Walking with A/r/tography (Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences) 3030886115, 9783030886110

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Walking with A/r/tography Alexandra Lasczik Rita L. Irwin Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles David Rousell Nicole Lee

Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences Series Editors Alexandra Lasczik Faculty of Education Southern Cross University Bilinga, QLD, Australia Rita L. Irwin Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

This series is a new and innovative proposition in the nascent and growing space of movement studies. Emerging and established scholars who are beginning to work within the contemporary practices and methods of movement, seek resources such as this series seeks to provide. Education is very much tied up within an awareness of space and place, for example, a school can begin to take on an identity of its own, with as much learning taking place within its corridors and playgrounds as occurs in the classrooms. As learners interact with these environments through movement it is essential for researchers to understand how these experiences can be understood, allowing for a very interdisciplinary approach. This series specifically explores a range of movement approaches, including but not limited to walking research, a relatively new and exciting field, along with several other paradigmic lenses. The series will be commissioning in the Palgrave Pivot format. More information about this series at http://link.springer.com/series/15783

Alexandra Lasczik • Rita L. Irwin Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-­Knowles David Rousell • Nicole Lee Editors

Walking with A/r/tography

Editors Alexandra Lasczik Faculty of Education Southern Cross University Bilinga, QLD, Australia Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles Faculty of Education Southern Cross University Bilinga, QLD, Australia Nicole Lee Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

Rita L. Irwin Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada David Rousell Design and Social Context School of Education RMIT Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences ISBN 978-3-030-88611-0    ISBN 978-3-030-88612-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Introduction: Palgrave Studies in Movement Across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences

As Eichberg (2014) asserts, human beings move physically, emotionally, socially and psychologically. All of these aspects are embedded in a variety of academic genres and fields that give this series both its focus and broad potential for growth and development. This series seeks to provide a site for scholarship in, around and through movement as research method, practice and praxis. The series seeks to be authentically interdisciplinary in that it accommodates movement studies in a wide range of fields, including but not limited to contemporary arts, education, environmental studies, anthropology, tourism, health studies, psychology and Indigenous studies. By specifically positioning this series to focus on movement and mobility studies, it allows for a range of disciplines, perspectives, approaches, theoretical dispositions, representations, forms and interpretations to be accommodated. The range of movements/ mobilities/temporalities that may be explored include but are not limited to concepts of the stationary, of stillness, of sitting, of walking, of mapping, of slowness, lingering, fluidity, rapidity, haste and more in all of their affective and sensorial (Springgay, 2011) potentiality. Other aspects such as self-mobilisation, mobility/non-mobility, human and non-human global movement flows, diaspora, migrations, cartographies, and human geographies all apply to this series. In this series, movement is conceptualised as a creative, relational, place-making practice, and as integration of a way of being, doing, experiencing, making, theorising and researching. Mindful mobility as a method of conscious experiential learning that affords new ways of generating empirical material and a focus on the concept of encounter (Benjamin, 2006), in the event of movement is another v

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SERIES INTRODUCTION: PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MOVEMENT ACROSS…

conceptual possibility. Mindful movement and new qualitative methods to gather empirical material (Jung, 2014) and the movement of thought (Manning & Massumi, 2014) and of feeling (Eichberg, 2014) further flesh out the possibilities for publications. Bilinga, QLD, Australia Vancouver, BC, Canada 

Alexandra Lasczik Rita L. Irwin

References Benjamin, W. (2006). The writer of modern life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard University Press. Eichberg, H. (2014). Explanation or understanding? Movement studies between natural sciences and cultural studies. Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research, 63(1), 5–21. Jung, C. G. (2014). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. Routledge. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. University of Minnesota Press. Springgay, S. (2011). “The chinatown foray” as sensational pedagogy. Curriculum Inquiry, 41(5), 636–656.

List of Reviewers

We would like to acknowledge the kind and generous contribution of our reviewers for this collection. Such work cannot possibly be accomplished without their big-hearted dedication and support. Given that this book was written and reviewed during a pandemic, we are even more grateful that our reviewers took precious time out of the ever-expanding demands to help us publish this collection. Lexi, Amy, David, Rita and Nicole are so grateful. Lorrie Blair Laura Reeder Kim Snepvangers Kath Grushka Barbara Bickel Geraldine Burke Kathryn Ricketts Adi Brown Katie Burke Melissa Caminha Linda Knight Kathryn Coleman Ellyn Lyle Natalie LeBlanc

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Foreword

Walking with A/r/tography Drawing from the Mapping A/r/tography project enterprisingly funded by Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, this book is a visceral invitation to walk with a/r/tographers, that is, those who inquire through art making and pedagogy. They do so t h r o u g h visual mapping and journaling the main artery of The University of British Columbia campus, feeling like you are in locomotion whilst staying in place in game developer/narrator directed virtual digital walks, walking dialogue with Earth, with felt reverence and presence to those who have passed and past, a pilgrimage with spirits, shrines and deities in Kumano Kodo,

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photographic documentation of walking PROPositions as an ant, as blind, as a sound recorder, as a water trail, at a high point, as intimate departures in Utah, tracing displaced, post and expanded engravings of discovered marks and textured cues across the palimpsest urban surfaces of Granada narrating history of the ground walked on, A/r/t Field Trips in China that document fear, walking blindly in environments created by the blind and virtual rhythmic dot walking as relational pedagogy with young people with autism, and visual and poetic trace and sense capturing of young co-researchers’ walking inquiries with the deeply ancient, spiritual and biodiverse Gondwana forest in Australia. The a/r/tographic authors work with the ordinary affect (Stewart, 2007) of walking, the shifting perspectives and exploration of art, the questioning of research, and the guidance of pedagogy to come to know and be with other matter in the seemingly ordinary/everyday more deeply and differently. The places of each of the walks are walked in everyday by others, but scarcely in the ways these a/r/tographic walkographers proposed and curated. The offerings of each chapter invite readers to imagine with the a/r/tographic authors what is possible to know through walking inquiries, sensorially manifesting artwalks across the world without leaving the comfort of your choice of sedentary locale. Through the visceral collaboratory accounts of artwalks we are invited to wonder about place conscious pedagogy, thinking and doing with matter, experimenting and thinking through movement. Louise Phillips Southern Cross University Gold Coast, Australia

Acknowledgements

Academic publishing is a curious beast; it relies upon the grace and goodwill of all involved. In the case of this work, grace and goodwill have certainly been ever-present. Given that the writing and reviewing of this work occurred during pandemic times, things went slower than we expected. We are all educators, and the work of pivoting to online and remote learning and teaching took its toll on our time and energy, yet our reviewers gifted us with their service and support, when so much else demanded their attention. We gratefully acknowledge their labour. We would also like to recognise the considerable work of Katie Hotko, who has worked indefatigably to support the assembling of this collection with her own grace and goodwill. Katie is an amazing asset to the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University and to the SEAE1 Research Cluster. We would also like to thank Angela Baldus and Marzieh Mosavarzadeh for their editorial assistance in helping us bring this book to completion. Palgrave Macmillan has been wonderfully supportive of this work, and we especially want to thank our Editor, Rebecca Wyde and also Eleanor Christie, with whom we worked in the early conceptualisations.  Sustainability, the Environment and the Arts in Education Research Cluster is located in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University. For further information, see https:// w w w. s c u . e d u . a u / e d u c a t i o n / r e s e a r c h / s u s t a i n a b i l i t y - e n v i r o n m e n t - a n d - t h e arts-in-education-seae-research-cluster/. 1

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Acknowledgements

We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada who have funded the Partnership Development Grant that has funded the project that this collection explores. The project is entitled Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational Storytelling Across Historical and Cultural Routes of Significance.

Contents

1 Walking  with A/r/tography: An Orientation  1 Alexandra Lasczik, David Rousell, Rita L. Irwin, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, and Nicole Lee 1.1 Walking the Meshwork: The Rhizomatics of A/r/tography  6 1.2 Chapter Overview  9 References 12 2 Pedagogical  Affect and the Curricular Imperative in a Moment of Poesis 17 Joanne M. Ursino, Rita L. Irwin, Nicole Lee, Ken Morimoto, and Marzieh Mosavarzadeh 2.1 Preamble 18 2.2 Proposition 1: Go for a Walk and Document the Walk 23 2.3 Proposition 2: Select One Page from Each Person and Use Them to Make a Book 27 2.4 Conclusion and the Turn of Page 33 References 36 3 Walking  Curricular Paths in the Virtual: The Stanley Parable and Minecraft 39 Nicole Lee and Ken Morimoto 3.1 Introduction 40 3.2 Walking Simulators and Simulations of Walking as Sites for Walking Research 40 xiii

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3.3 Walking Virtually Through Aesthetic, A/r/tographic, and Contemplative Orientations 42 3.4 The Stanley Parable and Minecraft 43 Wrestling for/over Control, Autonomy, and Meaning  44 3.5 Theorizing as Nicole Walks as Stanley 46 One of the Paths  46 Linear, Rhizomatic, and Circular Experiences  48 Dance of Animacy and Wide-Awakeness  50 3.6 Minecraft, Middle Earth, and Myself: Ken’s Virtual Walk 52 Caves, Games, and Meanderings  55 3.7 Conclusion 57 References 57 4 Invitation  to Walking Inquiry Along the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails: An A/r/tographic Travelogue Re/ braided with Walkers’ Inquiries 59 Koichi Kasahara, Satoshi Ikeda, Kayoko Komatsu, Toshio Ishii, Takashi Takao, Kazuji Mogi, Minako Kayama, Minori Inoue, and Kaho Kakizaki 4.1 Welcome to Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails and an A/r/tographic Trip/Journey! 61 4.2 The Style of This A/r/tographic Travelogue 61 4.3 Walking Places We Know About But Have Never Actually Been, with Multiple Walkers Together 62 4.4 Kumano Kodo World Heritage 62 4.5 How to Walk and Explore Places and Routes of Significance 63 4.6 Stepping with A/r/tography into an Inquiry of Complex Perceptions, Experiences, and Beings 64 4.7 What Walking with A/r/tography Has Created 65 4.8 Re/braiding Multiple Walkers’ Inquiries as Métissage 66 4.9 Preparations for the Journey 67 4.10 Water Mirror Puddle 67 4.11 Trip to Kumano 69 4.12 Eliminate Boundaries: Inquiry into Tolerant Inclusion 71 4.13 An A/r/tographic Inquiry While Suffering from a Fracture 73 4.14 Manga Walking 76 4.15 Place Walking Art at Kumano Kodo = A Search for Proactive and Free Learning Adaptation of Individuals (Inner Journey) and Society (Experiment of Community) 78

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4.16 Marginal Field 80 Kumagusu Monologue  80 4.17 Students’ Document and Drawing 82 4.18 Mapping A/r/tography Exhibition: Visualized and Spatialized Inquiries, and Where the Next Flow of Stream/Current Meets 83 References 85 5 PROPositional Walking 89 Daniel T. Barney, Corinne Christopherson, Shayne Eliason, Rebecca Lewis, Amber Logan, Amy Ollerton, Kaleb Ostraff, Priscilla Stewart, and Sophia Su 5.1 Introduction 90 5.2 Misuse a Tool: Daniel T. Barney 93 5.3 Healing Walk: Corinne Christopherson 94 5.4 Walk: Shayne Eliason 96 5.5 Walk: Rebecca Lewis 97 5.6 Walk: Amber Logan 98 5.7 Sound Relations; Sound Perceptions: Amy Ollerton 99 5.8 Paths as Liminal Spaces: Kaleb Ostraff101 5.9 Walk: Priscilla Stewart102 5.10 Walk Home Remotely with Another: Sophia Su103 References104 6 Walking  a Square Meter of Territory: An A/r/tographic Appropriation of Everyday Place Through Printmaking107 Jessica Castillo, Ricardo Marin-Viadel, and Paloma Palau-Pellicer 6.1 Displaced engraving108 6.2 The Construction of Identity Through the Emotional Assessment of Heritage: A Strategy to Understand One’s Surroundings110 6.3 Walking Strategies and Artistic Displacement112 6.4 A Meter Squared of Territory113 6.5 Conclusion115 References116

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7 Pedagogical Bipedalism119 Jun Hu 7.1 Introduction120 7.2 Three Ways of Perceiving a Pedagogy of Walking121 7.3 Walking as a Dynamic Way of Seeing122 7.4 Walking as a Pedagogy of the Oppressed125 7.5 Walking as Rhythmical Knowing128 7.6 Conclusion131 References132 8 Walking  A/r/tography with Youth at Risk: Mapping Movement and Place135 Alexandra Lasczik, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Katie Hotko, and Tahlia McGahey 8.1 Orientation136 8.2 A/r/tography and Walkography137 The Visual Arts and Inquiry 137 The Methodology of A/r/tography 138 The Methodology of Walkography 139 8.3 The Research Site: Walking the Gondwana Rainforests142 8.4 The Research Design of the Walking A/r/tography Project143 The Youth Researchers 144 8.5 Closing Thoughts156 References159 Index163

Notes on Contributors

Daniel  T.  Barney is Professor of Art Education at Brigham Young University. He is Associate Chair for the Department of Art. He teaches courses in contemporary art issues, curriculum theory and development, and arts-based inquiry and creation methodologies. He is a past-president of the Utah Art Education Association and senior editor of Journal of Social Theory in Art Education. For him, art has become less of a commercial endeavor and more of an approach for sensing and engaging with the world. This conceptualization of art as a way of knowing orients his research agendas and philosophies of teaching. Corinne Christopherson  is currently working towards a Master of Arts Degree in Art Education from Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. She currently teaches undergraduate courses for the Department of Art and the Department of Dance that include Art for Elementary Educators, Watercolor Painting, and International Ballroom Technique. As a member of the world-renowned Brigham Young University Ballroom Touring Company, she considers dance to be an extension of her studio art practice as it allows the unique expression of emotion and story through ephemeral movement. Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles  is Executive Dean for the Faculty of Education, as well as the Research Leader of the ‘Sustainability, Environment, the Arts in Education’ (SEAE) Research Cluster. She is Professor of Sustainability, Environment and Education at Southern Cross University, Faculty of Education, Australia. She has been recognised nationally and internationally for her teaching and research excellence. xvii

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Her research focuses on the conceptualisation and articulation of environmental education and sustainability in childhood, schools, teacher education, higher education and community. She has a particular interest in child-framed research methodologies. Amy has been recognised for both her teaching and research excellence in environmental education, including an OLT Teaching Excellence Award, Citation and the Australian Association for Environmental Education Fellowship (Life Achievement Award) for her outstanding contribution to environmental education research. Shayne Eliason  received a BFA in Graphic Design from Brigham Young University where she has been adjunct faculty in the Design Department for the past nine years. She teaches introductory courses in graphic design and typography for college and high school age students. She believes in a constructivist approach to learning and strives to engage her students in design-thinking activities as a way to unlock their creative potential. Katie  Hotko is an associate lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University, where she is also an active member of the SEAE (Sustainability, Environmental, and Arts Education) Research Cluster. She is in the final stages of her PhD exploring Primary Teachers’ self-beliefs about creativity, and how these beliefs effect their teaching of the Visual Arts. She is a self-taught artist who is passionate about making the Visual Arts accessible to all people. Through the lens of process philosophy and a/r/tography, her inquiry delves into the becoming of the creative self-identities of practicing generalist primary teachers in the Visual Arts. Jun Hu  is Professor and Chair of Art Education at Hangzhou Normal University in the School of Fine Arts. Since 2017 he has led the A/r/tography Pedagogy Research Centre at Hangzhou, China. His research interests are art education, a/r/tography and arts-based educational research. He hopes to develop the “One Teacher One Course” project, that would support the development of Asian school art teachers, through collaboration with art education researchers, while providing the world with an Asian perspective on art education. Satoshi  Ikeda  is Associate Professor of Art Education at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University. He received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Tsukuba University and a

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Ph.D. in Pedagogy from Hiroshima University. His research focuses on the interdisciplinary fields of art, disability, and education. He has conducted workshops in inclusive settings, literature research on disability studies and art education, nationwide surveys on the actual implementation of art in special needs schools in Japan, accepted disabled students into graduate schools, and collaboration with local governments, art museum, and non-profit organizations, with the aim of empowering disabled people and realizing a symbiotic society through art. Jessica  Castillo  is a plastic artist specializing in printmaking and is a visual arts teacher. She has worked to combine both fields, for the benefit of art education, working as a teacher of Visual Arts in formal educational contexts (for primary and secondary school students), informal contexts, and as a teacher in higher education in the city of Concepción, Chile. The interest of her work focuses on research, innovation, and implementation of didactic strategies applicable to different educational sites through an a/r/tographic approach, in order to develop a coherent work for the benefit of arts education. From this, she emphasizes the study of identity as an iconographic repertoire and theoretical substrate, as well as experimental and lateral engraving practices as a teaching and learning tool for creation. Minori  Inoue is a student currently enrolled in the Tokyo Gakugei University Graduate School of Arts and Crafts Education Program. She belonged to the Faculty of Education, Tokyo Gakugei University when she was an undergraduate. She mainly planned and managed workshop activities for children and personally produced works. In her graduation work, she made it with the keyword “story.” At graduate school, she will conduct research on themes such as “story,” “emotion,” and “desire.” Rita L. Irwin  is a Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Art Education and Curriculum Studies, former Associate Dean of Teacher Education, and former Head of the Department of Curriculum Studies at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. She has been an educational leader for a number of provincial, national and international organizations, including being President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, Canadian Society for Education through Art, International Society for

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Education through Art and Chair of the World Alliance for Arts Education. Her research interests have spanned in-service art education, teacher education, socio-cultural issues, and curriculum practices across K-12 and informal learning settings. She publishes widely, exhibits her artworks, and has secured a range of research grants allowing her to work internationally. She is best known for her work in a/r/tography that expands collaborative arts collectives. She is very proud of how collected works and edited volumes have been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Toshio Ishii  is Professor of Fine Arts at Tokyo Gakugei University. He has the following achievements as an artist: ART OLYMPIA 2019 International Open Art Competition/Excellent Award—Open Category, MUNICH Creative Business Week, Design Schau in ANBD 2018 Munich Special Exhibition/Grand Prix, 2018, Asia Network Beyond Design 2018/Excellent—Excellent Award 2018, ISCAEE 2017 Exhibition (Farnham/England), 2015, and Gwangju Design Biennale, Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall (Gwangju/Korea). Kaho Kakizaki  has completed the master’s program at the Department of Arts Education, Graduate School of Education, Tokyo Gakugei University. She wrote a treatise on modeling activities related to the amplification of creativity, holding a workshop using shadow pictures and animated images. After that, she was an elementary school art teacher at the Thai-Japanese Association School in Bangkok, Thailand, and led a project in which about 1000 people played with modeling at the same time. Currently, she is an art teacher at Toho Gakuen Primary School, Tokyo, Japan, and is practicing lessons focusing on communication through creative activities. Koichi  Kasahara is Associate Professor of Arts Education at Tokyo Gakugei University, Japan. He holds a doctorate of Kansei(affective) Science from Kyushu University with the studies of inter-subjective affective communication within art education practices. His research focuses on methodological development of art education and teacher training programs utilizing arts-based research, arts-based educational research and a/r/tography, and on collective and collaborative social art education practice inside/outside of university. He has published a co-edited book of a/r/tography with Rita L.  Irwin which has contributors/scholars in Canada and Japan, and edited books of art education in early childhood

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education and translated books of arts-based research. He has also led several research projects utilizing arts-based methodologies. Minako Kayama  is a researcher at Tokyo Gakugei University, a part-time lecturer at Komazawa Women’s Junior College and Musashino University. She studies children’s clay modeling activities in nursery schools, lesson studies in the drawing and crafts, and workshops in university extension courses. Kayoko  Komatsu  is a professor of the Graduate School of Design in Nagaoka Institute of Design, Japan. She was granted a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Education in the University of Tokyo. She is researching art education theoretically. Collaborating with various artists, she tries to introduce Arts-Based Research into the graduate school of art and design university. She has published the first Japanese book on ABR, The Possibilities of Art Education: Creative Practice and Arts-Based Research (written in Japanese, Keiso Shobo 2018). Currently, she is editing a book of Arts-Based Method in Education in Japan, which presents original research outcomes based on the accumulated practices in these years in Japan. Alexandra Lasczik  is Professor of Arts and Education in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University, Australia. She is currently Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Education, and Research coLeader of the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research Cluster (SEAE). She is an expert educator with almost 40 years of experience in the Visual Arts. She is also a practicing artist whose chosen mediums are painting, photography, poetry, walking and creative writing. Travel, movement and migrations are large themes in Lexi’s work, as are the Arts and Arts-based Educational Research (ABER), particularly A/r/tography. She is an Artivist, committed to equity and social justice, and her spirited advocacy of a high-quality Arts education for all spans across her entire career. She brings extensive teaching experience in the Arts in Australia and internationally, and is a specialist with respect to the Visual Arts, teaching and learning, creative curriculum design and innovative pedagogies, with particular expertise in the engagement of at-risk youth through the Arts. She brings this extensive experience and depth of understanding of the sector to her influential work in teacher education at Southern Cross University.

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Nicole  Lee holds a PhD in Art Education from the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts (studio), a BEd (Intermediate/Senior Art and English), and a MEd from York University, Toronto, Canada. She is a maker, writer, curator, and editor of anthologies in the fields of a/r/tography, arts-based educational research, and curriculum studies. Her dissertation research considers what it means to cultivate a relationship with the unknown as an artist, researcher, and teacher. She explores methodologies of a/r/tography, currere, and contemplative practices as process-based compasses that push through the unknown into the emergent. Her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Rebecca Lewis  received both a BA in Dance Education and a MA in Art Education from Brigham Young University. She has been adjunct faculty in the Department of Dance at Brigham Young University for the past 12 years and her work has been centered around movement for the everyman through somatic vehicles and mindfulness as well as fusing movement and the visual arts. She teaches contemporary technique courses as well as general education courses. She strives to connect principles of movement and spirituality to students’ everyday living practice. Amber Logan  received her MA in Art Education from Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Her thesis focused on becoming more reflective in her teaching practice and curriculum and connecting her artistic self to her teaching self. She has been teaching for six years and is currently at Willowcreek Middle School in Lehi, Utah. She received Utah’s Middle School Art Teacher of the year 2019–2020 and has been nominated for the several other awards. She has focused her art-­ making on found mixed-media sculptures at home and creating found mixed-media collages when traveling. Ricardo Marin-Viadel  is currently Professor of Artistic Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts and at the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the University of Granada and is coordinator of the doctoral program ‘Arts and Education’. He has taught at the Universities of Barcelona (1981–84) and Madrid Complutense (1984–88). Tahlia McGahey  is a country music performer, producer and songwriter who is also Principal at the Gold Coast’s premier school for disengaged youth. She brings a wealth of education and psychology knowledge and

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experience to her role as Principal and is currently a doctoral candidate at Southern Cross University. She has recorded and performed in Nashville and is currently working on her third album of original songs. Kazuji Mogi  is Professor of Humanities at the Faculty of Letters, Atomi University, Japan. He received an MA in Arts from the University of Tsukuba and a Ph.D. in Design from the Kyushu Institute of Design. His research explores the foundations of art education. Recently, he has been researching the theory and practice (workshops) of inclusive art education, where children with and without disabilities can learn together. He believes that art education should be the foundation for a symbiotic society in the future. Ken  Morimoto  is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at The University of British Columbia with interests in a/r/tography, arts education, and phenomenology. Marzieh  Mosavarzadeh  is a PhD candidate in Art Education at The University of British Columbia. Her arts-based educational research explores the emergent process of Making-Place through following and attending to the practice of propositional thinking and making while walking in a place. She is fascinated with the entanglement of the practices of writing and image making on-site while walking and how together they can work as an “oxidizing” method to enable the walker to follow things on the move while holding space for the meaning-making process to happen organically. In her research, she explores the kind of sorcery, complexity, and tension that pausing with and contemplating in spaces in-between brings to her a/r/tographic research. Amy Ollerton  is completing an MA in Art Education at Brigham Young University. Her main interests are photography and video. Her most recent films work with movement, embodiment and memory. She currently teaches high school photography and graphic design. Kaleb  Ostraff is currently pursuing a PhD in Art Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before pursuing his PhD, he enjoyed teaching middle school art classes in public schools in Utah. He has an interest in the space where disciplines overlap and examining the affordances these spaces provide for education and art making. This interdisciplinary interest he attributes to his parents, who are both professors, one of ethnobotany and one of art. His current research

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interests include museum studies, reinterpreting the idea of archives and collections, cultural heritage, critical pedagogies, and curriculum development. Paloma Palau-Pellicer  is a Professor and Secretary of the Department of Education and Specific Didactics, Area of Didactics of Plastic Expression of the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón. Her PhD is in Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts from the Universitat Jaume I. She has been a member of the executive of the Valencian Association of Art Critics since 2013 and Vice President from 2015 to 2018. Her research focuses on artistic methodologies of teaching in art education, theory analysis and criticism of fine arts and gender studies related to the artistic field. David  Rousell is Senior Lecturer in Creative Education at RMIT University, where he is a core member of the Creative Agency Lab. His research is invested in the reimagining of educational cultures, theories, and environments through new empirical approaches drawing on the relational arts and process philosophy. Prior to joining RMIT, he was a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he coordinated the Manifold Lab for Biosocial Studies in the Education and Social Research Institute. His research combines his work in affect studies, digital ethnography, and posthumanism with his professional background as an environmental artist, designer, and arts educator. He is invested in an ecological rethinking of the politics and ethics of digital life through critical and creative engagements with sensory technologies and media. Priscilla Stewart  received an MA in Art Education from Brigham Young University. Her research interests include art education combined with place-based education, ecology, experiential learning and outdoor education. She has presented her research at international, national and Utah art education association conferences. She is currently an art teacher at the Waterford School. Here she teaches secondary sculpture, ceramics, drawing and art foundation classes. Her art work explores functional wheel thrown pottery, sculpture and painting, usually inspired from travels around the world. Her other interests include epic climbing adventures, summiting mountain peaks and eating food from the garden. Sophia Su  received her Master’s in Art Education from Brigham Young University. She is a licensed art teacher in Utah and Idaho and has taught in Utah, Idaho, and Guangzhou. Her goal is to help her students use Art to understand why they matter.

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Takashi  Takao  is Associate Professor of Theatre and Music at Tokyo Gakugei University, Japan. His research interests include impro (improvisational theatre) and wind music education. He is a founder and performer of an impro group, Improlabo. He has taught impro in schools, theatres, companies, and communities. He has studied impro with its founder Keith Johnstone for over 20 years. He also has taught music in wind bands. He has studied conducting with Eugene M. Corporon, who conducts North Texas Wind Symphony. While he was a visiting scholar at the University of North Texas in 2016–2017, he conducted the North Texas Symphonic Band as a guest conductor. He was selected as a participating conductor of Frederick Fennell Memorial Conducting Masterclass in 2019. He published books including Impro Education: Does Improvisational Theatre Develop Creativity? and Improvising Organizations (both in Japanese). Joanne  M.  Ursino is a PhD candidate at The University of British Columbia. She centers arts-based research and auto-poetic inquiry in a strong studio art practice in her doctoral studies in Cross Faculty Inquiry in the Faculty of Education. She has both depth and breadth in her textile art practice and has been making quilts for over twenty-five years—alongside more recent explorations in book arts/artist books and photography. Her work and texts are intimate and intricate and engage feminist, queer, anti-racist and decolonization discourses at the cutting edges of arts-based research and language. She is currently a sessional instructor in Textile Design and Pedagogical Approaches in Art Education and a co-instructor in Arts-Based Educational Research: A/r/tography. Previously, she worked in the federal public service, trade union movement and university administration in the field of human rights and employment equity.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

The Main Mall ground, looking south from the Martha Piper Fountain and at the sky (May 19, 2020). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino 23 The Engineer’s Cairn and the ground at the base (April 15, 2019). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino 24 Campus map at the intersection of the Main Mall and Agronomy Road (looking north), the Reconciliation Pole, and a handmade sign calling attention to the Wet’suwet’en protests at the base of the Reconciliation Pole (May 19, 2020). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino 25 Sharing our six individual fieldnotes and found objects (April 15, 2019). Photo credit: Marzieh Mosavarzadeh 27 Creating our handmade books around the table (April 15, 2019). Photo credit: Marzieh Mosavarzadeh 29 A turn of pages with one of the handmade books compiled from the shared fieldnotes (June 2020). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino 30 Curating the handmade books at the end of the day (April 15, 2019). Photo credit: Marzieh Mosavarzadeh 31 Pavement markings on the Main Mall at Agronomy Road (May 19, 2020). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino 34 The Stanley Parable Main Menu on a laptop and game stills of Stanley/Nicole pushing buttons. Photo credit: Nicole Lee/The Stanley Parable47 Options, directions, courses, paths, and dimensions in The Stanley Parable. Photo credit: Nicole Lee/The Stanley Parable49 xxvii

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Fig. 3.3

Selected game stills from The Stanley Parable. Photo credit: Nicole Lee/The Stanley Parable52 Fig. 3.4 Game still of a house in Hobbiton. Photo credit: Ken Morimoto/Minecraft53 Fig. 3.5 Game stills of a various points of interest in MCME. Photo credit: Ken Morimoto/Minecraft54 Fig. 3.6 Game stills of cave entrance and tunnel system. Photo credit: Ken Morimoto/Minecraft56 Fig. 4.1 Short poem written in a drama workshop during this project, Author unknown, May 31, 2019 60 Fig. 4.2 Walking on the trails, I found a puddle. Kasahara Koichi, 2018 68 Fig. 4.3–4.4 Streams. Minako Kayama, 2018. Ceramics. Minako Kayama, 2018 70 Fig. 4.5 Eliminate Boundaries. Satoshi Ikeda, 2018 73 Fig. 4.6 Lines in/along Kumano. Kayoko Komatsu, 2019 74 Fig. 4.7 Poem/Document. Toshio Ishii, 2019 77 Fig. 4.8 Manga Walking. Toshio Ishii, 2019 78 Fig. 4.9 Kumano Taisya × Norito × Omikuji …What kind of dream do you have? Kazuji Mogi, 2019 79 Figs. 4.10–4.12 The presentation of “Kumagusu Monologue” at InSEA 2019. Takashi Takao, 2019. Drama Workshop to consider the experiences at Kumano. Takashi Takao, May 31, 2019 82 Figs. 4.13–4.14 Document. Kaho Kakizaki, 2018. Drawing. Minori Inoue, 2019 83 Fig. 4.15 Photographs of Exhibition of ‘A/r/tographic Inquiry through Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails Walking’ at the InSEA 2019 World Congress, The University of British Columbia, July 9–13, 2019 84 Fig. 6.1 Collage artwork 108 Fig. 6.2 Collage artwork 109 Fig. 6.3 Process of inking and printing 111 Fig. 6.4 Making prints from the ground 113 Fig. 6.5 A Meter Squared of Territory 115 Fig. 7.1 Dadongya Pass at Mt. Qilian; Altitude: 4120 m; Photo by Wei Li 123 Fig. 7.2 Shengjie Wu’s performance to experience fear as art performance at Wei Li’s workshop, 2016 124 Fig. 7.3 Children’s Day (June 1, 2018) Wormhole project at a community centre, Hangzhou. The girl in blue T-shirt not wearing the blindfold is a fifth-grade pupil at Zhejiang Special School of the Blind 127

  List of Figures 

Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3

Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5

Kuankuan, taught by two blind pupils in blue T-shirts, printed his work about the plastic toy of a handsaw Mosaic animation project participated by nine autistic juveniles at Yanglingzi Special School, Hangzhou, 2017 Mosaic collage, by nine autistic juveniles at Yanglingzi Special School, exhibited at Zhejiang Art Gallery, Hangzhou, 2017 Youth researcher drawings with dirt. They created rubbings of the earth on-site onto paper and canvas surfaces, using their feet to create them The youth researchers walking and mapping the site through photography and seismic drawings in their visual diaries and on a collaborative canvas Collaborative seismic work created by the youth researchers as they walked the site. A young person held the canvas vertically whilst the other young people made marks on the surface of the canvas, their moving bodies controlling the marks being made, similar to that of the marks made by a Seismograph Youth researchers engaging in a/r/tographic, walkographic fieldwork onsite Youth researchers engaging in foot paintings as an analytical process

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128 130 131 141 145

148 150 154

CHAPTER 1

Walking with A/r/tography: An Orientation Alexandra Lasczik, David Rousell, Rita L. Irwin, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, and Nicole Lee

Abstract  This book brings together visual arts educators working on an international research project titled Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational Storytelling Across Historical and Cultural Routes of Significance. Emphasizing a collaboratory model (Muff, 2014) that fuses concepts of collaboration and laboratory, the project underscores how a/r/tography facilitates participatory, collaborative, and cooperative knowledge creation and mobilization. Each chapter is located in a collaboratory in a particular location.

A. Lasczik (*) • A. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University, Bilinga, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] D. Rousell Design and Social Context, School of Education, RMIT, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] R. L. Irwin • N. Lee Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking with A/r/tography, Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_1

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Keywords  A/r/tography • Mapping • Walking inquiry • Mapping a/r/tography This book brings together visual arts educators working on an international research project titled Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational Storytelling Across Historical and Cultural Routes of Significance.1 Emphasizing a collaboratory model (Muff, 2014) that fuses concepts of collaboration and laboratory, the project underscores how a/r/tography facilitates participatory, collaborative, and cooperative knowledge creation and mobilization. Each chapter is located in a collaboratory in a particular location. The original partnership included seven sites with three sites reaching across Canada (Vancouver, Regina, and Montreal) and one in each of Australia, China, Japan, and Spain. Since then, many other international sites have joined the Mapping A/r/tography network2 and indeed, this book includes chapters from each of the countries from the original partnership plus a new site from the United States. Each collaboratory location has spent the past three years designing artistic and pedagogical actions, alongside place-based philosophical perspectives, artistic traditions, contemporary artistic and educational initiatives, and distinctive engagements with their local communities of practice (Irwin, 2008). This has meant that the participatory, dialogue-oriented structure of collaboratories has fostered cultural and transcultural idea exchanges within and among our international network. Ultimately, this has led to many complicated conversations (Pinar, 2012). This volume shares one of those conversations that discusses how walking is an important method for thinking through how we might engage with a/r/tography across all sites and among all those involved in the project. As we imagined this project, we realized that despite the geographic disparity, historic and contemporary routes of significance around the world help shape human relationships with the land, as well as connect people through different purposes. In this volume, some authors explore well-established routes of significance like the Kumano Kodo Trail in Japan, the Gondwana Rainforests in Australia, and the Silk Road in China; others explore contemporary and personal routes of significance in their particular 1  We wish to thank the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and The University of British Columbia for their generous funding of this research project. 2  Please see https://artography.edcp.educ.ubc.ca/?page_id=1627 for an introduction to the many sites around the world and the projects and activities they are undertaking.

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locations. They represent unique cultural landscapes, deeply rooted in singularities of tradition, history, socio-politics, economy, geography, geology, environment, space, time, affect, and spirituality. These cultural landscapes are shaped by processes that define the authors’ locations and interests, such as religious rites of worship and purification, spiritual connections of Indigenous peoples to the land, (re)vitalization of history and place, and desires to understand selves-in-relation through human and/or nonhuman bodies. Each grapple with what has gone before and that which is yet to be known. As a result, the distinctiveness of each chapter calls for place-consciousness as a critical pedagogy (Farr Darling & Taylor, 2015) that foregrounds “a narrative of local and regional politics that is attuned to the particularities of where people actually live, and that is connected to global development trends that impact local places” (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 1). A place-conscious pedagogy (Ellsworth, 2005) allows each of the authors to start with what is nearby and known, while also cultivating relationships with the local, the global, and the social life world with the natural environment, thereby engaging students and teachers with their local communities as vibrant, important sites for both local and global learning. In other words, the routes explored in each site and each chapter become crucial for (re) thinking and (re)imagining living and learning as interrelated, and a placeconscious pedagogy enables the authors to map geographies of self and others. Walking routes of significance allows us to think through movement, leaving actual and virtual footprints (Irwin, 2006; Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017; Triggs et al., 2014). Walking has become an important artistic and pedagogical practice in recent decades making it a rich form for initiating and inspiring inquiry (Springgay & Truman, 2019). As a result, many scholars have explored a variety of sensory, material, and auditory intensities that reach into the potential of ontology and discernments that are beyond representation (MacLure, 2013; Truman & Springgay, 2015; Vannini, 2015). The embodied nature of walking is immediate and affords an awareness of the bodily experience of moving that defies knowledge categorization yet is, in the act of moving, knowledge in the making (Ingold, 2004, 2010; Springgay & Truman, 2017). As walking researchers walk, actual or virtual, they become more and more aware of the body in relation to the surfaces of particular place and in so doing, particularized understandings of place emerge (Pink et al., 2010). While research demonstrates the importance of individual accounts of the experience of walking, more research is needed to investigate the shifting cultural, economic, and political dispositions that allow us to map geographies of self through living inquiry.

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While walking is employed as a mode of inquiry, a/r/tography is a “research methodology, a creative practice, and performative pedagogy” (Irwin, 2013, p. 199) that enables us to understand the global–local implications of movement with/in social and cultural contexts. A/r/tography (Irwin, 2004; Springgay et al., 2008) has often been aligned with understanding the self as artist/researcher/teacher(learner), yet it is also social when groups or communities of a/r/tographers come together to engage in shared inquiries, act as critical friends, or share their collective provocative works with others in an effort to rethink social actions and curiosities. This volume is a collection of collaborative a/r/tographic projects each using walking as a mode of inquiry. A/r/tographers have always embraced a process-oriented way of being engaged with the world. While research products are still important, it is in the processes of engagement—the doing—that the work comes to life. In an effort to go beyond the geographic borders that initially defined a/r/tographic projects (Canada), this international research project brings to life how a/r/tography may be taken up through transnational storytelling and walking as methods within particular locations. The forward slashes in the word a/r/tography initially indicated multiple identities as a/r/tographers negotiated within the often in-between spaces of coming to know. This orientation has been helpful to arts educators navigating personal and professional lives, communities of practice, and evolving understandings of how arts education may be embraced within current society. Yet, what has stood out over the last two decades has been the emergent processes. A/r/tography resists the fixity of representation and tendencies toward cause and effect. Deleuze (1994) and Bolt (2004, 2009) each discuss how artistic practices create their own rhythms and logic by experimenting with speed, intensities, and materials that connect and disconnect as they flow, change, and enlarge. Artists are committed to these dynamic processes in their artistic practices. Arts educators enact these commitments to creative and emergent processes in their teaching and learning environments. To Barad (2003, 2007), practice involves any actions and processes that attend to ontology, materiality, and agency. Whereas many forms of research are concerned with epistemological matters, research that is concerned with ontology is committed to examining that which is yet unknowable. Moreover, while the former uses reflective processes to interpret experiences, the latter uses practices that challenges normative understandings and looks instead to potentials (see Boulton-Funke et al., 2016).

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Some a/r/tographic literature discusses conceptual renderings that serve to disrupt a static fixity of methods, data, and interpretation and instead offer openings to living inquiries that are generative, flexible, and intersubjective. A/r/tographic renderings are not procedures to be followed but rather opportunities for creating anew (Springgay et al., 2005). Renderings encourage an entanglement of art and text, as questions and quests (Irwin & Ricketts, 2013) pursued through conceptual and material practices. These practices are understood as living practices, constantly in movement, and committed to change. Informed by Canadian curriculum theorist, Ted T. Aoki (1993, 2005) who distinguished between curriculum-­ as-­plan and curriculum-as-lived (Pinar & Irwin, 2005), a/r/tographers are committed to a living curriculum that is dialogical, complex, and emergent, allowing for and seeking the unexpected. Indeed, William F. Pinar’s conception of curriculum as “a complicated conversation” and his conception of a teacher as a “socially-engaged artist-intellectual” (Pinar, 2009, p. 52) complements Aoki’s notion of the lived curriculum. Embracing these curricular ideas, a/r/tographers see educational settings and all that happens within them as invitations for learning, and encourages all involved in these settings to take the responsibility of pursuing their learning in passionate and provocative ways. Rather than relying on habitual forms of knowing and perceiving, a/r/tographers decenter and reframe their engagements. For many, this means, for example, thinking with materials (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017); experimentations with movement, the environment, art, and pedagogy; and becoming medium (MacDougall et  al., 2018). Furthermore, it means being open to the form and formlessness of a/r/tographic work where exhibitions, performances, sonic walks, and all manner of artistic processes and sharing become important—not only to the processes of doing but also to dissemination. This means that a/r/tographic work may disrupt taken-for-granted notions of research sharing, and include forms such as comics (Madrid-Manrique, 2014), photobooks (Burke, 2013), and scripted plays (e.g., Irwin et al., 2018) among many other artistic forms. In doing so, the material and conceptual practices that permeate a continuous state of movement, point to something that is more than the final product or the medium. The importance of relationality throughout these processes and among those involved is significant. In turn, this points to our ethical practices with others (Fenwick, 2012; Kind, 2006) and how the arts and, indeed, a/r/tography inspire action in the face of ethical concerns. It is here that Barad’s (2014) notion of diffraction is important. By delving into concepts while thinking with materials and movement, a/r/tography engages in

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intra-actions that entangle agencies wherein responsibilities are distributed across relationships among people, places, things, and discourses. Diffraction does not divert responsibility nor possibility as reflection or interventions may, but rather embraces the potential of both. The possibilities are endlessly generative.

1.1   Walking the Meshwork: The Rhizomatics of A/r/tography In its commitment to living inquiry as the axis of theory and method, a/r/tography’s engagement with walking reflects a continued investment in ‘organic’ thought as both an ethical and aesthetic imperative. Walking extends a/r/tography’s proliferation of an organicism that, despite critiques, explicitly privileges life as both the fundamental problem and condition for creative inquiry. To begin with life, indeed, to walk with life, is to attend to life’s poetic force as ontogenesis: a becoming-with (Irwin, 2013). In this respect, walking expresses a/r/tography’s sustained engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) botanical concept of the rhizome. A/r/tography is rhizomatic in that, like ginger, it proliferates through nodes of growth that do not resemble any underlying structure or transcendent form. Wherever it finds itself, ginger simply ‘grows out’ along a line of becoming and entanglement within a particular biocultural matrix, or ‘milieu’. Like the structured improvisation of a wandering line, the morphological organization of a ginger root is always emergent. It grows and grows, never the same, potentially replicating itself everywhere, a repetition that differs, a continuity that varies. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 12) use this figuration of the rhizome to argue that the brain does not operate like a computer (connections between points), but like a field of grass (proliferation in every direction). Moreover, they assert that the concept of the rhizome is not a metaphor but a tool. The rootless, unstructured growth of the rhizome in any direction is, quite literally, an organic image of thought as the movement of creative activity through the living force of events. While often evoked in studies of digital life, the botanical concept of the rhizome offers a radical counterpoint to the cybernetic image of the ‘network’ that has been so pervasive in recent scholarship. Rather than resembling a structural network of linear connections between static points, a rhizome consists of continuous processes of growth and variation that

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constitute the weave of a meshwork, or ‘knotting’, of entangled life-lines (Ingold, 2011). And to the extent that walking articulates a spidery line of experience through the comportment of a body through space and time, then it can (and must!) be capable of making connections anywhere and everywhere (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The question becomes how and where the entanglement of lines will find a particular confluence that collapses proximity and distance (Rousell et al., 2018a), with each confluence generating another knot in the global meshwork. Walking, from this perspective, becomes co-extensive with any process of life-living along the lines of a near-infinite meshwork: life-lines, drawing-lines, wandering-­ lines, writing-lines, feeling-lines, thinking-lines. Lines of extension, lines of intensity, and lines of virtuality (Deleuze, 1997). Approached in this rhizomatic key, the Mapping A/r/tography project could be considered a global experiment in what it means to ‘walk the meshwork’, both together and apart, across a multiplicity of lines of becoming. Indeed, the idea of walking the meshwork has been a formative proposition in the work leading to this collection and was the name of a symposium organized by Alexandra Lasczik, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-­Knowles, and David Rousell at Southern Cross University in 2015, with Rita Irwin as an international speaker. The contributions to this symposium included a range of discussions and interactive walking propositions that engaged with new materialist conceptualizations of movement (Manning, 2013), place (Massey, 2005), and entanglement (Barad, 2007). As key propositional terms for walking-based practice, these new materialist articulations of walking the meshwork continue to resonate with the rhizomatic a/r/tographic approaches gathered together in this book. Erin Manning’s (2012, 2013, 2016) work on the philosophy of movement provided a significant entry point for these creative engagements with walking, to the extent that movement is no longer associated with displacement (from point to point), but with a durational passage of felt relations in the collective ‘bodying’ of events. The act of walking, in this respect, is immanently creative, intensively felt, and not (just) a matter of physical displacement of bodies. Walking becomes a matter of ‘moving the relation’ across sensing bodies in motion, a speculative practice of “walking-­ with the world: the only kind of walking” (Manning, 2012, pp. 29-30). The work of Doreen Massey, among a number of other ‘more-than-­ human geographers’ (McCormack, 2008, 2013; Whatmore, 2002), has been influential in reconceptualizing place beyond the ‘fallacy of simple location’ critiqued by Whitehead (1978) and Deleuze and Guattari

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(1987). In attending to the ever-shifting affective atmospheres of place and the ‘thrown togetherness’ of spatial relations (Massey, 2005), non-­ representational geographies disrupt conventional notions of place as a static container or backdrop for human experience. By introducing the affective dimensions of the moving body into geography, place is reengaged as a ‘constellation of trajectories’ (Massey, 2007) and vital intermixings of confluence and encounter where humans (amongst numerous other affective agencies) participate in the improvised composition of spatial and temporal worlds. What Massey (2007) terms a ‘global sense of place’ never stands still and must be continuously reinvented through speculative practices of life-living. Walking constitutes a significant practice in this regard, as a technique of affective relation that continuously introduces new patterns of life and movement into places of collective encounter. The concept of entanglement serves as a touchstone for this collection’s engagement with walking, with Barad’s (2007) account of quantum entanglement offering a counterpoint to the botanical figuration of the rhizome discussed earlier. Barad’s engagement with quantum physics helps to both ground and ‘queer’ the notion of entanglement in theories of posthuman performativity and agential realism. Engaged through the diffractive apparatus of quantum physics, the act of walking paradoxically combines a radical nonlocality with a radical inseparability. In performing an agential cut in the nonlocal fabric of spacetimemattering, walking becomes an act of ‘cutting together/apart’ that recalibrates the terms of entanglement according to the specificity of intra-actions that constitute a creative worlding of the real (Barad, 2007). The turn to agential realism in theorizing a/r/tographic walking methods is thus significant in unsettling the ‘comfortable organicism’ that Deleuze and Guattari rallied against in their call to artistic experimentation with life’s ‘inhuman’ potentials (Rousell, 2019; Zepke, 2005). In a similar way that a/r/tographers have leaned into Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with the organic concept of the rhizome, they have also drawn out the poetic, and arguably, even Romantic intimations of their thought as a geophilosophy of nature. This has implications for a/r/tographic scholarship in which walking is engaged as an act of poiesis (Triggs et al., 2014). Protevi (2013) argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s construction of a geophilosophy is intimately linked to “a materialist history sensitive to the earth, a historical geography or geographical history” (p.  43). He describes how the French word terre takes on at least four

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distinctive registers in A Thousand Plateaus, one of which he translates as a ‘gathering point’ for the production of intensive assemblages through the ‘earth-territory (terre-territoire) system of Romanticism’. Perhaps there is a resonance between the Romantic sensitivity to the earth that Protevi (2013) finds in Deleuze and Guattari, and the poetic practices developed by a/r/tographers who attend to the intensive movement of subjectivity through the act of walking. In recent work, Irwin and Lasczik Cutcher (2018) have described these practices through a critical reconceptualization of the figure of the flâneur in relation to the contemporary a/r/tographic scholar. Hallmarks of this a/r/tographic walking approach include its commitment to slowness, close attunement, multimodality, compositional framing, and improvised drift as elements of artistic knowledge creation through intensive poiesis. Scholarly artistic inquiry is engaged at the poetic horizon or limit point of the subject-world relation, an immersion perhaps akin to what Massumi (2011) describes as the “aesthetic appreciation” of events “at no remove from life’s immediacy” (pp. 1–2). Such poetic orientations to walking-based scholarship approach Deleuze’s (1995) challenge of “existing not as a subject but as a work of art” (p. 95), or what Whitehead (1929) elsewhere described as an art of life. They connect everyday acts of walking to an aesthetic education of the senses, refusing the separation of art and life. While the chapters collected in this book demonstrate the geopoetic expansion of a/r/tographic walking inquiry to relatively global proportions, it could be argued that walking has played a part in preserving the novelty of the a/r/tographic approach. One of the dangers of a distinctive methodological platform like a/r/tography is the possibility of routine adoption, inevitably leading to the calcification of living inquiry into a transcendent model to be ‘applied’ across contexts (St. Pierre, 2019). As the chapters in this book attest, walking has the potential to resist the reduction of methodology to a static subject or object of inquiry. Perhaps the question of how to keep a/r/tography fresh is best answered, quite simply, by moving.

1.2   Chapter Overview The collection begins with work from The University of British Columbia, Canada, as Chap. 2. Joanne M. Ursino, Rita L. Irwin, Nicole Lee, Ken Morimoto, and Marzieh Mosavarzadeh write in their chapter ‘Pedagogical Affect and the Curricular Imperative in a Moment of Poesis’ about a

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walking study group that seeks to unsettle and trouble their walking and writing. They do this by purposefully centering Indigenous scholarship in their readings, shifting their ideas and creative propositions toward a focus on time, place, and practice. The a/r/tographic collaborations took unanticipated directions and outcomes, which led to the making and sharing of small art-books. The idiosyncrasies of experience and artwork opened spaces for empathic postures, which, in turn, became a reflection on and with critical scholarship that informs their a/r/tographical walking practices. In Chap. 3, ‘Walking Curricular Paths in the Virtual: The Stanley Parable and Minecraft’, Nicole Lee and Ken Morimoto consider walking that transcends ableist notions of the physical and lean into digital and virtual ‘walks’. The chapter focuses on walking simulators and simulations of walking through aesthetic, a/r/tographic, and contemplative orientations. The enigmatic nature of such exploration games, or environmental narrative games, and their resistance of specific instructions means that players explore the virtual terrain without instrumentalized instructions or prescribed goals, an approach that can be provocative, or alternately, confusing. The authors explore the educative potential of digital walking and how it can activate conceptual and philosophical considerations in personal, critical, intellectual, and affective realms of being and becoming. Chapter 4, ‘Invitation to Walking Inquiry Along the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails: An A/r/tographic Travelogue Re/braided with Walkers’ Inquiries’, has a suite of Japanese authors, namely Koichi Kasahara, Kayoko Komatsu, Satoshi Ikeda, Toshio Ishii, Kazuji Mogi, Takashi Takao, Minako Kayama, and Kaho Kakizaki, who explore the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails. This chapter takes the reader through the World Cultural heritage site that is a well-known Japanese attraction, which has had much attention from tourists in recent years. Despite this, only one of the authors had previously been there. As the authors attest, Japan is an environment rich in history and culture, and therefore, the walking of the Kumano Kodo Trails was an opportunity for the members to reunite the relationships between ‘I’ and ‘we’, and ‘I/we’, along with culture, religion, and history. The next offering in the collection is a visual essay. Visual essays are an important critically aesthetic mode of sharing a/r/tographic inquiry, and Chap. 5 is no exception. Daniel T.  Barney, Corinne Christopherson, Shayne Eliason, Rebecca Lewis, Amber Logan, Amy Ollerton, Kaleb Ostraff, Priscilla Stewart, and Sophia Su, in their chapter, ‘PROPositional

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Walking’, engage in walking research alongside art and educational discourses within an a/r/tographic community of practice. Eight art education university graduate students and their professor used what they refer to as ‘props’—cameras, sketchbooks, audio recording devices, water bladders, and other tools—and experimented with these in creating experiential walks, they assert give rise to new thought, senses, and imaginations. The authors present nine PROPositions that point toward a proposition for a walk, in various locations along with suggested props. Chapter 6, ‘Walking a Square Metre of Territory: An A/r/tographic Appropriation of Everyday Place Through Printmaking’ by Jessica Castillo, Ricardo Marin-Viadel, and Paloma Palau-Pellicer, presents another visual essay. The Spanish researchers share their artmaking inquiry that resulted in a hundred 10 × 10 cm prints taken directly from urban surfaces. The authors assert that the work is an artistic reflection about territory as a teaching device and a learning opportunity about engraving techniques. The project focuses on the urban ground of the streets of the researchers’ neighborhood as an engraving matrix, visually disclosing the way in which daily surroundings influence the construction of identity. It proposes the concept of ‘Displaced Engraving’ as an ‘a/r/tographic technique to develop a direct and sensitive interaction with the urban environment’. The next offering, ‘Pedagogical Bipedalism: By Feet’ by Jun Hu, asserts that walking could have unconsciously set ground for human’s intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic being. In Chap. 7, five pedagogical projects at Hangzhou Normal University of China are shared that employed walking in both a physical and metaphorical sense, in order to theorize walking as meaning making. The projects include ‘Macro Walking on the Silk Road in the A/r/t Field Trip’, ‘Micro Walking in Classroom in the Inter-­generational United4Heritage Project’, ‘Blind Walking for Social Equity of the Visually Impaired’, ‘Walking in the Performance of Light Animation as Juvenile Inmates’ Correction’, and ‘Virtual Walking in the Mosaic Animation as Art Therapy for Autistic Children’s Social Skill Rehabilitation’. These studies conceptualize walking as pedagogical philosophy in the context of a/r/tography. The final chapter, ‘Walking A/r/tography with Youth at Risk: Mapping Movement and Place’, is shared by Alexandra Lasczik, Amy Cutter-­ Mackenzie-­Knowles, Katie Hotko, and Tahlia McGahey. It offers one thread of the Australian branch of the Mapping A/r/tography Project, which includes young people from a secondary school for youth at risk as youth researchers. A participatory research framework was employed, and

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the youth researchers worked with the research team, to work together in a deep mapping of connections, ecologies, and experiences of the world heritage-listed Gondwana Rainforests. This process mobilized affective and material knowings through walkographic inquiries that afforded a unique opportunity to initiate innovative pedagogy and curriculum and practical actions that sought to privilege the agency of young people as researchers. This image-rich chapter explores their mappings and methodologies. This collection provides a snapshot of the various situated inquiries in the Mapping A/r/tography project. It represents a critical mass of contemporary a/r/tography more broadly, and walking inquiry more specifically. A/r/tography began as a hybrid, localized approach that has evolved into an internationally recognized form of artistic practice, pedagogical engagement, and research inquiry (LeBlanc & Irwin, 2019; Triggs & Irwin, 2019). In designing the international project, we embraced movement through walking methods. This offered us opportunities to create the conditions for new forms of learning, teaching, and scholarship as we examined human–land relationships grounded in movement of thought (theory) and body (practice). The chapters in this volume give a taste to the diversity of scholarship that is emerging from this rich environment for experimentation and collaboration.

References Aoki, T. T. (1993). Legitimizing lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 8(3), 255–268. Aoki, T. T. (2005). Spinning inspirited images in the midst of planned and live(d) curricula. In R.  L. Irwin & W.  F. Pinar (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key (pp. 413–423). Lawrence Erlbaum. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum Physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. Bolt, B. (2004). Art beyond representation: The performative power of the image. I.B. Tauris. Bolt, B. (2009). A performative paradigm for the creative arts? Working Papers in Art and Design, 5, Retrieved from: https://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/ pdf_file/0015/12417/WPIAAD_vol5_bolt.pdf

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Boulton-Funke, A., Irwin, R. L., LeBlanc, N., & May, H. (2016). Interventions and Intraventions of Practice Based Research. In P. Burnard, E. Mackinlay, & K.  Powell (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research (pp. 248–258). Routledge. Burke, G. (2013). Immersive art pedagogy: (Re) connecting artist, researcher and teacher (unpublished PhD exegesis). School of Education, Design and Social Context, RMIT, Melbourne. Retrieved from https://researchbank.rmit.edu. au/view/rmit:160566. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. Colombia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997). Essays critical and clinical (M.A.  Greco & D.W.  Smith, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. Routledge/Farmer. Farr Darling, L., & Taylor, T. (2015). Rural landscapes and teacher education in Canada: Exploring the role of place-consciousness in preparing and supporting rural teachers. In T. Falkenberg (Ed.), Handbook of Canadian research in initial teacher education (pp.  245–260). Canadian Association for Teacher Education. Fenwick, T. (2012). Ethics and experiments with art in mobilizing educational research. In T. Fenwick & L. Farrell (Eds.), Knowledge mobilization and educational research: Politics, languages and responsibilities (pp. 142–153). Routledge. Gruenewald, D. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3–12. Ingold, T. (2004). Culture on the ground. Journal of Material Culture, 9(3), 315–340. Ingold, T. (2010). Footprints through the weather-world: Walking, breathing, knowing. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(s1), S121–S139. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge, and description. Routledge. Irwin, R.  L. (2004). A/r/tography: A metonymic metissage. In R.  L. Irwin & A. de Cosson (Eds.), A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry (pp. 27–40). Pacific Educational Press. Irwin, R. L. (2006). Walking to create an aesthetic and spiritual currere. Visual Arts Research., 32(1), 75–82. Irwin, R.  L. (2008). Communities of a/r/tographic practice. In S.  Springgay, R.  L. Irwin, C.  Leggo, & P.  Gouzouasis (Eds.), Being with a/r/tography (pp. 71–80). Sense. Irwin, R.  L. (2013). Becoming a/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 54(3), 198–215.

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Irwin, R. L., & Lasczik Cutcher, A. (2018). Editorial: Walking and lingering as flâneur. In A. Lasczik Cutcher & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), The flâneur and education research: A metaphor for knowing, being ethical, and new data production (pp. xxvii–xx). Palgrave Macmillan. Irwin, R. L., LeBlanc, N., Ryu, J. Y., & Belliveau, G. (2018). A/r/tography as living inquiry. In P. Leavey (Ed.), The handbook of arts based research (pp. 37–53). Guildford Press. Irwin, R. L., & Ricketts, K. (2013). Living inquiry: An evolution of questioning and questing. In C. Stout (Ed.), Teaching and learning emergent research methodologies in art education (pp. 65–76). National Art Education Association. Kind, S. (2006). Of stones and silences: Storying the trace of the other in the autobiographical and textile text of art/teaching. Unpublished dissertation. University of British Columbia. Lasczik Cutcher, A., & Irwin, R. L. (2017). Walkings-through paint: A c/a/r/ tography of slow scholarship. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 1, 1–9. LeBlanc, N., & Irwin, R. L. (2019). A/r/tography. In G. Noblit (Ed.), Oxford encyclopedia of qualitative research methods in education (pp.  1–21). Oxford University Press. MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. MacDougall, D., Irwin, R.  L., Boulton, A., LeBlanc, N., & May, H. (2018). Encountering research as creative practice: Participants giving voice to the research. In A.  Cutcher & L.  Knight (Eds.), Arts-research-education: Connections and directions (pp. 31–60). Springer. Madrid-Manrique, M. (2014). Creating audiovisual participatory narratives: A/r/tography and inclusivity. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Granada, Granada, Spain. Manning, E. (2012). Relationscapes: Movement, art, philosophy. MIT Press. Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage. Massey, D. (2007). World city. Polity. Massumi, B. (2011). Semblance and Event: Activist philosophy and the occurrent arts. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. McCormack, D. P. (2008). Geographies for moving bodies: Thinking, dancing, spaces. Geography Compass, 2(6), 1822–1836. McCormack, D. (2013). Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces. Duke University Press. Muff, K. (2014). The collaboratory: A co-creative stakeholder engagement process for solving complex problems. Greenleaf. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Kind, S., & Kocher, L. L. M. (2017). Encounters with materials in early childhood education. Routledge.

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Pinar, W. F. (2009). The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service. Routledge. Pinar, W. F. (2012). The character of curriculum studies: Bildung, currere, and the recurring question of the subject. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. F., & Irwin, R. L. (Eds.). (2005). Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki. Lawrence Erlbaum. Pink, S., Hubbard, P., O’Neil, M., & Radley, A. (2010). Walking across disciplines: From ethnography to arts practice. Visual Studies, 25(1), 1–7. Protevi, J. (2013). Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. University of Minnesota Press. Rousell, D. (2019). Inhuman forms of life: On art as a problem for post-­qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(7), 887–908. Rousell, D., Cutcher, A., & Irwin, R. (2018a). Making-Lines: Movement, affect and aesthetic causality in arts-based educational research. In K. Snepvangers & S. Davis (Eds.), Embodied and walking pedagogies engaging the visual domain: Research cocreation and practice. Common Ground Publishing. Springgay, S., Irwin, R.  L., Leggo, C., & Gouzouasis, P. (Eds.). (2008). Being with a/r/tography. Sense. Springgay, S., Irwin, R.  L., & Wilson Kind, S. (2005). A/r/tography as living inquiry through art and text. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(6), 897–912. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. (2017). A transmaterial approach to walking methodologies: Embodiment, affect, and a sonic art performance. Body and Society, 1, 1–32. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. (2019). Walking methodologies in a more-than-­ human-world: WalkingLab. Routledge. St. Pierre, E. A. (2019). Post qualitative inquiry in an ontology of immanence. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), 3–16. Triggs, V., & Irwin, R. L. (2019). Pedagogy and the a/r/tographic invitation. In R. Hickman, J. Baldacchino, K. Freedman, E. Hall, & N. Meager (Eds.), The International encyclopedia of art and design education (pp.  1–16). John Wiley & Sons. Triggs, V., Irwin, R. L., & Leggo, C. (2014). Walking art: Sustaining ourselves as arts educators. Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art, 3(1), 21–34. Truman, S., & Springgay, S. (2015). The primacy of movement in research-­ creation: New materialist approaches to art research and pedagogy. In E. Tyson & M. J. Laverty (Eds.), Art’s teaching, teaching’s art (pp. 151–164). Springer. Vannini, P. (2015). Non-representational methodologies. Routledge. Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid geographies: Natures, cultures, spaces. Sage. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The function of reason. Princeton University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality. The Free Press. Zepke, S. (2005). The abstract machine: Art and ontology in Deleuze and Guattari. Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Pedagogical Affect and the Curricular Imperative in a Moment of Poesis Joanne M. Ursino, Rita L. Irwin, Nicole Lee, Ken Morimoto, and Marzieh Mosavarzadeh

Abstract  This collaborative research chapter is based on a retreat of an a/r/tographic walking study group at The University of British Columbia. In an unfolding commitment to unsettle our collective walking and writing practice, we trouble everyday ways of working together. This includes centering Indigenous scholarship in our reading practice, and shifting the intention of our walk and creative propositions to a conceptual framing that addresses time, place and making. The reading, walk, a/r/tographic fieldnotes, subsequent making practice and writing took unexpected turns and led to a variation on themes as well as group art sharing and the creation of small art-books. We continue to story the day’s events as we retrace our steps and write with the artefacts made in encounter and unfolding (idio)synchronistic tracings. In our process, we propose J. M. Ursino (*) • R. L. Irwin • N. Lee • K. Morimoto • M. Mosavarzadeh Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking with A/r/tography, Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_2

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propositions from which we may learn to see from the points of view of other people. In an a/r/tographic reflection we share our unique perspectives of the experience in a return to the scholarship that informs our walk and making practices. Keywords  A/r/tography • Land as pedagogy • Book-making • Affect • Poesis • Walking • Learning from Indigenous scholarship

2.1   Preamble

This work invites a deepening of our understanding of what it means to study, teach and work as settlers on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) People. The mapping a/r/tography walking study group comprises graduate students alongside our doctoral supervisor in the field of arts-based research and education.1 This collaborative research chapter is based on an a/r/tographic retreat at The University of British Columbia held on April 15, 2019. In an ongoing effort to unsettle2 our collective walking and writing practice, we trouble everyday ways of working together. In this moment, it includes centering Indigenous scholarship in our reading practice (Simpson, 2014), and shifting the intention of our walk to a conceptual framing that addresses time, place and making. We continue to story the day’s events as we retrace our steps and write with the artifacts made in encounter. In our process, we attend to Donna Haraway’s invitation of “the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view” (1988, p.  583). In an a/r/tographical reflection we share our unique perspectives of the experience in a return to 1  We are grateful to Blake Smith, a member of the UBC Art Education graduate community for her participation and insights both on the day of the retreat and in the formative stages of the work of the study group. In addition, we wish to thank Larissa Bezerra, visiting international research student (VIRS—UBC) from Federal University of Ceara (UFC— Brazil) for her comments during our editing process. The work of the Mapping A/r/tography Study Group draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. 2  The deliberate choice of language: to unsettle, draws upon the writing of Paulette Regan (2011), in particular her text: Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada.

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the scholarship that informs our walk and making practices (Springgay et al., 2008). We shape our intentions together and then take turns sharing the direction of a specific event. It was my threefold suggestion to first read the writing of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2014), Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.3 In coming-to-­ know, Simpson (2014) fosters a process that is “learner-led and profoundly spiritual in nature”, and prefaces her writing on learning in-relation “both from and with the land”—the land “is both context and process” (p. 7). Second was to walk and document our singular experiences along the Main Mall at The University of British Columbia from the Martha Piper Plaza to the Reconciliation Pole, and return to the Faculty of Education. The third moment was a pivot from the singular to the plural, where we shared our pages documenting our walk and each made a book in community. This was “a deliberate act—to uncouple from the ordinary” thereby creating an opportunity to share my book arts practice with my colleagues and “to move deliberately into what can be called an aesthetic space, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, where all sorts of things become revealed that the cotton wool of habit has for so long obscured” (Greene, 2001, p. 659). This a/r/tographic retreat continues to be generative as we reflect on both the imperative(s) of this work and our relationality: how might we “carry the responsibility for generating meaning” within our own lives, engaging our “minds, bodies and spirits in a practice of generating meaning” (Simpson, 2014, p. 11), in our own making and to do so with and on Indigenous land? This questioning is resonant with a/r/tography, which as a “practice does not situate artist, teacher, or researcher to act as a fixed symbolic foundation of meaning for art-making, researching, or teaching but rather as an invitation to move into the teaching that the world compels as we respond with sensate learning selves” (Triggs & Irwin, 2019, p. 2). In facilitating this effort, I am reminded that “how we make sense of the world is through creating meaning. As we create meaning, we create ourselves. We negotiate our identities and we increasingly understand that this is a lifelong undertaking” (Macintyre Latta, 2013, p. 104). 3  The deliberate choice of language: to unsettle, draws upon the writing of Paulette Regan (2011), in particular her text: Unsettling the settler within: Indian Residential Schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada.

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This inquiry continues to nourish, as each of us “thinks through making” (Ingold, 2013, p. 6). We think through making in the singular and plural, in the material and virtual, through theory and practice and, each of us thinks from and with—on Indigenous land. Our making, in this instance the pages, books and for some of us photographs, as well as our writing, becomes data that we use “to become more humane and to connect with ourselves and others at a deeper level” (Lupi & Posavec, 2016, p. xi). It is in this regard perhaps that Simpson’s (2014) writing is most provocative for us—stating that meaning is not derived “through content or data, or even theory in a western context, which by nature is decontextualized knowledge, but through a compassionate web of interdependent relationships that are different and valuable because of that difference” (p. 11). The following is a piecing together of our texts that make evident the relationality of our experiences both on this retreat and in our coming-to-­ know through a/r/tographical fieldwork and writing in community, which offers an opportunity “to creatively document understandings of movement and matter as process” (Rousell et al., 2020, p. 1824). It marks our movement through moments in time, in relation, in place and in poesis—creating in turn vibrant tensions. The reading of our voices is in relation with each other, the images, the land and our making of both object and ourselves. The invitation to the reader is in the turn of pages of the small books that we each stitched and held in our hands. It is not intended to be seamless, rather the particularities of each of our experiences is what offers both the complexity and the possibilities that continue to be generative in our a/r/tographical work together. It is purposefully fragmented and quilt-­ like: a layering that complicates the linearity through both text and image. As Tim Ingold (2013) shares, it “is not to explicate the world, to provide the information that would amount to a complete specification, obviating the need for would-be practitioners to inquire for themselves. It is rather to trace a path that others can follow” (Ingold, 2013, p. 110). It is in this regard that scholarship on weak theory is of note: “it’s a composition—a poesis—and one that literally can’t be seen as a simple repository of systemic effects imposed on an innocent world but has to be traced through the generative modalities of impulses, daydreams, ways of relating, distractions, strategies, failures, encounters, and worldings of all kinds” (Stewart, 2008, p. 73).

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The images both compliment and offer a counternarrative to the text. In some instances, they expose what we have yet to articulate in our unsettling: coming-to-know differently and to allow ourselves to become different. The images were gathered at the retreat, and upon my return to campus on May 19, 2020. The third are a series of pages from the book I made at the retreat—these were taken in June 2020 after our group discussed the (in)significance of the books as an artifact. The images are integral with the text, in that they are “a launchpad, a teaching, for further potential movement. We see with an image and through the image as we move forward in it” (Triggs & Irwin, 2019, p. 2). Between the fragmented texts, images and endnotes, the narrative reads as if we walk4 with each other—backward and forward again—in a return that sustains unresolved questioning: “opening onto a something, it maps a thicket of connections between vague yet forceful and affecting elements” (Stewart, 2008, p. 72). I felt a particular commitment to both the importance of the walk in troubling our practices on Indigenous land—in relation to specific site markers on the university campus—as well as providing an opportunity to share my making practices with the study group by storying our walk in the binding of books to mark and reflect upon the event. The significance of the walk along the Main Mall between University Boulevard and Agronomy Road is a return to thinking historically alongside my experiences as a former employee of UBC in the then Equity Office working in the field of human rights and employment equity and, now as a graduate student in Faculty of Education.

In much of the early literature of a/r/tography, the identities of artist, researcher and teacher/learners were highlighted in an effort to embrace multiple identities and to be affected by what that could mean to one’s theorizing and practicing. Over the last two decades, the emphasis on process has become ever more important, giving more attention to 4  We walked on the day of the retreat and we continue to walk the path of meaning-making and knowledge creation that has unfolded since. On the significance of walking alongside one another, Ingold (2013), writes that “while conversing, as they often did, companions would rarely make immediate eye-to-eye contact, at most inclining their heads slightly towards one another” (p.  106). Alongside each other we walked in the singular/plural— side-by-side we created our books and, each in our turns share our thinking through our writing. This structure of the text is a continuation of our a/r/tographic inquiry and documentation. While Ingold’s reference (Ingold, 2013) is to the sociable, perhaps this offering in walking and making—speaks to the nature of relational scholarship.

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“materiality, affects, and bodily capacities rather than human subjects with stable identities” (Healy & Mulcahy, 2020, p.1). While a/r/tography never envisioned stable identities, it was often interpreted as such. This essay expands upon the pedagogic affects we experienced as a community of a/r/tographers—in moments of poesis and committed to inquiry, and it invites us to think about the curricular imperative(s) of our future work.

Through reflecting on the walking and bookmaking activities our a/r/tography study group have engaged in together in a communitybuilding retreat, I theorize on notions of collaboration, reciprocity, and respect in communities of a/r/tographic practice. Irwin (2004) writes that “[t]heory as a/r/tography creates an imaginative turn by theorizing or explaining phenomena through aesthetic experiences that integrate knowing, doing, and making” (p. 31). Our work at the retreat embraces Simpson’s (2014) idea that theory “is generated from the ground up and its power stems from its living resonance within individuals and collectives” (p.  7). Our work, which involves walking with (in)visible others, discussing ideas, stitching books, and sharing meals, demonstrates how theory “is woven within kinetics, spiritual presence and emotion, it is contextual and relational. It is intimate and personal, with individuals themselves holding the responsibilities for finding and generating meaning within their own lives” (Simpson, 2014, p. 7).

Here, there is a call for becoming singular plural through the processes of becoming a/r/tographers together and apart, while attending to ways of “becoming-intensity, becoming-movement, and becoming-event” (Irwin, 2013, p. 200). We walked together while apart. Our togetherness was in reading an article (Simpson, 2014) before the walk, following one mutual walking proposition, a shared starting point, the destination and return, the thirty-minute duration of the walk, and becoming a/r/tographers. This togetherness was about “being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence” (Nancy, 2000, p. 3, emphasis in original). We also shared “(1) a commitment to inquiry; (2) a commitment to a way of being in the world; (3) a commitment to negotiating personal engagement in a community of belonging; and (4) a commitment to creating practice that troubles and addresses difference” (see Irwin, 2008, as cited in Irwin, 2013, p. 201).

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2.2   Proposition 1: Go for a Walk and Document the Walk A thirty-minute walk between two significant place markers on the Main Mall: The Martha Piper Plaza and the Reconciliation Pole and the making of a/r/tographical fieldnotes—to keep and to share with each other (Fig. 2.1).

The day started with Joanne suggesting that we walk from the Martha Piper Plaza to the Reconciliation Pole because this main artery of UBC campus meant a lot to her and she wanted to share the experience with us. We were challenged with how we can bring something back to share from our walks. After fumbling a while, we decided to each create six pieces of documentation. I embraced spontaneity in my walk, which felt aimless at the time. Looking back, however, I ended up lingering around spots where I shared moments of connection with others. My body instinctively knew where to pause.

Our walking apart was about our distinct ways of attuning ourselves to our surroundings and moving our bodies in the space, our ways of slowing down/pausing/contemplating/making encounters/thinking with fragments of the walk, the multiple and diverse layers of identities and stories which we carried with ourselves, how each of us held a certain disposition toward our shared walking proposition, our ways of “becoming sentiment to the world’s work, bodies, rhythms, and ways of being in noise and lights and space” (Nancy, 1997; also cited in Stewart, 2011, p. 445), as

Fig. 2.1  The Main Mall ground, looking south from the Martha Piper Fountain and at the sky (May 19, 2020). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino

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well as the diverse recording objects we carried with ourselves as companions.

In our walk together apart, I did not quite make it to the Reconciliation Pole. Along the way, I had become enamored by the slow saunter of the clouds across the sky, compelling me to make maps of transient things that filled the air, things like the movement of clouds and passing conversations. These were relatively accurate maps that reported on what was, where the clouds were or what words were in the air at a very specific point in time, at least to the best of my perception and ability to interpret and transcribe these things into two-dimensional form. However, despite their accuracy, these maps were full of inaccuracies. The contours of clouds are not static, so the result is a drawing of cloud-like forms that are not the clouds I see, and if somebody were to take these maps out and try to follow them, they would not see the same clouds or hear the same words.

I began drawing the fountain in the Martha Piper Plaza because I took my very first photograph on campus there in 2015. I then immersed myself in walking the full length of the path. Placing a pen on a page as I moved, the marks reflected my rhythmic pace—the ink would pool each time I took a step (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2  The Engineer’s Cairn and the ground at the base (April 15, 2019). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino

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The Engineer Cairn, midway between the Martha Piper Plaza and the Reconciliation Pole, was painted in the colours of the most modern version of the Pride flag: adding black and brown and the colours of the transgender flag. The cairn is usually painted white with the letter E—in bright red—and, has a history of note. It has been brushed in prank, protest and provocation. A lightning rod; or perhaps, barometer of the work on equity and inclusion on campus. I return to Simpson (2014), and her writing on teachings—“both individually generated and collective” (p.  13); here I acknowledge campus encounters and conversations that have taken place for over a decade—with two Spirit students, staff and faculty that have shifted my understanding of being queer. And, there is contradiction in my gesture to mark this moment as I gather sparkly, broken-­off pieces of cement crumbled on the ground at the base. One for each of us: a reminder—a taking for giving—a touchstone of my desire to connect this work to our work (Fig. 2.3).

Fig. 2.3  Campus map at the intersection of the Main Mall and Agronomy Road (looking north), the Reconciliation Pole, and a handmade sign calling attention to the Wet’suwet’en protests at the base of the Reconciliation Pole (May 19, 2020). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino

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Our walk down a portion of the Main Mall at The University of British Columbia leads southward from our Faculty of Education near the Martha Piper Plaza to the Reconciliation Pole, a recently added, 17-meter red cedar totem pole carved by James Hart, Haida Hereditary Chief and master carver. As a country, we are addressing the profound and harmful impact of decades of residential schools on Indigenous peoples. The Reconciliation Pole is a symbol of the university’s commitment to confronting injustice and to reimagining our relationship as a learning community with Indigenous peoples. Walking southward on Main Mall, we are given choices for the directions we might take. Recognizing the Pole and the stories it shares has pedagogic affect not only in its Haida history but also in its prominent placement in our learning environment. On my walk, on this particular day, I was struck by how little I still knew of Indigenous history, the stories of this land, and the stories of all the relations experienced on this land. The pedagogic affect is that I still have much to learn in this place I live and work.

Reaching the Reconciliation Pole (2017), I sketched a few elements from the pole on a third page. The pole tells the story of the residential school system (1800s-1996) in Canada and the journey toward reconciliation.

The raising of the Reconciliation Pole on April 1, 2017 was profound: I attended the ceremony with my sister who was visiting from Ontario— and we speak of it still. I return to and story this place when family and friends visit Vancouver. I share with the study group that I am critical of myself for not offering a deeper consideration of reconciliation and decolonization. We engage in a conversation to find ways to do so.

On a fourth page, I made a frottage at the Sopron Gate (2001), an ethno-cultural monument celebrating the legacy of Sopron foresters who fled the Hungarian Revolution and found a place in the Faculty of Forestry. On a fifth, I made a frottage on the benches where I shared conversations with colleagues and friends. On a sixth, I sat down on the bench and listed all the sounds I can hear. Noticing the shadows cast by the branches of the trees near me, I placed a page on the ground and traced them. I playfully embossed a page on the brick path too. Admittedly, I let curiosity take me

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into some nearby buildings where I lost track of time and forgot to return for lunch.

I began to ponder about the meaning of acts and artefacts of marking contours of amorphous things, but running out of time, I turned back to rejoin the group.

The walking proposition brings about an invitation to follow “lines of becoming entangled in becoming-event” (Irwin, 2013, p. 207). The proposition that we followed was meant to entangle our singular stories together, and to intertwine/complicate the layers of our stories, as “becoming-­event does not reside in a single personal encounter: it resides in a multiplicity of events that are social and collective” (Irwin, 2013, p. 207). This is my way of theorizing through contextual and relational moments of walking and making together and apart. Each of us returned to the studio with six pages to put on display so that each co-walker could choose one page from every other person’s collection in order to make their books. This act of giving “opened the way to conceptualizing becoming within the multiplicities of our work” (Irwin, 2013, p. 202).

2.3   Proposition 2: Select One Page from Each Person and Use Them to Make a Book Sharing our fieldnotes with each other to create an assemblage and bind our books (Fig. 2.4).

Fig. 2.4  Sharing our six individual fieldnotes and found objects (April 15, 2019). Photo credit: Marzieh Mosavarzadeh

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The book art proposition that engaged our a/r/tographical fieldwork, was an opportunity to amplify Eve Sedgwick’s (2011) observations with regard to the “second to second negotiations” of working with our materials alongside her three-fold questioning: “What will it let me do?” and “What does it want to do?” with “What is that I want to do?” (p. 83). This engages each of us in the complexities of roles/identities—and how what we as educators facilitate and encourage actually creates entanglements that determine phenomena such as ‘object’, ‘performance’, ‘work’, ‘art’, ‘craft’, ‘student’, ‘teacher’, ‘professor’, and so on. The object, in this case the books we are about to make, begins to take on a life of its own, and “this influences how we think about making art and teaching and learning about art” (Garber, 2019, p.  11). In equal measure, I check discipline with desire—in an effort to not overfill the space: allowing for others to come up against their own expectation and experience in the precision of the crease to page and tension in the draw of thread.

After lunch, Joanne shared her bookmaking practice with us to pull the pages together. We laid out our work and took turns selecting pages for our books. It was difficult for me to let go of these representational fragments of experience in this process of structured sharing. Simultaneously, I did not want my pages to be selected last as if they were not wanted. The pages I obtained excited me but also demanded that I incorporate others’ experiences into “my” documentation. The act necessitated that I made space for others in my reality. However, I could not access the experiences for which the pages served to represent. They remained with the other despite my physical possession of the documentation.

Seventy-six digital photos of sewer hatches that I saw on my walk were saved on the camera’s memory card; five blank pages, and one page filled with my handwriting, which held my fragmented thoughts/data/reflections/feelings, conceived through the experience of a walk. These were gifts to my study group with whom I walked.

Sharing pages, we collected assemblages of our walks, together—yet apart. In these books, our capacity to realize our co-implication of our relations became profound intraactions (Barad, 2007). We were not separate but entangled without clear identities. We were affecting and being affected through shared power relations. We were materializing stories as we encountered other stories. This is the power of the pedagogy of affect.

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I printed six of the photographs that I took from the sewer hatches using the laser jet printer in the studio. Then I tore the one page filled with my handwriting into two pieces slowly, watching how the words became displaced. I put one of the pieces on the table and tore the other half into three pieces. Then I put these three pieces on the table and did the same with the other half.

Together, we shared our creations, giving and receiving, making something new (Fig. 2.5).

After the walk, we made six books together and apart. Our togetherness was in coming back from the walk with six pages of text and images (drawings, sketches, handmade maps, photographs and found objects), sharing the process of making the books from start to finish, learning along with each other, gifting our pages (fragments of our walks) to each other, watching and following each other’s hands in the process of making, sharing and using the art supplies which Joanne provided for us and, learning how to stitch our pages/stories to one another (Fig. 2.6).

Retreating from our independent walks and moving into a creative space, we embraced affects and relationality as we shared our drawings, notes, rubbings and gathered objects. Creating handmade books together, side-by-side around an oblong table, I experienced an affirmative ethics (Braidotti, 2018) where our ontology was a way of being with one another, where we agreed to enter into a continuous negotiation between and among all of our relations, including the non-human and the environment.

Our making apart was in choosing the types of papers that we wanted to include in our book, arranging/juxtaposing the pages/stories, our

Fig. 2.5  Creating our handmade books around the table (April 15, 2019). Photo credit: Marzieh Mosavarzadeh

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Fig. 2.6  A turn of pages with one of the handmade books compiled from the shared fieldnotes (June 2020). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino

willingness to add more pages in addition to the five other pages which we chose from the collection of gifted pages, choosing/making our covers, and picking the colours of the linen thread and beads used to bind our book. The process of making the book became an opportunity to re/connect with the co-walkers and their stories of the walk. The book itself also carries a potential to become an opening to a collection of moments of walking and making the book as a collective; to access the “experiences that are multilayered, sensory, and affective […] as a line of becoming-­ intensity” (Irwin, 2013, p. 204).

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Binding the pages together did not make other stories more mine. Storying the pages felt transgressional because it continues to be another’s story to tell. I am simply charged with being the keeper of the page. Correspondingly, I am undeniably implicated in others’ narratives should they decide to work with my pages in their book, though they may encounter similar apprehensions.

