Skip to main content

BISR Methods Lunch - Methods on the Move: Walking, Sensing, Belonging

When:
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

No booking required

BISR Methods Lunch: Methods on the Move: Walking, Sensing, Belonging

Speaker: Professor Maggie O'Neill, University of York

Chair: Dr Karen Wells, Birkbeck, University of London

Free event open to all: Book your place

Inspired by artists who use walking as part of their arts practice this seminar will open with an interactive session where we will imagine and produce a map that frames a walk that might capture senses of belonging for participants/co walkers. This will be followed by Maggie discussing and sharing walks undertaken using this method as part of her Leverhulme Fellowship; as well as in her research with asylum seekers,undocumented women and sex workers.

The Leverhulme Fellowship brings together walking methods with biographical methods to explore the concept of borders, risk and belonging. As an arts-based participatory methodology, walking has much to recommend it, especially when combined with visual and biographical forms of doing research. Walking methods can help articulate the material, phenomenological, lived, embodied and imagined yet transitory sense of being 'home away from home' as well as giving priority to walking and thinking as 'body and image-space' (Wiegel 1996) as a means, for some of the participants, of 'modulating alienation'as well as 'that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world'(Solnit 2001). The Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship Methods on the Move: experiencing and imagining borders, risk and belonging is undertaken by inviting participants to walk with Maggie along a route of their choice, connected to the theme of borders, risk and/or belonging. https://walkingborders.com/

Participants might be interested to look at the following paper written with photographer John Perivolaris - A sense of Belonging: walking with Thaer through migration, memories and space in Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture Volume 5 Numbers 2 & 3 pp327-338.

Maggie O'Neill is Professor in Sociology/Criminology at the University of York and has a long history of working with artists and communities conducting participatory, ethnographic, biographical and visual/performative research. Her latest books are: Advances in Biographical Methods (Routledge) with Brian Roberts and Andrew Sparkes and Transgressive Imaginations (Palgrave) with Lizzie Seal. Methods on the Move (Routledge) is in progress with Brian Roberts.

Contact name: