuition and intellect, theory and practice. Attentive to moments of emergence and rupture, research-creation concentrates on process rather than product. Constituted by rhythm and affect, it is a form of thinking-in-movement — an act of thinking and thinking in the act — which walking brings to light. Walking research-creation events may produce objects and artefacts, but they also do labour— they are works of art. Thus, intentional walking with all senses engaged is a form of working in and with the environment.

My paper explores research-creation as a more-than-human methodology informed by new materialisms and posthumanisms, which I will bring to bear on walking research. I will conduct an auto-ethnographic examination of a roadside walk amongst the creeks, fields, and forests of the Hudson Valley, New York, harnessing research-creational methods to contemplate concepts within walking research that are accountable to Indigenous knowledges — to an ethics and politics of the more-than-human. Place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and movement will be explored. I aim to show how walking research-creation events not only reflect reality but instantiate thought. In the context of the Anthropocene, research-creation offers new understandings of the world as an earth system in which humans are an entanglement of being.