The six fragments of my handwritten text held potential for meanings to be made in companionship with my photographs, along with the rest of the pages of my co-walkers’ books. In the process of walking the path and making the books with my colleagues, the rhizomatic connections were constantly being re/made. In this process, each of us was in a continuous state of movement; movement with the self and with stories of others. We were becoming-movement through the entanglement of our stories (Irwin, 2013, p. 209).

Clouds of my tracing—given. Where these tracings of the untraceable were clouded further, no longer mine, if they ever had been, bound inside their books or our books. I am not sure which (Fig. 2.7).

Fig. 2.7  Curating the handmade books at the end of the day (April 15, 2019). Photo credit: Marzieh Mosavarzadeh

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The curation is a performance of sorts: a familiar side-by-side stance—a linear progression, then a nesting of the books one stacked on top of the next, I then place them in conversation with each other in a circle and, then switch them around—more open to our gaze: a subject-object turning of spine, signature, image and text. In this instance, the playing is a beholding in which the “movement foregrounds the materiality of thought, imagination, and poetics as the concrescence of bodily experience” (Rousell et al., 2020, p. 1824). I am pushing against my own discomfort and feeling of tentativeness or perhaps uncertainty—in relation to the objects just created. Poesis in performance moves to a performativity of desired relationality. Poesis is fleeting—this text is still to come—to offer some measure of my own (mis)attunement. I remind myself now that a “moment of poesis is a mode of production in an unfinished world” (Stewart, 2008, p. 77).

The resultant books seem to have become our collective documentations of our collective experience, a/r/tographic fieldwork fraught with tensions around ownership, access, ethics of storytelling, stewardship and meanings of respect (Welch, 2009). The books seemed to belong together somehow, however instead, we each took one home.

Now the pages of my walk are living in six books. Parts of my walk— parts of me—are out there in connection with parts of others, creating a new assemblage of stories that are not linear anymore. The books are bodies that hold the fragments of our stories together while keeping them apart.

Irwin (2004) suggests that “a/r/tographic inquiry does not set out to answer introductory research questions but rather to posit questions of inquiry that evolve over time” (p. 77). The tensions remain unresolved as I look back upon this experience, ‘my’ book, and images of everyone’s books. What has changed is that I can now articulate them better. The tensions provoke a series of questions: Whose books are these? What do/ can I do with ‘my’ book? What permissions do I need to work it? What do the books document? Whose documentation is this? By extension, whose story is this? What is the difference between owning the physical pages of a story and owning the right to tell a story? Who gets to tell a story with implicated others? Who controls the narrative? What does it mean to share a walk and an experience with others?

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2.4   Conclusion and the Turn of Page

I managed to complete the walk on my own at a later date, on a clear day without any clouds to distract me from the path set before me. During the anti-pipeline protest and demonstrations to mark the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, the Reconciliation Pole that awaited me then was quite different from the one that would have greeted me had I arrived there in the first walk—material traces of pain and grief lingering from the demonstrations. Though starkly distinct in tone and context from the first walk, this too seemed to be a moment and marking of cloud-like things, real yet somehow beyond my grasp. With no one to share, I quickly took a few photos and returned the way I had come, pondering about reconciliation and peace with the anticipation of returning to these questions once again in community. (Mapping Clouds) Return, Reconciliation and Other Re-words Return to reconciliation and Resolutions retroubled. Reminders restless Reflect with resolve Repair and reparations. Remaking retellings, Representations representing Renegotiations of renderings and Revolution. Remember reconciliation. Apart together due to COVID-19 campus closures, we are not able to revisit the walk as planned. Instead, I found myself looking to trace the contours of return and reconciliation and other words that start with ‘re’. In place of the return denied is another return, different yet full of its own provocations and promises that decentre the weight of agential relation from the subject to the object of return, enabling a kind of receptive attunement. Perhaps these moments of return to the Reconciliation Pole are able to offer so much in becoming a focal point of that backward glance that “as an act in a moment, not planned in advance, but rather aroused by a curiosity piqued in passing… nonetheless opens the possibility for something to happen, as it reconfigures the object of curiosity that triggered it in the first place” (O’Donoghue, 2015, p.364). In between

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the pages of return and reconciliation, I am left with lingering questions longing for answers suspended that open new questions and insights.

While this a/r/tographical retreat may have been one day, it continues to offer a call to pause and an opening for reflection both outward and inward, where the questioning of Haraway (1988), and how we should position ourselves “in order to see, in this situation of tensions, resonances, transformations, resistances, and complicities?” (p.  588), gives way for grace, attunement and authenticity in this work. This includes the images of our collective making—alongside the handmade book, where it is possible to recall the events of the day and their impact (Fig. 2.8). The taking of “images in art practice is a way of sensitizing ourselves to noticing the making of images that moves us through the world” (Triggs & Irwin, 2019, p. 5). O’Donoghue (2019) writes: The types of thinking, remembering, and imagining that the making of a photograph invites can potentially enlarge what one notices, thinks, considers and explains about one’s experience of becoming oneself in place and in the company of others. (p. 83)

In many ways, the engagement afterward offers a new telling. In this regard, the “aesthetic play holds significances”—arguably in relation, in making, through object and image and, in its resonance and beholding which “restores life within learning” (Macintyre Latta, 2013, p. 109).

Our retreat, with the gathering of six study group members, was a remarkable moment of singularity as it was “the coming together of

Fig. 2.8  Pavement markings on the Main Mall at Agronomy Road (May 19, 2020). Photo credit: Joanne Ursino

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singulars” (Irwin, 2008, p. 72). In many ways, it marked the beginning of getting to know one another and what is important to each of us, as we learn how to share, work and play together/alongside; negotiate differences; and create sustainable partnerships. There are inevitable tensions in every group dynamic, and we remain committed to discerning practices that honour each member’s work, ideas, input and lived experiences. Much of this work is about finding a place where “a complicated conversation in which both separation and belonging together exist in generative tension” (Pinar, 2005, p. 84). Such spaces offer fertile ground on which the generous reciprocity of sharing can happen, particularly when supported by a mutual respect for clearly communicated boundaries that involve rigorous citational practices, thoughtful consideration of process, and veracious acknowledgements of the lineages of ideas. Understanding how to adjust tensions to a generative spot requires attentive listening and authentic expression, and it is a lifelong learning process that I continue to engage in.

For our study group gathering, affect lies predominantly between and among those participating, and with all of the relations we experienced. Affect is always relational existing between affecting and being affected (Kwek & Seyfert, 2018). Pedagogic affects exist in multiple relations, and for our inquiry, we came to realize that these relations might be seen as human–human, human–materials, and human–environment.

Garber (2019) reminds us, “In art education, outcomes of making (often involving the senses) may result in a handsome object—be it a sculpture, weaving, pot, or a painting—as well as the development of skill or procedural knowledge. But for many educators, particularly in schools, these objects are not the real goal. Rather, they are focused on the learners and what they gain from the interactions of making” (p. 13). In attending to our work as educational researchers, we mark the materiality of this moment (Triggs & Irwin, 2019), our relationality (Irwin, 2017), in and through walking and, recognize that this is an opening of both our willingness and “commitment to seek attunement” (O’Donoghue, 2019, p. 104). The curricular importance of this moment is an opportunity to both uncouple and entwine the relationality of our scholarship unfolding that is resonant with place and land: “not only physical but cultural, often spiritual, and certainly historical, haunted by what happened (t)here, threatened by what may be. … Obligation requires action;

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it involves duty” (Pinar, 2019, p.  19). This is foundational to thinking both with and from the land (Simpson, 2014). As our work in mapping a/r/tography and a/r/tographical fieldwork unfolds, we are challenged to move with the call that “the academy must make a conscious decision to become a decolonizing force in the intellectual lives of Indigenous peoples by joining us in dismantling settler colonialism and actively protecting the source of our knowledge—Indigenous land” (Simpson, 2014, p.22). I suggest that we further trouble our work with the article ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’ by Tuck and Yang (2012). I am grateful for the opportunity to create, learn, think, teach and walk with others, to acknowledge that I do so on Indigenous land—alongside scholarship that moves us in a good way (Simpson, 2011, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2012). In turning the pages of my handmade book from the retreat, I come upon the question of another: “Whose land is this?”. This question in its pedagogical affect and curricular imperative is contained in a moment of poesis; the connectedness of teaching and learning in a/r/tography offers a “space that starts somewhere [anywhere and everywhere] and moves [us] to another space [not already determined]” (Irwin, 2017, p.  94). Reflecting on this retreat, its propositions, the a/r/tographical documentation, relationality and threading of fragmented texts and images prompts a consideration of the criticality of mapping a/r/tography and walking alongside each other with the integration of Indigenous scholarship and decolonial praxis.

References Barad, K.  M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2018). Affirmative ethics: Posthuman subjectivity, and intimate scholarship: A conversation with Rosi Braidotti. In K.  J. Strom, T.  Mills, & A.  Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship: Critical posthuman methodological perspectives in education (pp. 112–118). Emerald. Garber, E. (2019). Objects and New Materialisms: A Journey Across Making and Living With Objects. Studies in Art Education, 60(1), 7–21. https://doi. org/10.1080/00393541.2018.1557454 Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. Teachers College Press. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Retrieved 14, November, 2015 from http://doi.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.2307/ 3178066

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Healy, S. & Mulcahy, D. (2020). Pedagogic affect: assembling an affirming ethics. Pedagogy, Culture & Society. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1468136 6.2020.1768581 Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archeology, art and architecture. Routledge. Irwin, R.  L. (2004). A/r/tography: A metonymic métissage. In R.  L. Irwin & A. de Cosson (Eds.), A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry (pp. 27–40). Pacific Educational Press. Irwin, R.  L. (2008). Communities of a/r/tographic practice. In S.  Springgay, R.  L. Irwin, C.  Leggo, & P.  Gouzouasis (Eds.), Being with a/r/tography (pp. 71–80). Sense. Irwin, R.  L. (2013). Becoming a/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 54(3), 198–215. Irwin, R.  L. (2017). Maple Jazz: An artist’s rendering of currere. In M.  Doll (Ed.), The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies: A festschrift in honor of William F. Pinar (pp. 93–102). Routledge. Kwek, D. H. B., & Seyfert, R. (2018). Affect matters: Strolling through heterological ecologies. Public Culture, 30(1), 35–59. https://doi.org/10.121 5/08992363-­4189155 Lupi, G., & Posavec, S. (2016). Dear data. Princeton Architectural Press. Macintyre Latta, M. (2013). Curricular conversation: Play is the (missing) thing. Routledge. Nancy, J. L. (1997). The sense of the world. University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J. L. (2000). Being singular plural. Stanford University Press. O’Donoghue, D. (2015). Art, scholarship and research: A backward glance. In M.  Fleming, L.  Bresler, & J.  O’Toole (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of the arts and education (pp. 364–377). Routledge. O’Donoghue, D. (2019). Learning to live in boys’ schools: Art-led understandings of masculinities. Routledge. Pinar, W. F. (2005). “A lingering note”: An introduction to the collected works of Ted T. Aoki. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 1–85). Lawrence Erlbaum. Pinar, W.  F. (2019). Moving images of eternity: George Grant’s critique of time, teaching, and Technology. University of Ottawa Press. Regan, P. (2011). Unsettling the settler within: Indian Residential Schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. UBC Press. Rousell, D., Lasczik Cutcher, A., Cook, P., & Irwin, R. L. (2020). Propositions for an environmental arts pedagogy: A/r/tographic experimentations with movement and materiality [e-book version]. In A.  Cutter-MacKenzie, K. Malone, & E. B. Hacking (Eds.), Research Handbook on Childhood Nature: Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research (pp. 1815–1843). Springer. Sedgwick, E.  K. (2011). In J.  Goldberg (Ed.), The Weather in Proust. Duke University Press.

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Simpson, L. (2011). Dancing on our turtle’s back. Arbeiter Ring. Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25. Springgay, S., Irwin, R.  L., Leggo, C., & Gouzouasis, P. (Eds.). (2008). Being with A/r/tography. Sense. Stewart, K. (2008). Weak Theory in an Unfinished World. Journal of Folklore Research, 45(1), 71–82. Stewart, K. (2011). Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, 445–453. Triggs, V., & Irwin, R. L. (2019). Pedagogy and the A/r/tographic Invitation. In R.  H. J.  Baldacchino, K.  Freedman, E.  Hall, & N.  Meager (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education (pp.  1–16). John Wiley & Sons. Tuck, E., & Yang, W. K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Welch, W. (2009). Who owns the story? Storytelling, Self. Society, 5(1), 1–22.

CHAPTER 3

Walking Curricular Paths in the Virtual: The Stanley Parable and Minecraft Nicole Lee and Ken Morimoto

Abstract  This writing explores the educative potential of walking in virtual spaces and how it can activate conceptual and philosophical considerations in personal, critical, intellectual, and affective realms of being and becoming. Digital and virtual ‘walks’ offer alternatives to ableist assumptions of walking that might be limited to physical movement. As such, the chapter focuses on the experience of moving through two exploration games—a walking simulator and a simulation of walking. The authors discuss the curricular paths they took through aesthetic, a/r/tographic, and contemplative orientations. The enigmatic nature of such games and their resistance to specific instructions mean that players are compelled to create their own meaning and conclusions through interactions with the virtual terrain, an approach that can be pedagogically provocative. Keywords  Virtual walking • A/r/tography • Simulator and simulation • Philosophy • Games • Walking research N. Lee (*) • K. Morimoto Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking with A/r/tography, Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_3

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3.1   Introduction This chapter considers walking beyond the habitual patterns of the ‘physical’ into the realm of the digital/virtual. We discuss an emergent genre of games that have been referred to by online communities as walking simulators’, ‘exploration games’, ‘environmental narrative games’, and/or ‘literary gaming’ (Ensslin, 2015), which ludologists are only beginning to consider (see Muscat & Duckworth, 2018) and remain largely unexplored in cultural studies, media studies, digital humanities, and art education. Clark (2017) traces the term ‘walking simulator’ back to online forums in the late 2000s as an insult for video games that resist instrumentalized instructions. Players explore a wide expanse of space without prescribed goals, which can be both confusing and provocative at once. ‘What’s the point of this?’ and ‘What am I supposed to do here?’ are common questions we hear when we watch playthroughs of games in the walking simulators genre on YouTube. It takes time to understand what the game is about.

3.2   Walking Simulators and Simulations of Walking as Sites for Walking Research Movement in (video) games is not new, and such movement can offer simulations of walking—which we conceptualize as a kind of walking. Players use a controller, like a keyboard and mouse, to direct the character’s movement in virtual space. Particularly, a first-person perspective, where players see through the eyes of the character, and a third-person perspective with a lock-on camera view, where the camera closely follows the character from behind, may offer a more immersive experience of walking. Collapsing the gap between the character and the camera heightens the believability that the player is in the game as opposed to engaging from the outside. The walking simulator—as a genre—questions what can be considered a game because there are little to no fail states or challenges. As a result, winning or losing is not central to the gameplay. Walking simulators are exploration-driven, character-focused adventure games. They offer interactive and poetic (meta)narratives that are experienced as one walks through a digital/virtual environment/space. They stride between experience, story, art, game, atmospheric adventure/ exploration, play, contemplation, slow pedagogy, and sites for walking

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research. They are characterized by one’s solitude as they present firstperson single-player experiences with an absence of non-player-­characters. Walking in these kinds of digital worlds echoes what Sumartojo and Pink (2019) express as “know[ing] through and in the atmospheres that are part of the configurations of circumstances that we pass through and participate in as we are on the move” (p. 75, italics in original). To walk in the digital/virtual is to heighten the tension of the (in)corporeal: of being somewhere, (and somewhere else,) and being nowhere at once. As Lavery (2020) acknowledges in the context of physical walking: [T]o walk is not only to occupy a place, to move through a territory, it is to absent oneself from oneself, to be open to the impress of things, the Stimmung that precedes knowing, refusing to be named as ‘this’ or ‘that’ emotion or state. (p. 38, italics in original)

In walking simulators, players experience movement and are simultaneously summoned to interpret one’s own movement, piece together fragments of encounter, and construct a (meta)narrative that is constantly changing. Conclusions are never fixed but are open to personal understanding(s). Virtual walking is not merely a mimetic alternative of physical walking, but it presents a unique set of conditions and provocations. Along with the proliferation of games produced in this genre, the term ‘walking simulator’ is beginning to shed its negative connotations. Because walking simulators involve the exploration of empty spaces without the visual presence of others, the environments can be easily interpreted as abandoned, becoming a mystery in which the player finds one’s self. This context lends itself well in psychological/atmospheric thriller/horror genres, which can parallel walking simulators as the player walks through spaces to understand and construct a story, though the ones with active enemies and puzzles to solve are beyond the scope of our discussion. In this work, we explore the question: How might one’s engagement with digital walking provoke considerations of the conceptual and philosophical? To address this question, we invite the reader to come along our virtual walking practices in Davey Wrenden and William Pugh’s The Stanley Parable (2011) and Mojang Studios’ Minecraft (2009). We argue that walking virtually extends opportunities for conceptual understanding(s) of human experience through immersive narratives.

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3.3   Walking Virtually Through Aesthetic, A/r/tographic, and Contemplative Orientations Walking simulators employ the virtual, spatial medium of walking and movement as a metaphor to extend spaces for contemplation and the exploration of one’s interiority. Their educative potential lies in their use of gaming mechanics to communicate concepts and themes and their invitation to think and philosophize. We turn to walking simulators and simulations of walking with Wittgenstein’s (1958) call to “look and see” (p. 31) to consider their pedagogical possibilities, particularly when the player attends to them through an embodiment of aesthetic, a/r/tographic, and contemplative orientations. Ahmed (2010) writes, “To be oriented in a certain way is how certain things come to be significant, come to be objects for me … Orientations affect how subjects and objects materialize or come to take shape in the way that they do” (p.  235, italics in original). An aesthetic orientation entails “sensitivity, curiosity and a commitment to see things beyond how they might first appear” (O’Donoghue, 2018, p. 61). An a/r/tographic orientation hinges on “several notions of relationality: relational inquiry, relational aesthetics, and relational learning” (Irwin & Springgay, 2008, p. xxvii), where “meaning making within relational aesthetics is embodied in the intercorporeal negotiations between things” (p. xxvi). In a contemplative orientation, “embracing wholeness is the underpinning of contemplative pedagogy, blending both the inner and the outer, and mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the individual” (Dalton, 2018, p. 177). Entering with such orientations, walking simulators can provoke personal, critical, intellectual, and affective examinations. In other words, to access the educative potential of walking simulators and simulations of walking, one must be willing to look and see, in relation with the world, and with an openness to engage holistically. One can take up aesthetic, a/r/tographic, and contemplative orientations while traversing in any games and virtual spaces that accommodate a form of movement, although doing so may be at the expense of the intended game experience by the developers. If we structure experiences following the commonplace binary model of failure versus success used in games, a resulting fail state under the terms of the game world may also lead to a ‘success’ of another kind— the discovery of new knowing.

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3.4   The Stanley Parable and Minecraft The Stanley Parable and Minecraft are both first-person exploration games that allow the player to move through digital space without instrumentalized aims. The Stanley Parable offers an already built environment with more structured experiences, while Minecraft, a sandbox game, allows players to build digital environments themselves with blocks and explore the terrain. The Stanley Parable is in the walking simulator genre, while Minecraft is not. We study The Stanley Parable because its use of (meta) fiction and irony “draws attention to the digital, procedural materiality of videogames” (Fest, 2016, p. 1). We select Minecraft as a companion juxtaposition because it presents an experience of walking in an open-world environment, which is in sharp contrast to The Stanley Parable. Minecraft also has the ability to switch between first- and third-person camera perspectives, which help us explore the implications of the mechanics further. In this study, Minecraft was played solely in first-person to better align with the first-person only experience of The Stanley Parable. The pairing helps us understand how considerations of the conceptual and philosophical can manifest in both walking simulators and simulations of walking. The Stanley Parable runs like a choose-your-own-adventure book, offering a range of choices and 19 endings where the game restarts automatically or the player is prompted to restart on their own. The player moves the office worker character Stanley through a labyrinth that is an empty office building, which is filled with either-or decision points. The Narrator (TN), voiced by Kevan Brighting, acts as spokesperson for the absent designers’ intentions. TN tells the player to proceed through specific paths and the player makes choices in response to his instructions. TN then follows with comments on the interaction and possible interpretations, including possible motives and other ideas that incite thought. The authoritative, patronizing British voice describes what Stanley does at each turn and breaks the fourth wall in multiple instances, making explicit both the gap and entwinement between the player and the character Stanley— while we are not actually Stanley, we seem to have fused with him somehow through walking virtually as him. The strong presence of an explicit guiding narrative invites one to make choices and think about one’s decisions critically. Minecraft is a game of world-building and exploration. While additional features have been added throughout its development since its release, like objectives and achievements that a player may choose to

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pursue, the core aspect of the game entails a near-infinite space and interactable blocks that comprise the world through which the player can explore and create. Minecraft works like Lego but in a computer program. By using the blocks, one can construct a range of virtual experiences, including those that are very similar to The Stanley Parable, with a closed-­ level design and an overarching narrative. However, we focus on the sandbox quality that forms the ground of Minecraft as a game. No narrators provide direction or commentary outside of what the players make for themselves. The gameplay revolves around exploration, prompted by one’s curiosity and constrained by factors that may end the gaming experience, such as the depletion of a ‘health bar’ or running out of time. In comparing the two games, walking in Minecraft may be more consistent with the physical experience of walking, introducing a fusion with the virtual walker. Physical walking occurs primarily as a balance of various interests that come into being in negotiation between the affective relationship of the environment and the walker. Without the presence of explicit guiding narration in Minecraft, a player may easily play the game without much critical thought. Especially as they become more accustomed to the mechanics of the game, it becomes easier to work mindlessly, pushing buttons toward the next goal. Constructing one’s own (meta)narratives can transform these routine routes into moments of inquiry by allowing oneself to notice elements that may have faded into the background. A critical engagement in virtual walks becomes possible through the creation of conditions for observation and contemplation on the player’s end. Wrestling for/over Control, Autonomy, and Meaning There is one more, perhaps more central reason why we chose these two games to study. In The Stanley Parable, TN’s forceful, humorous, and sarcastic pedagogical imperatives guide, inform, taunt, and manipulate the player, bringing to the forefront an uncanny feeling that one’s actions are not one’s own. In the context of games, Patterson (2020) asserts that the player’s freedom is defined not by capitalism (the freedom to own, buy, or sell) or by state rights (the freedom to live, to vote, to believe) but by a child’s freedom from the masters of control, a freedom to reinvent and experiment within a “magic circle” of play. (p. 11)

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Even when TN blames the player for destroying the game through disobedience, this is part of the game, as one “obeyed by disobeying, blindly following the crumb trails of disobedience” (Patterson, 2020, p. 12). It underscores how one’s choices are always already predetermined by preexisting conditions, highlighting the long-standing tension between determinism and free will. At no point does this become resolved as questions and self-doubt continue spiraling and layering: Did one choose an option over another because one wanted it or because the choice was framed a certain way? Where do intentions and desires come from? How are they influenced? What do freedom and free will mean? The wrestling for/over control, autonomy, and meaning is most evident when the player disobeys TN’s commands and his idea of where the story should go. He angrily/ hopelessly/ sadly/ nonchalantly restarts the game and decision points, eliminates choices, and forces the player where to go. Nicole’s move to subvert the deterministic control of TN is through theorizing. The experience of walking as Stanley planted seeds for her ongoing thinking and process of making meaning, but surely this paper was not predetermined by TN (or Wrenden and Pugh). Particularly, walking in The Stanley Parable invites her to come into an experience of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizome, Nietzsche’s (1887/2001) eternal recurrence, Ingold’s (2013) dance of animacy, and Greene’s (1980/2001b) wide-awakeness. Walking in this virtual world serves as a kind of curriculum (as the running of a course), which invites Nicole to ponder the lived implications of theory. One of the paths of constant defiance launches the player into a Minecraft-like setting because TN is “done making things for you,” and it is a “game [he] had absolutely nothing to do with.” TN eventually shuts it down, lamenting that it is “far too open-ended than [he] had in mind” as he’s “looking for something more narrow and linear.” Ken takes this one step further and exits The Stanley Parable, turning his attention to walking in Minecraft. This posture of defiance and exercise of free will is simultaneously an act of obedience to the idea of disobedience planted by Wrenden and Pugh. While Minecraft is more open-ended, the theoretical implications above can still be at play, though perhaps more implicitly.

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3.5   Theorizing as Nicole Walks as Stanley Walking as Stanley in The Stanley Parable prompts me (Nicole) to question the fundamental nature of reality. The taken-for-grantedness of being the character Stanley came as second nature to me since I played many games growing up. I did not pay much attention to the procedural materiality of operating Stanley until TN questioned why I could not see my/ Stanley’s feet, when I finally looked down and discovered empty space. Stanley is a floating ghost and my assumption and fusion with the character are exposed. In one ending, TN critiques Stanley’s investment in pressing buttons as instructions came through the screen at work, where “the longer he spends here, the more invested he gets, the more he forgets which life is the real one.” This directly mirrors how I am invested in pressing buttons (WASD and mouse clicks) too, as instructions are coming through the screen via environmental cues and TN. The game even made my mouse clicks sound like a clattering keyboard key. Point taken. This leads me to imagine whether the human experience parallels Stanley’s experience: whether a metaphysical being operates me-as-human as a character in an environment much like how I am operating Stanley in the game. Echoing this speculation, the Main Menu shows a computer monitor with the Main Menu inside it, which shows a computer monitor with the Main Menu inside that. It does not take long for me to realize the Main Menu is on my computer monitor and the layers can zoom out infinitely. I instinctively looked behind me, wondering whose screen I might be on (Fig. 3.1). One of the Paths The playthrough I detail here is one possible path; it lingered with me years after my first encounter. The game always ‘begins’ from Stanley’s office. Upon examining and finding nothing clickable in my office, I step outside and discover empty cubicles that I cannot interact with. Walking past a corridor, I encounter two doors. TN declares plainly, “When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he enters the door on his left.” I step through the right door and TN chastises me, “This was not the correct way to the meeting room.” Another choice presents itself as I continue down another corridor, to correct my ‘mistake.’ TN encourages, “but eager to get back to business, Stanley took the first open door to his left.”

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Fig. 3.1  The Stanley Parable Main Menu on a laptop and game stills of Stanley/ Nicole pushing buttons. Photo credit: Nicole Lee/The Stanley Parable

No thanks. I continue down the ‘wrong path’ and find a warehouse environment. I get on a transport platform and it starts moving. Mid-way in the air, I see a ramp below and jump off as TN speaks, “Please, stop trying to make every decision by yourself. [Stanley/I jump(s).] Wha— really? I was in the middle of something”; “Give me a chance,” he begs as I then come to a set of red and blue doors, “Stanley walked through the red door.” I cave in and walk through the red door. Regret washes over me as TN’s tone changes from one of appeal to annoyance, “Oh, thank god, you are willing to listen to me.” He got me. In this ending, he shows me a stage engulfed in stars and lights. “If we just stay right here, right in this moment, with this place… Stanley, I think I feel… happy.” I stay for a while and nothing else happens, so I exit the stage. TN panics as I come to a tall industrial space with six flights of stairs that lead you nowhere except a straight dive to the ground. He pleads

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with me to not approach the stairs, hurt and kill myself, and take this state of happiness from him. Yet, the only way that the game seems to ‘continue’ is by going up the stairs and jumping down, hurting Stanley/myself. I survive somehow so I go back to the stage and stay longer. But growing increasingly disinterested, I threw myself from the platform a second time. He exclaims, aghast, “Is this really how much you dislike my game? That you’ll throw yourself from this platform over and over to be rid of it? You are literally willing to kill yourself to keep me from being happy?” Jumping from this platform a third time, an exhibition of my determined commitment to the notion of ‘progress’ and to defying TN, restarts the game. I am in the office again. From this experience of walking, I wondered: Why did I resist being told what to do at every turn—what kind of person am I? Why did I give up at the last moment? What instrumentalized ideas do I have about progress that led me to make the decision repeatedly to throw Stanley/myself off a platform? I simply could not “stay and be happy” with TN as I was not happy on that stage—was happiness a place or must I be in movement to find it? In what ways did TN shape my decisions? How does this highlight the tension between determinism and free will? Where do my choices come from? What kinds of “alternatives to the given” (Greene, 2000/2001c, p. 122) might be possible? How might I still make this story mine so the experience of living through it is meaningful? Linear, Rhizomatic, and Circular Experiences Each decision point in the game breaks off into two possibilities. When fully mapped out, all the endings can be laid out in a tree-like structure. The choices—right and wrong, left and right, red and blue—seem dichotomous and dualistic. Yet, this choose-your-own-adventure continues to spin in all sorts of directions for me years later in rhizomatic ways. The Stanley Parable strides between—as both and neither fully—linear and rhizomatic. At each restart, the loading screen shows this text: “end is never the end is never the end is loading ne” (Fig. 3.2). While the narrative always begins structurally in Stanley’s office, the story one experiences “has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  21, italics in original). The story keeps going from one playthrough to the next and all the beginnings and endings eventually blend together as one big story. The use of (meta)fiction and the metaphorical extension to metaphysics make the story “reducible neither to the One

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Fig. 3.2  Options, directions, courses, paths, and dimensions in The Stanley Parable. Photo credit: Nicole Lee/The Stanley Parable

nor the multiple… composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  21). Each ending offers a different dimension of what this office can mean: an actual office, a mind control facility operated by Stanley’s boss, a figment of Stanley’s imagination, thoughts of a crazy person who collapsed in the street, a story TN is telling, and a game that TN built. My experience of The Stanley Parable ruptures into different lines of flight despite the game’s structural linearity. Simultaneously, the game’s restart mechanism evokes a circular experience, which provokes a connection to Nietzsche’s (1887/2001) Eternal Recurrence where a demon asks whether one would want everything in life to recur over and over again eternally (p. 194). It is a thought experiment that demands a consideration of what it means to live life well. A decision’s value depends on whether one would be willing to accept the implications of that choice ad infinitum, which makes decisions both heavy

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and light: heavy because one must deliberate intensely on every act as it will happen again, but also light because life no longer matters when everything repeats anyway. The Stanley Parable seems to take up the lighter conclusion of Eternal Recurrence. At one point, a female meta-narrator pauses a life-threatening situation for Stanley/me and describes the circumstance in which TN and Stanley/I find ourselves. She then muses, “when every path you can walk has been created for you long in advance, death becomes meaningless, making life the same. Do you see now? Do you see that Stanley was already dead from the moment he hit start?” After she unpauses, I let the life-threatening situation continue to run as Stanley/I meet(s) his/my demise, again, confident that Stanley/I can arrive in the office again, choose again, and return again. In real life, I continue returning to this game, again and again, as ideas continue to spiral and layer rhizomatically. Because I have already walked and died as Stanley in the virtual, I can carry understanding(s) of the theoretical hypothesis of Eternal Recurrence with me in waking life, where it is not possible to restart quite the same way and where it is even more urgent to figure out for one’s self what is of value. Dance of Animacy and Wide-Awakeness The uncanny frustration that one’s actions are not one’s own demonstrates what Ingold (2013) calls a dance of animacy. The setting, TN, and Stanley/I influence each other relationally, taking turns to cue the next part of what unfolds, always already moving in relation to what came before. Ingold (2013) writes that: partners take it in turns to lead and be led or—in musical terms—to play the melody and its refrain. In the dance of animacy, bodily kinaesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing, morphogenetic field of forces. (p. 101)

Most of the time, the dance becomes implicit in how one moves through the everyday. However, TN’s unwelcomed assertion of control and the limitations offered by dichotomous decision points in the environment serve to highlight the role that each play in this dance. It is important to note that without continuing to move forward, TN cannot exist, and the environment ceases to grip me. Only when I continue to engage, and walk do TN and the environment come alive. The meta-narrator at one point urges me to “press ‘escape,’ and press ‘quit’”, to finally beat the game and

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be ‘free,’ because “there’s no other way to beat this game. As long as you move forward you’ll be walking someone else’s path. Stop now, and it will be your only true choice… Don’t let time choose for you!” The dance of animacy continues even if I quit the game as I simply become involved in a different set of relations. TN serves as an ironic pedagogue that activates a critical awareness of one’s embeddedness in an existing web of relations and gravitations toward certain frameworks of understanding the world. The pedagogy of irony highlights jarring gaps between what ‘should’ happen and what I am experiencing, feeling, thinking, and imagining, stirring in me an introspective wide-awakeness (Greene, 1980/2001b) as I keep asking myself questions. Engaging with TN as ironic pedagogue invites me into a critical examination of my ideas around process and product, journey and destination, progress and success, being and becoming. In one of the sillier paths, Stanley/I get(s) “lost” in the maintenance section. TN gets confused and does not know where to direct Stanley to get him “back on track,” so he restarts the game and employs The Stanley Parable Adventure Line™ to help Stanley/me “find the story”—as if a story is an object, a thing that you reach. TN encourages, “The Line™ knows where the story is, it’s over in this direction! Onward, Stanley, to destiny!” Along the way, I realize when TN talks about the story, he is referring to the meaning and purpose for which Stanley/I embark upon this chase. We travel through strange rooms, corridors, basements, back offices, and even another building in pursuit, calling to attention the ridiculousness of a desire to find the conclusive meaning at one’s destination—wherever and however arbitrary this destination is (Fig. 3.3). The story, meaning, and purpose of a journey come through a process of becoming. As TN explicitly articulates, “Simply by the act of moving forward are we implying a journey such that a destination is inevitably conjured into being via the very manifestation of the nature of life itself?” Yet, I do not know how many times I have journeyed in the hope that I will find the purpose and meaning of something around the next corner. “One way to think of understanding freedom,” Greene (1982/2001a) offers, “is to think of it as the capacity to look at things as if they could be otherwise” (p. 63). However deterministic, linear, and closed-ended The Stanley Parable might be in certain aspects, the critical awareness and introspective wide-awakeness that it inspires extends a kind of freedom, of developing different possibilities that are not already given.

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Fig. 3.3  Selected game stills from The Stanley Parable. Photo credit: Nicole Lee/The Stanley Parable

3.6   Minecraft, Middle Earth, and Myself: Ken’s Virtual Walk This simulation of walking occurs in an online Minecraft server dedicated to building an explorable replica of Middle Earth, the fictional world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium. One of the key differences with this walk and walking in the Stanley Parable is that there is no narrator explicating authorial intent. In games where free exploration is central, overarching narratives are often de-emphasized or are absent in its entirety. Despite this absence, narrative elements are discovered and created during the virtual walk through the engagement of a set of aesthetic, a/r/tographic, and contemplative orientations. If one possible way of describing reality is as an “interpreted experience” (Greene, 1984, p. 123), then perhaps personal narratives are always present even if it is not the grand narrative.

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Founded in 2010, the Minecraft Middle Earth (MCME) server is an online multiplayer server that hosts a community dedicated to the recreation of Middle Earth (www.mcmiddleearth.com). On the main server, major components of the base game such as day/night cycles, damage, hunger, and non-playable entities are disabled, limiting players who join the server to walk or fly around and add to building projects should they apply to do so. Learning about this server recently from a friend, my friend and I (Ken) take the opportunity to explore the MCME server, loosely following the arc of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a guide. Having just entered the server, we are limited to moving about and taking in the sights. Over the years, the MCME community has succeeded in fabricating many of the major locations with attention to the approximate proportion of detail and size that are open to exploration. We then decide to make the journey on foot unless the terrain or circumstances from the narrative impede us from doing so. When restricted to walking, I am kept on the ground and am able to experience the scale of structures and land formations as if I am physically present. Mountains are large and towering while towns sprawl across the land (Fig. 3.4). Following the tutorial, our path begins in Hobbiton, the starting town of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Entering into this virtual reproduction, I

Fig. 3.4  Game still of a house in Hobbiton. Photo credit: Ken Morimoto/Minecraft

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find myself at the intersection of multiple histories that make themselves felt. As I walk, I am reminded of the fictional history of the books and the literary significance of various locations. I am fascinated by the attention to detail that reference illustrations and films to create lively homes and lush gardens that simulate what it may feel like if this fictive world was real. As I regard these constructions, I appreciate the history of the server and the dedication of the community in building these vast yet detailed landscapes. I recall my memories around my relationship to the game and Tolkien’s books. These histories that occurred in different times and places yet connected relationally through a shared interest in Middle Earth are storied anew and interwoven in the present as I walk across them. In attending to these moments, the walk itself seems to generate a new history of a virtual walk between friends in a fantastical land that takes us there and back again (Fig. 3.5). The decision to walk gains personal significance. When I read about locations in the books or see them in the films, I am primarily interested in the characters. When the scene moves to a tavern, although I know that this is occurring in a town, my imagined world is confined within it. Walking around the tavern and the reproduction of the town in which it is found, I begin to consider the event not only in the context of what is

Fig. 3.5  Game stills of a various points of interest in MCME. Photo credit: Ken Morimoto/Minecraft

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happening, but what is also happening around it. Walking up the mountain instead of merely reading about it, I contemplate upon what transpired on its slopes and become aware of its gradations, size, and beauty. Walking slows our pace, compelling us to take our time walking from one location to another. As the virtual reproduction is not to scale, what took the characters days to traverse takes us mere minutes. These minutes feel much longer in comparison to the way in which books and films can transport their audiences across these vast distances through the use of narrative transitions. The world outside the screen, too, is devoid of narrative devices that patch gaps between moments of focused action and excitement. Walking for days, actually takes days, and much of the real is composed of the everyday in which nothing seems to happen. Even in these instances, the ‘dance of animacy’ (Ingold, 2013) is still present, directing one’s attention to underlying narratives or the creation of new ones. Other narratives can arise from a state of being alone with one’s thoughts, though never completely as one is perpetually embedded in the visible and invisible. Being in relation with the land and others, one’s own interpretations are allowed to take the fore. Caves, Games, and Meanderings On the road to the next location, I notice a stream flowing out of a small cave opening that cuts across the path. Neither the flowing water nor the opening is of any literary significance. I can only assume that the one(s) responsible for building this part of the area placed it here to add to the color of the otherwise relatively nondescript terrain. My curiosity is raised by this virtual land formation, and I decide to look inside. In doing so, I am not expecting much more than a small hollow with a water source inside. What I do discover is a branching tunnel system that winds up the interior of the mountain on which the opening was found. As I climb up the dark underground river, I am no longer sure when it will end. I am struck by the quiet complexity of the interiority that was masked by a seemingly benign exterior. I imagine the intention of the person who had taken the time to painstakingly carve out these waterways and the people that must have passed by this cave without taking a look inside as I had done. Perhaps there are many openings like this winding tunnel, unasked for and easily overlooked, yet once attended to, offers in excess (Fig. 3.6).

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Fig. 3.6  Game stills of cave entrance and tunnel system. Photo credit: Ken Morimoto/Minecraft

Tolkien’s narrative world-building is perhaps another example. Tolkien created Middle Earth with incredible depth to the effect of inventing unique elvish languages with their own set of characters, lexicon, pronunciation, and history, and many undertake the study of this fictional language as though they were learning a foreign language. Tolkien’s world has come alive and grown beyond the words on the page. Often, we begin something not knowing how far it will take us. In showing how words like ‘games’ are applied to objects that share significant similarities as opposed to an essential definition, Wittgenstein (1958) encourages critics to “look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that” (p.  31). To look and see in this way is an invitation to bracket one’s assumptions and engage relationally with the things themselves. Such moments may appear in different forms, at times through a narrative-­ driven walking simulator or around a nonessential point of interest in a simulation of walking within a fantasy world, may awakening “a sense of present-ness, to a critical consciousness of what is ordinarily obscured” (Greene, 1984, p.  132). However, to do so requires an aesthetic, a/r/tographic, and contemplative commitment to see these things for

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ourselves. We must go inside the cave/walk the path and story our own experiences.

3.7   Conclusion We are now at the end of the chapter. Thank you for coming along with us on our virtual walks. We leave you with no concluding remarks. When you shut the book, there will be no game developer, narrator/narrative, Line™, authors, and editors to tell you, the reader, explicitly what to do or think. What will you do now? As the reader came to their wits and regained their senses, they got up and stepped outside.

References Ahmed, S. (2010). Orientations Matter. In D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 234–257). Duke University Press. Clark, N. (2017, November 11). A brief history of the “walking simulator,” gaming's most detested genre. Salon. https://www.salon. com/2017/11/11/a-­brief-­history-­of-­the-­walking-­simulator-­gamings-­most-­ detested-­genre/ Dalton, J. E. (2018). Opening the contemplative mind through art. In M. Garbutt & N.  Roenpagel (Eds.), The mindful eye: Contemplative pedagogies in visual arts education (pp. 171–186). Common Ground Research Networks. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Massumi, B. [Trans.]). University of Minnesota Press. Ensslin, A. (2015). Video games as unnatural narratives. Diversity of Play, [e-­journal], 41-70. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/550 Fest, B.  J. (2016). Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the legacies of postmodern metafiction. Wide Screen, 6(1), 1–23. https://doi. org/10.17613/M6V02N Greene, M. (1984). The art of being present: Educating for aesthetic encounters. Journal of Education, 166(2), 123–135. Greene, M. (2001a). Being fully present to works of art. In Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education (pp. 57–63). Teachers College Press. (Original work published 1982). Greene, M. (2001b). Notes on aesthetic education. In Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education (pp. 7–43). Teachers College Press. (Original work published 1980).

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Greene, M. (2001c). Resistance to mere things: Art and the reach of intellectual possibility. In Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. Teachers College Press. (Original work published 2000). Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. Irwin, R. L., & Springgay, S. (2008). A/r/tography as practice-based research. In S. Springgay, R. L. Irwin, C. Leggo, & P. Gouzouasis (Eds.), Being with a/r/ tography (pp. xiii–xxvii). Sense. Lavery, C. (2020). Walking and theatricality: An experiment in weathered thinking (kairos). In D. Borthwick, P. Marland, & A. Stenning (Eds.), Walking landscape and environment (pp. 36–50). Routledge. Muscat, A., & Duckworth, J. (2018). WORLD4: designing ambiguity for first-­ person exploration games. CHI PLAY ’18 proceedings of the 2018 annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play, 341-351. https://doi. org/10.1145/3242671.3242705 Nietzsche, F. (2001). A gay science (Williams, B. [Ed.], & Nauckhoff, J., & del Caro, A. [Trans.]). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1887) O’Donoghue, D. (2018). Learning to live in boys’ schools. Art-led understandings of masculinities. Routledge. Patterson, C.  B. (2020). Open world empire: Race, erotics, and the global rise of video games. New York University Press. Sumartojo, S., & Pink, S. (2019). Atmosphere and the experiential world: Theory and methods. Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (Anscombe, G.E.M., Trans.). Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

Invitation to Walking Inquiry Along the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails: An A/r/tographic Travelogue Re/braided with Walkers’ Inquiries Koichi Kasahara, Satoshi Ikeda, Kayoko Komatsu, Toshio Ishii, Takashi Takao, Kazuji Mogi, Minako Kayama, Minori Inoue, and Kaho Kakizaki K. Kasahara (*) • T. Ishii • T. Takao • M. Kayama • M. Inoue Tokyo Gakugei University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; domingo@u-gakugei. ac.jp; [email protected]; [email protected] S. Ikeda Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan e-mail: [email protected] K. Komatsu Nagaoka Institute of Design, Niigata, Japan e-mail: [email protected] K. Mogi Atomi Univdersity, Saitama, Japan e-mail: [email protected] K. Kakizaki Toho Gakuen Primary School, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking with A/r/tography, Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_4

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Abstract  This chapter is a travelogue and research paper by eight walkers on the World Heritage Kumano Kodo. At first glance, this journey appears as a sightseeing and pilgrimage trip. However, the eight walkers are artists, educators, and researchers—that is, they are ‘a/r/tographers’. This chapter therefore asks: What kind of trip/journey did the walkers make on the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trail? What kind of possibilities for art education practice were created? The eight walkers are like a group of tourists often seen at tourist attractions, but they are also independent a/r/tographers, and their ‘I’ is also ‘we’ at the same time, which is a complex relationship. Keywords  Kumano Kodo • Pilgrimage • Collaborative • Travelogue • Journey • Japan • Inquiry • Subjective • Objective • A/r/tography • Walking pedagogy • Rebraiding

Fig. 4.1  Short poem written in a drama workshop during this project, Author unknown, May 31, 2019

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“I am a person, this is the earth, I am walking with you…”

4.1   Welcome to Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails and an A/r/tographic Trip/Journey! Now the trip/journey and inquiry begins!1

4.2   The Style of This A/r/tographic Travelogue This text is re/braided and edited with multiple walkers’/inquirers’ texts and images. Each walker/inquirer has contributed a section, each with the authors’ name identified with their text. The texts were written after our walks. Other sections without attribution are written by first author Koichi Kasahara who has responded to each walker’s text. These responses are written in order to re/braid the texts and images into the whole of this collective and collaborative a/r/tographic offering. This chapter is taken up as a form of response to the a/r/tographic travelogue by researchers who walked along Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trails together, coordinated by first author, Koichi Kasahara. That is, the conversations and un/foldings after the trip are re/braided with/by/through a/r/tographic correspondences in the form of letters (Fig. 4.1). At time of writing, it is unclear what this is—a ‘trip’ or ‘journey’. However, similarly, readers may be able to know through this text that there are a lot of matters that cannot be expressed or defined through one single term or definition, because the walkers’ experience and their inquiry are in constant motion and flux during the process. We hope that readers enjoy walking/reading with us through this a/r/tographic trip/journey that seeks to slow connections (Walsh, 2000).

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 Travel companion and a/r/tographer, Koichi Kasahara.

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4.3   Walking Places We Know About But Have Never Actually Been, with Multiple Walkers Together Kumano Kodo is a famous Japanese place registered as a World Cultural Heritage site (2004). Many international tourists visit the site. However, this does not mean that many people in Japan have been to Kumano Kodo; notably, of the eight walkers in this research project, only one had ever been previously. The individual understandings and beliefs formed during our growing process were diverse. However, we live in an environment influenced by the country’s history and culture. In other words, we are singular yet collectively formed beings, existing simultaneously in plurality (Nancy, 2000). Kumano Kodo is historically, culturally and religiously significant. Accordingly, from this perspective, walking the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails with eight walkers was an opportunity to re/think and re/illustrate how we related to these histories, religions and cultures individually and collectively.

4.4   Kumano Kodo World Heritage Kumano refers to the area comprising the entire ‘Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range’ in Japan. Kodo means ‘old trails and routes’. Thus, Kumano Kodo is an historical and culturally significant pilgrimage trail which was founded in the seventh century by Kukai (Kobo Daishi—空海) who was a priest of virtue (Koyama, 2000). The Kii Mountains, where Kumano is located, is a mountain range that has a span of altitude from 1000 to 2000 metres. It faces the Pacific Ocean (Kumano Cape) and is a mountainous area with giant trees and deep forests with precipitation of more than 3000 mm a year (Wakayama Prefecture, 2017). Kumano has been regarded as a sacred place since ancient times and has become a place of training for monks and Shugenja2 from the Nara period (710–794) to the Heian period (794–1185) (Koyama, 2000). Shugendo is Japan’s unique mountain religion, in which Shinto, Buddhism (the esoteric religion) Shintoism, and Esoteric Buddhism were combined with ancient Japanese mountain faiths. In particular, it is unusual that these two different religions are mixed. Moreover, the eclectic mix of religions is a feature that was noticed when the place was registered as a World Heritage Site, as  Diviners who could wield magic and control elemental forces.

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conflicts between various religions and ethnic groups continued. Nevertheless, about 150 years ago, when the new government was established in Japan at that time, there was a history of suppressing Buddhism and pushing forward with the integration policy of the people through Shinto. Such histories and cultures have continued through the power of time and religions with differing principles (Dilworth, 1969; Nishida, 1993). It provokes questions around which kinds of dialogue, negotiations, and intra-actions (Barad, 2007) with/in-between Kumano Kodo could be generated by walking along these places and trails, and what possibilities might emerge through a/r/tographic inquiries.

4.5   How to Walk and Explore Places and Routes of Significance Given the complexity of history and culture, the walkers wondered: how might we explore these historically complex places? To visit meaningful and iconic places around the world is to live in negotiation with their multi-layered narratives of history, culture, power, and politics. In other words, this study is an inquiry that lives between place as external environment, located in historical time and space, and the internal experience of/ through walking, which provokes an inquiry through experiences and events where objectivity and subjectivity intersect. Den Heyer and Fidyk (2007) addressed the “relation between fact, fiction, and imagination, specifically the necessity of a transdisciplinary use of historical fiction in conjunction with history teaching remains relatively unexplored in contemporary research” (p. 141). They mentioned furthermore, “the subjective and objective dimensions of historical work are complementary” (p. 142) and “historical inquiry calls upon hermeneutic sensibilities to explore the limitations of present subjectivity, intuition, and imagination in the light of facts” (p. 142). This suggests that there is a necessity for including our singularity and particularity in this inquiry. Thus, this inquiry took place in-between the time and space of self and history, the subjective and objective, information and experience, and the known and unknown. We conducted an inquiry employing walking as a/r/tographic inquiry. It is not common to employ the arts as a methodology for inquiry into an historical place. However, in/through this work, we seek to move beyond just facts, to include the body, affect, our existence, lived/living experience, and reflection, through the possibilities of emergence and heuristic generation. For us as inquirers, the following quote is therefore relevant:

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“What role does agency play in historical imagination? These are questions of ethics. They are, therefore, also questions of education” (Den Heyer & Fidyk, 2007, p. 143). The inquiry included subjective experiences while walking, together with contemplation and sensory experience, combined with various modes and forms of material practices: creative writing, art-­ making and dialogical conversation.

4.6   Stepping with A/r/tography into an Inquiry of Complex Perceptions, Experiences, and Beings We contemplated how we might think about the complex condition of our inquiry, involving multiple walkers/inquirers, our complex experiences, the materials we wanted to use, our writings, memories, and conversations. What could we study with respect to the non/human, non/ material, word/world? Beyond being a travel record, as an inquiry, how should we walk, think, make, write and consider? LeBlanc and Irwin assert that “[r]ather than capturing research ‘findings’ and displaying them as a static or fixed representation of knowledge, renderings play and move alongside one another, disrupting other thoughts and ideas” (LeBlanc & Irwin, 2019, p. 3). The need for us to walk and play alongside with uncertain potentialities was not easy for us, as we have previously been encouraged to engage in rigid academic approaches (Takahasi, 2009). Moreover, the project took us to the complex sites/routes of pilgrimage, and the walkers are a diverse group of artists (visual art and drama), teachers, students and researchers. LeBlanc and Irwin’s following notion was helpful to us as we faced these complex issues, when they say, “Whereas epistemological forms of research are interested in what is already known about the world and about phenomena, ontological forms inquire into the yet unknowable. Rather than using processes of reflection to explore and learn from past experiences, ontological modes of research favor practices that challenge normative understandings, creating new potentials” (2019, pp. 4–5). In other words, we could step into a complex constellation of things, existences, phenomena, time and space, and subject/object, non/ human, non/material and word/world. In recent times, a/r/tography has been extending from the aspect of epistemology, relationality and identity to focus on the ontological as well (Boulton-Funke et al., 2016). Such positioning supports and stimulates these more complex conditions in which we found ourselves.

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4.7   What Walking with A/r/tography Has Created A/r/tography is a performative pedagogy (Irwin, 2013) in which the generative process brings about self-renewal and knowledge creation, utilizing artmaking, and consideration when writing text. In this research, we employed one more key method of ‘walking’. The a/r/tographic inquiry of Triggs et al. (2014) illustrated that what came from the process of walking made them realize what is sustaining them as arts educators. Hu (2016) also took students to a Silk Road field trip in China where they had encounters with historical and cultural artifacts. Consequently, they became to be aware of their own cultural backgrounds and inquired around the possibilities for art education through a field trip around significant places employing art-making and dialogical processes. Kasahara et  al. (2019) conducted their “Tokyo Walking” with master’s students, which involved walking, artmaking, exhibitions, and dialogic sessions. These a/r/tographic inquiries helped them realize their identities and the many reasons for them coming to Tokyo. The walkers/inquirers experienced—individually and collaboratively—various events and feelings within/by their body and mind, time, and space during the walking processes. In recent years, this kind of walking inquiry has been moving toward the creation of more challenging research. For example, Lasczik Cutcher and Irwin (2018) explored the figure of the flâneur and its place within educational scholarship through their collective and relational inquiry with flâneurial walking as metaphorical methodology. Their multiple places, relationships, engagements, way of arts and inquiry, and renderings show a new way of generative research. Lee et al. (2019) demonstrate the possibility of “walking propositions” to generate “being present to presence” as a way of coming to know a/r/tographically through collaboration and discussion within a community of a/r/tography. In their practice, they set three propositions of ‘go for a walk outside, find an object and do something with it’, ‘walk around your neighbourhood with another, when you find unfamiliar ground, pause, and ground yourself’ and ‘Follow one another in a line without stopping or speaking’. In response, we understood that our inquiry could not be pre-described.

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4.8   Re/braiding Multiple Walkers’ Inquiries as Métissage Lee et al. (2019) offer an example of the significance of collective and collaborative a/r/tographic work. They suggest: Doing a/r/tographic work often means teaching one’s self what it means to live deeply, based on the particularity and singularity of one’s own autobiographical traces. When this is enacted in a community, a vital relationality expands awareness among all involved. (p. 681)

This implies the possibility of collaborative learning within live(d) experience (Aoki, 2005) and curriculum and a/r/tographic living inquiry (Irwin & de Cosson, 2004). When it is impossible to know a predetermined end in a/r/tography, it is far more useful to think of the possibilities un/folding from potentiality. This ‘thinking’ would be made by/with multiple and complex entanglements and fragments of complex experiences, materials, writings, memories, and conversations by multiple walkers’/inquirers’ as mentioned earlier. These métissages and assemblages can be ‘re/braided’. Fidyk and Wallin (2008) attempted to rebraid their texts by introducing multiple authors and explored the possibility of what emerges from an intertextual and a generative ‘rebraiding’ of narratives/stories/manuscripts. Their “work is in part an experiment in textual disruption and derailed communication, inhabiting a liminal space teetering between recognition and the anxiety of crisis” (p. 2). Their attempt to ‘rebraid’ with/ through texts and visual images can read as meaning making. Their multilayered text’s employ continued reflexive methodology. Strongly influenced by this work, we have re/braided the walkers’ texts in this chapter, taking account of their writings, texts, experiences, artmaking, and interpretations, in a creative and generative portrayal. We sought to create this literary métissage, “without losing [the] individual and different textures and voices” (Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009, p. 13). We re/braided our manuscripts and images enabling readers to join our Kumano Kodo trails walking and un/foldings of a/r/tographic inquiry. The studies of Lasczik Cutcher and Irwin (2018), and Burke et al. (2017), are demonstrative and artistic examples which tackled this difficult problem and aroused continuing dialogue of complex events and situations.

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4.9   Preparations for the Journey Before starting this project, we dared not decide on very many specific details regarding the methods of inquiry for each of us. The authors were therefore able to determine what to take and how to approach the site. There were those who recorded with a camera and field notes, while another used and focused only on his body and its sensations. As a consequence, we employed photographs, movies, poems, manga, and installation arts at an exhibition as a provisional presentation rather than as a ‘final’ outcome. We share our texts, workshops, and artworks that came from this inquiry in the following sections. These pieces are written by single-authors, multiple and mixed groups; and some are multi-vocal edited texts and images.3

4.10   Water Mirror Puddle Koichi Kasahara Step by step Walking is dialogue Walking is felt like lively meditation Small water puddle could reflect everything Dialogues with the history and culture Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails never end.

Walking through the trails in the forest made me feel relaxed and refreshed as I enjoyed the walking trip with companions (Kasahara, 2019). On the other hand, I felt fearful to see over 200,000 gravestones and memorial pagodas of persons of power. I knew of them, generals from the textbooks during my school days. However, for me who was born after the Meiji restoration (150 years ago) and furthermore World War II, the persons of power in the age of tyranny and not democracy is hard to accept. The restoration and the war were the turning point of Japan toward a more democratic society and popular sovereignty. The impression of seeing the gravestones and pagodas will feel differently depending on the 3  The following text and images are the a/r/tographic works by the eight walkers that were exhibited at The University of British Columbia at the InSEA 2019 World Congress.

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person. However, the huge size and number of objects made me feel fear for their lust for power, and I realized that it is hard for me to accept the tyrannical irrationality of those days, that restricted personal rights and liberty. With the beautiful and deep mountains and forest, solemn and beautiful temples and shrines, magnificent Buddhist statues, I experienced a simple life—indeed, I had peace of mind. There are unacceptable extraordinary distances and simultaneously distances that are close, which cannot be denied between Kumano and me. I realized that such complex and ambivalent whole experiences of Kumano Kodo vibrated within me. It was when I walked through the trail to Nachi Falls that my eyes were caught by a small puddle of rain on the stone stairs (Fig. 4.2). My instincts told me that the reflected scenery in the small water mirror represented the whole experience and all of the things I saw and experienced while walking. What that small water mirror reflects is just a part of the whole. However, the whole and the world are not only on the ground but also

Fig. 4.2  Walking on the trails, I found a puddle. Kasahara Koichi, 2018

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under the water surface. This small puddle water mirror is the in-between of these dual or double worlds. It shares a part of them within/on the in-­ between surface. This dual/double subsumption, reflection, and representation of both ambivalent worlds in the water mirror is a visual metaphor of the ambivalence between the wonderful experiences of walking and my horrible encounter with power. This small puddle hole is neither condensation nor abstraction of the experiences but is like a small gate of a boundary that connects this world and the next. Natural, personal, religious, political, and state—Kumano has been affected by various kinds of ‘power.’ Like Kumano, whether we like it or not, we must live in a world filled with ambivalence. It is crucial to find or r­ e/ create something of engagement and attitude that can subsume, reflect, and be metaphorically representative of both ambivalent things, events, beings, and the world—as water mirrors do. Art can mediate in-between them. It could be said that the small water mirror puddle is Kukai. Kukai(空海) is the founder of Shingon Buddhism; his name is comprised of Ku(空: Sky, Empty air)and Kai(海: Ocean, Waters), and suggests the in-between space of the sky and sea. This is like the water (Kai) mirror puddle reflecting the sky (Ku). It was a modest enlightenment or nirvana given to Koichi Kasahara through his walking—or by providence of Kumano and Kukai. Look for a small gate of a boundary in your everyday life, and pay attention to it.4

4.11   Trip to Kumano Minako Kayama I travelled Kumano Kodo and Koyasan. On the first day, I strolled through the Oku-no-in and was overwhelmed by the number of gravestones. After passing the cemetery, crossing the bridge leading to Kobo Daishi’s5 (high priest) gobyou (mausoleum), and climbing the stone steps, a space suddenly opened above the tourou-dou (lantern pagoda) and the sky became very close. I felt like I was on a floating island above the sky. At Kobo Daishi’s gobyou, a few monks chanted the Sutra—it resonated—and the atmosphere was tense. A woman worshipper sat in the hallway, closed her eyes, and shook her body. She seemed asleep or unconscious. 4 5

 Reflective re/braiding response by travel companion and a/r/tographer, Koichi Kasahara.  Kukai is also known posthumously as Kobo Daishi.

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For me, this place was another dimension away from everyday life and I was immersed in that feeling. However, for enthusiastic worshippers, I felt that this place was the closest to Kobo Daishi and was the place where they could have absolute security. The next day, the Kumano River, as seen from the train window, became muddy from flooding. There was a place where a clear blue stream—which is usually the color of the Kumano River—flowed in and was about to cross. Nevertheless, the tributaries were pushed back by the flooded mainstream momentum, and the river’s surface was clearly divided into two colors. The beautiful scenery was presented in two colors; the white mainstream, and the clear blue tributary, which evoked a scene where the two colors flow in parallel along the vast currents of the Kumano River (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4). The Kumano River which visited right after the typhoon was colored in two colors A cloudy mainstream and a clear blue tributary Two streams with different speeds follow the same river without crossing each other It was an impressive and beautiful sight.

Figs. 4.3–4.4  Streams. Minako Kayama, 2018. Ceramics. Minako Kayama, 2018

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Seeing the contradiction, feeling, and finding qualities might be an approach to deal with such complex things and situations. This might lead us to concepts and strategies that do not contradictorily overcome various conflicts in peaceful and cultural ways. This is a feature of the Koyasan and Kumano areas as well. Do the streams in the river want to identify one another? We might be able to learn a way of coexistence from the water.6

4.12   Eliminate Boundaries: Inquiry into Tolerant Inclusion Satoshi Ikeda The theme of my work are the boundaries in social inclusion. The challenge involves the boundaries in societies created by decentralization, which have been criticized by Foucault (1988) and Derrida and Caputo (1997). In this work, I attempted to conceptualize and visualize tolerant boundaries through a/r/tography (Irwin et al., 2018). We visited and walked through the Koyasan Okunoin Temple, a World Heritage site around Kumano. An interesting aspect was the inclusive positioning of the tombstones and memorial towers, where people from various positions—generals, artist, emperors, war victims, common citizens, and founders of different religions—were all seamlessly lined up next to each other. From Ambiguous Boundary to Inquiry The waterfall turns into mist and disappears We can’t grasp the form The falling water beats the rock We can’t grasp catching the sound My mind is uplifting I can’t grasp this ‘feeling’ enough Many people have visited since ancient times,

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 Reflective re/braiding response by travel companion and a/r/tographer, Koichi Kasahara.

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and I should have felt something as I did But I can’t know that The sacred area is indicated by the torii gate wand the tight rope I don’t’ know where the failing water comes from and where it goes.7

I used a photo to create an artwork in which the gravestones belonging to three different religions—Buddhism, Shintoism, and Esotericism—stand together. The artwork was created using the method of intersection by arbitrary rules and random events (Solnit, 2001)— often employed in contemporary art. I used the following procedure: (1) scratching the outlines (boundaries) of an object; (2) taking an original photo and a scratched photo with multiple exposures; and (3) printing, and subsequently, steps 1, 2, and 3 are repeated. I experienced, observed, and considered what happened while creating this work (Fig.  4.5). During this process, as I continued to scratch the boundaries, the original shape of the object became ambiguous, and a new shape was created by another boundary connecting to it. This was followed by the emergence of newer boundaries of even more complexity. A boundary is a point of contact and a facing surface that separates something and a limit point that separates us from that. Keeping ambiguity, constantly changing shapes, having no outlines, and not completing do not lead us to easy conclusions. At Kumano, in particular, the Koyasan area, people from various positions were all seamlessly lined up next to each other and in the coexistence of different religions. The elimination of boundaries never ends; changing the line of boundaries with the holding center as deconstruction, the in between space was drawn. In art and pedagogy, these movements of intervention of boundaries become “integral to social, cultural, economic, and political process that are reimagined as concepts situated within events” (Irwin, 2008, p. 200). This inquiry generated such a ‘re/image’ of the artist/walker and historical, political, and social matters/ boundaries, and insights about boundaries through arts-based engagement.8

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 Written at Nachi Falls on August 30, 2018.  Reflective re/braiding response by travel companion and a/r/tographer, Koichi Kasahara.

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Fig. 4.5  Eliminate Boundaries. Satoshi Ikeda, 2018

4.13   An A/r/tographic Inquiry While Suffering from a Fracture Kayoko Komatsu My inquiry started with the suffering of a fracture. I fell at a point approximately 1 km from the destination. My right mountaineer boot got caught in the root of a tree and could not be pulled out, which caused me to fall forward and break my right wrist. I was in extreme pain due to this fracture, along with the discomfort caused by my anemia. In that physical condition, I had to slowly walk along the rest of the way to Motomiya-­ Hongu, which is one of the central shrines of Kumano. I felt as if an ‘injury arose in me’ rather than ‘I was injured’. The pain forced me to concentrate on walking in the here and now. I could not think about the distance to the destination—that is, the idea of transportation. I was thrown into a situation in which I could not think about anything other

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than just walking step by step; that was a curious sensation, in which every step I took, formed me. However, the next moment became so uncertain again that I had to timidly take the next step. The uncertainty of myself, which presented and vanished in every step I took, ‘exposed’ me to the world (Fig. 4.6). Lines in/along Kumano We walked in Kumano Walking is along the line The accumulation of our steps makes a line I wrote a text on the experience of my walking Text is also a line I cut my text and joined the lines into one long line The Nachi waterfall in Kumano is also a line I exhibited the text printed on papers, the long strings of text, And the books to which I referred to the cloth with the photo of the waterfall The lines link my experience to my inquiry The lines link my thinking to books written by others The lines link the time of my walking to the present

Fig. 4.6  Lines in/along Kumano. Kayoko Komatsu, 2019

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The lines link Kumano in Japan to Vancouver in Canada The lines link my artwork to the audience While we walk along the line, the line does not decide our way Every time we digress, the line can be changed I displayed the above several lines on the table, like an image atlas Paradoxically, it was a challenge to go beyond linear thinking This is one way of generating knowledge peculiar to art Lines in art education, which are not stable but fluid and uncertain, and could be a passage to a new world.

Walking is not just a methodology for understanding based on sensory experience and reflection. Masschelein’s (2010) notion of walking “allows for a view beyond every perspective since a perspective is bound to a standpoint in the sense of a subjective position, which is exactly also the position of a subject in relation to an object or objective” (p. 278). Walking, “it is about ex-­ position, being out-of-position” (Masschelein, 2010, p.  278). If so, what could we think about the position of our subjective, perceptive, somatic, reflective ‘position’ and ‘direction?’ It might be that as “to walk,” as Masschelein puts it, is to be “commanded by what is not yet given but, on the way to being given” (Ingold, 2015, p. 136). If so, the subject that gave rise to the events, that is the accident and accompanying awareness, is not human. The ancients would regard such events as the will of deities. However, we could consider these events as philosophical. If we share a sense of spirituality, it could be said that we experienced and considered the series of events as spiritual and rational. This doubleness is different from an ancient pilgrim. But it was critical for us to walk on foot as the ancients indeed. The subject that gave and brought unexpected events and awareness to walker/pilgrim (a/r/tographer) is not and beyond human beings. The walking inquiry is a methodology of re-­ experiencing, re-living, and re-thinking, and an invitation to us to explore the in-between space and time which dwells in doubleness. This might be momentum to move us to an ontological view that departs from human-­ centered perspective and epistemology.9

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 Reflective re/braiding response by travel companion and a/r/tographer, Koichi Kasahara.

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4.14   Manga Walking Toshio Ishii When we present the act of ‘walking somewhere’, we also present the temporal process of moving from somewhere to somewhere else. This is because the act of walking is a processual expression of the flow of time. This experience is like reading between the lines of a text, the space between one panel and the next is blank, which serves to complement the representation of time. If readers are also able to use that white space to stimulate thought, they will be able to intervene as parties that strengthen the realistic character of the time. This is because the existence of the always-experiencing ‘I’ exists prior to a dialogue with the ego (Figs. 4.7 and 4.8). He engaged in walking as a natural action—like he acts in his daily life—as if it were nothing special. He naturally faced his sensations and sensed the fall of water as a ‘magnificent event that outstrips any work of human beings.’ He became absorbed in that walking, and customary repeating movements became a form of belief. Walking is the most primeval form of repetitive action and in and of itself is thought of as a kind of prayer. These experiences and inquiries are a flow of daily life without predetermined objectives. This continuity of daily action and prayer, flow of water, and daily life is significant. Paying attention to something slight in our everyday life teaches us what forms ourselves within an accumulation of daily life, and arts-based methodology could be a useful method to get to know about it (Sullivan, 2000, cited in Barone & Eisner, 2012). Lasczik Cutcher and Irwin (2018) explored the process and experience during walking, emphasized that mindful walking became research methods for qualitative aspects of experience in art education through their a/r/tographic walking inquiry.10

10   Reflective re/braiding response by travel companion and a/r/tographer, Koichi Kasahara.

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Fig. 4.7  Poem/Document. Toshio Ishii, 2019

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Fig. 4.8  Manga Walking. Toshio Ishii, 2019

4.15   Place Walking Art at Kumano Kodo = A Search for Proactive and Free Learning Adaptation of Individuals (Inner Journey) and Society (Experiment of Community) Kazuji Mogi What walking art at Kumano Kodo clearly reaffirmed for me is that in a society where communication skills are strongly required, only art/education can be worked—that is, art should be the basis for establishing a symbiotic society (Mogi, in press). The journey to the inner side and the socialisation by art is seen from the way to Kumano Kodo, or from the inclusion/tensional relationship between individual constructivism and social constructivism in learning. The journey to Kumano Kodo is a product of the image of the world created by the human mind, and no matter how much secularity there is, the spiritual powers can create misery and

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rebirth in the land of the dead. Kumano Kodo is one of the few sacred places where you can live the above mentioned art through the world. If five people who participated in the walking art of Kumano were conscious of each other, while being protected by the natural god/deity of Kumano, they would be unconsciously exchanging something on a higher level than their senses and feelings. The meaningfulness of learning through art is essential to the notion that the individual and the whole are always creating a world that moves and responds. However, the whole InSEA exhibition seemed to explain Kumano’s personal experiences, feelings and interpretations: ‘community = relationship’ was confronted with hospitality, participation and play. Accordingly, I decided to turn the entire exhibition into a workshop. The content of the workshop is the virtual character of Hatsune Miku, a Vocaloid Software voicebank, and a Tianjin congratulatory song, ‘PV’, is played directly from YouTube while one is drawing their fortune and writing their dreams there (see Fig. 4.9). It is a message that cooperated with the ‘collaborativeness’ of saying that it is important to enjoy something meaningless and that play = art/education.

Fig. 4.9  Kumano Taisya × Norito × Omikuji …What kind of dream do you have? Kazuji Mogi, 2019

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Kazuji Mogi commented on this field trip that the walkers did not have solitude; as we generated unseen lines, the lines connected our hearts, and created unseen communication while walking. In our walking and inquiries, we each coexisted and shared together. Walkers might have their own aims, senses, and own ways of practices and collaboration. Subsequently, sharing such multiple and diverse internal experiences within the religious site suggests a connection between art and something in the internal/spiritual world or mind. If we engage in internal exploration, it is necessary to have solitude; however, we also need to share the same experience with someone, and a community will be generated to share the common memories by making us conscious about the unconscious. The emergence and status of inquiry is in the ‘middle’ and is neither an active nor passive voice. Through this a/r/tographic walking inquiry, he/we found that the collective and collaborative a/r/tographic inquiry has a possibility to re/form a community of practice for/as pedagogy.11

4.16   Marginal Field Takashi Takao

Kumagusu Monologue Hello! I’m Kumagusu Minakata and I was born 150 years ago. I am a biologist and an ethnologist. After traveling in the United States, Cuba, and England, I came back to Japan in 1902 and stayed alone in the Kumano forest for two years. Kumano inspired me a lot. Every day, I walked into the Kumano forest and collected many plants and stories. This task required concentration and it stopped me from going mad. Kumano is a marginal field. Kuma is ‘margin,’ and No is’ ‘field’ in their original meanings. For over 1,000 years, emperors and their families walked from Kyoto, which was the ancient capital of Japan, to Kumano, the

11   Reflective re/braiding response by travel companion and a/r/tographer, Koichi Kasahara.

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marginal field. They believed Kumano was the end of the world and continued to the next world. They prayed here for their happy next lives. Kumano blurs every boundary: the living and the dead, genders, healthy and handicapped, rich, and poor, as well as the noble and the excluded. I feel comfortable there, and I think it is because I am also a marginal man. While I was in Kumano, I drew some Mandalas. I received inspiration from Mahayana Buddhism. These are the maps of the whole universe. Am I an artist? Am I an a/r/tographer? I do not know, and I do not care. I just like drawing, reading, discovering, listening to stories, writing, and exchanging letters. It comes from pure curiosity and spontaneity. Is that enough? One hundred and twenty years later, a Japanese improvisational actor will be inspired by my ideas. Takashi Takao is a multifaceted artistic person; accordingly, he is an artist (improvisational actor), researcher (scholar), and a teacher (improvisational facilitator). Kumano blurs these boundaries. Kumagusu’s footprints with walking and researching in Kumano as a biologist and ethnologist, in a sense, looks like an a/r/tographer, though Kumagusu = Takashi Takao said, “I do not know,” “I do not care.” He/ they proposed sharing the experiences at Kumano with those who did not visit yet participated in the improvisational drama workshop (Figs. 4.10 and 4.11). The walkers wrote their impression of Kumano on a small sheet of paper, shuffled, and composed them, made script, and played with improvisation. This workshop was not meant to look back to understand but rather ‘pro’-ject to open a new question and disturbance (Derrida & Caputo, 1997). This approach shifted the walkers/participants from an epistemological view to an ontological and diffractive view/approach from which to generate the unforeseen. He also gave a field trip presentation at the InSEA 2019 World Congress employing performative engagements (Fig.  4.12). We walked, researched, made, and presented in a continuum of motions.12

12   Reflective re/braiding response by travel companion and a/r/tographer, Koichi Kasahara.

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Figs. 4.10–4.12  The presentation of “Kumagusu Monologue” at InSEA 2019. Takashi Takao, 2019. Drama Workshop to consider the experiences at Kumano. Takashi Takao, May 31, 2019

4.17   Students’ Document and Drawing Kaho Kakizaki and Minori Inoue Kaho Kakizaki walked Kumano Kodo with us and presented the documents of her experiences (Fig. 4.13). Minori Inoue joined (Fig. 4.14) and supported our inquiries in Canada during the InSEA (International Society for Education through Art) 2019 World Congress. If we compare this trip/inquiry to the stream of the Kumano River as the Minako Kayama’s text, their engagement brought the stream of this inquiry’s richer colors.

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Figs. 4.13–4.14  Document. Kaho Kakizaki, 2018. Drawing. Minori Inoue, 2019

4.18   Mapping A/r/tography Exhibition: Visualized and Spatialized Inquiries, and Where the Next Flow of Stream/Current Meets These walkers’ inquiries at/of/through the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trails in Japan were exhibited at the InSEA (2019) World Congress (Lee, 2020) and extended its steps/lines (Ingold, 2015) to The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The exhibition became a place where the walkers’ inquiries/ journeys were visualized and spatialized (Fig. 4.15) in a shared exhibition. It was art that simultaneously embodied their individual and collective inquiries at/of/through the Kumano Kodo. The members/walkers of this exhibition walked Kumano Kodo as a/r/tographers, and their inquiries migrated to Canada in the form of an exhibition. In the process, the challenge created a negotiation with ancient Japanese history, culture, religion, politics, and the richness of nature and religious stories (myths). Furthermore, it created a cyclical and generative journey of art education and research, intertwining various philosophies and concepts from the West and the East, nature and art, experience, and reflection: like the streams of the Kumano River and the currents that trip and round the Pacific Ocean. In our walkings, the footsteps on the ground could be compared to ‘lines’ (Ingold, 2015) and the lines turn into a stream or a river and a waterfall, that consequently, flows into the ocean. The rain that falls on the mountains of Kumano eventually flows into the Kumano River and onto the Pacific Ocean. The water of Nachi Falls flows into there the same way. After that, the water circulates through the northern hemisphere and ends up in Vancouver on the west coast of Canada, where it meets another flow of currents from other parts of the world. The lines of

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Fig. 4.15  Photographs of Exhibition of ‘A/r/tographic Inquiry through Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trails Walking’ at the InSEA 2019 World Congress, The University of British Columbia, July 9–13, 2019

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the streams and currents also change form through rain or atmospheric mist. We are lines of footsteps, streams, currents and moving/generating journeys. Of course, the journey is an existence and phenomenon beyond us, an encounter and experience beyond our consciousness. This multilayered flow of currents of time and space connects Western and Eastern a/r/tographers and circulates around the world creating a walking inquiry of a/r/tography. Acknowledgments  We would like to express the deepest appreciation to the members of ‘Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational Storytelling Across Historical and Cultural Routes of Significance’ grant support by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada 890-2017-0006 (PI: Irwin, Rita L.), and JSPS Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (18H0101; 18H00622; 18H01007, 20KK0045).

References Aoki, T. T. (2005). Spinning inspirited images in the midst of planned and live(d) curricula. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 413–423). Erlbaum. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts based research. Sage. Boulton-Funke, A., Irwin, R. L., LeBlanc, N., & May, H. (2016). Interventions and intraventions of practice based research. In P. Burnard, E. Mackinlay, & K. Powell (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of intercultural arts research (pp. 248–258). Routledge. Burke, G., Lasczik Cutcher, A., Peterken, C., & Potts, M. (2017). Moments of (aha!) walking and encounter: Fluid intersections with place. International Journal of Education Through Art, 13(1), 111–121. ISSN: 1743-5234. Den Heyer, K., & Fidyk, A. (2007). Configuring historical facts through historical fiction: Agency, art-in-fact, and imagination as stepping stones between then and now. Educational Theory, 57(2), 141–157. Derrida, J., & Caputo, J. D. (1997). Deconstruction in a nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Fordham University Press. Dilworth, D. (1969). The range of Nishida’s early religious thought: Zen no kenkyū. Philosophy of East and West, 19(4), 409–421. Fidyk, A., & Wallin, J. (2008). Rebraid: Repeated narrations. Educational Insights, 12(1), 1–14. Foucault, M. (1988). Madness and civilization: A History of insanity in the age of reason. Random House. (Original work published 1965).

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Hasebe-Ludt, E., Chambers, C. M., & Leggo, C. (2009). Life writing and literary métissage as an ethos for our times. Peter Lang. Hu, J. (2016). A/r/t field trip: Art Education Department, Hangzhou Normal University, 2016 Album of Student’s Presentations 2016.4.29-5.9. Art Education Department, Hangzhou Normal University. Ingold, T. (2015). The life of lines. Routledge. Irwin, R.  L. (2008). Communities of a/r/tographic practice. In S.  Springgay, R.  L. Irwin, C.  Leggo, & P.  Gouzouasis (Eds.), Being with a/r/tography (pp. 71–80). Sense. Irwin, R.  L. (2013). Becoming a/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 54(3), 198–215. Irwin, R. L., & de Cosson, A. (Eds.). (2004). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Pacific Educational Press. Irwin, R. L., LeBlanc, N., Ryu, J. Y., & Belliveau, G. (2018). A/r/tography as living inquiry. In P. Leavy (Ed.), Handbook of arts-based research (pp. 37–53). Guilford Press. Kasahara, K. (2019). Significant in/sight sustaining myself: A/r/tographic inquiry with walking and mapping methodologies. Imaging social innovation: Expanding the social role of art education. 2019 SAEK International Conference, Society for Art Education of Korea Proceedings, pp. 188–196. Kasahara, K., Gui, R., Zhou, Y., He, Z., Zheng, S., Nishina, T., Ishii, S., & Shoji, R. (2019). Mapping a/r/tography: Tokyo walking. In K.  Kasahara & R.  L. Irwin (Eds.), A/r/tography: A methodology of living inquiry as artist/ researcher/teachers (pp. 321–350). Bookway. (in Japanese). Komatsu, K. (2019). Walking the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage: An a/r/tographic inquiry while suffering from a fracture. Unpublished manuscript. Koyama, Y. (2000). Kumano-Kodo. Iwanami Shoten. (In Japanese). Lasczik Cutcher, A., & Irwin, R. L. (2018). The Flâneur and education research: A Metaphor for knowing, being ethical and new data production. Palgrave Macmillan. LeBlanc, N., & Irwin, R.  L. (2019). A/r/tography. In G.  Noblit (Ed.), The Oxford research encyclopedia of education (pp. 1–21). Oxford University Press. Lee, N. (Ed.). (2020). Mapping a/r/tography: Exhibition catalogue. InSEA Publication. Lee, N., Morimoto, K., Mosavarzadeh, M., & Irwin, R. L. (2019). Walking propositions: Coming to know a/r/tographically. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 681–690. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12237 Masschelein, J. (2010). The ides of critical e-ducational research: E-ducating the gaze and inviting to go walking. In Gur-Ze’ev, I. (Ed.), The possibility/impossibility of a new critical language of education (pp. 275–291). Sense.

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Mogi, K. (in press). Journey to the inner world and socialization through art/ education: Exploring the path to love and freedom, beginning with walking art. In K. Koichi, K. Morimoto, & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Walking a/r/tography: A journey of art and education through walking inquiry. Academin Research Press. (in Japanese). Nancy, J. L. (2000). Being singular plural. Stanford University Press. Nishida, K. (1993). Zen no kenkyu ̄ [An inquiry into the good]. Iwanami Bunko. (in Japanese) (Original work published 1911). Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin Books. Sullivan, A. M. (2000). Notes form a marine biologist’s daughter: On the art and science of attention. Harvard Educational Review, 70(2), 211–227. Takahashi, I. (2009). Shutaina, Seimei-no Kyoiku [Steiner, education of life]. Kadokawa. (In Japanese). Triggs, V., Irwin, R. L., & Leggo, C. (2014). Walking art: Sustaining ourselves as arts educators. Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art, 3(1), 21–34. Wakayama Prefecture. (2017). Sacred sites and pilgrimage routes in the Kii mountain range. Wakayama Prefecture. Walsh, S. (2000). Writing with the dark. Language and Literacy, 2(2), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.20360/G2X88N

CHAPTER 5

PROPositional Walking Daniel T. Barney, Corinne Christopherson, Shayne Eliason, Rebecca Lewis, Amber Logan, Amy Ollerton, Kaleb Ostraff, Priscilla Stewart, and Sophia Su

Abstract  Eight art education university graduate students and their professor engaged in walking research alongside art and educational discourses within an a/r/tographic community of practice. Implementing cameras, sketchbooks, audio recording devices, water bladders, and other props as tools, the educators experimented with these in creating experiential walks that give rise to new thought, senses, and imaginations as bodies moved through actual and virtual space. The authors present nine PROPositions that point toward a proposition for a walk, in various D. T. Barney (*) • C. Christopherson • S. Eliason • R. Lewis • A. Logan • A. Ollerton • P. Stewart • S. Su Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] K. Ostraff University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking with A/r/tography, Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_5

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locations along with suggested props or tools. Photographic documentation from the authors’ enactments of these propositions is included as reverberations. Keywords  Propositional walking • Visual essay • A/r/tography • Props and tools • Community of practice • Experiential walking Eight art education university graduate students and their professor engaged in walking research alongside art and educational discourses within an a/r/tographic community of practice. Implementing cameras, sketchbooks, audio recording devices, water bladders, and other props as tools, the educators experimented with these in creating experiential walks that give rise to new thought, senses, and imaginations as bodies moved through actual and virtual space. The authors present nine PROPositions that point toward a proposition for a walk, in various locations along with suggested props or tools. Photographic documentation from the authors’ enactments of these propositions is included as reverberations.

5.1   Introduction According to Pemberton (2019), the artist William Pope. L has been reemphasizing the loss of ‘verticality’ and a type of ‘lameness’ and begging for justice since the late 1970s in a series of multimedia site-based performances known as Crawls. Joanna Fiduccia (2015) describes the first of these artistic movements through space and place, Times Square Crawl, 1978: Dressed in a brown suit and yellow safety vest, Pope.L maneuvered through the crowds on his hands and knees, traveled at some distance by a photographer. The photographer’s lens caught the scene: tourists look on disconcertedly; unflappable locals continue their commute; a cop puts a paternalistic hand to the artist’s shoulder to urge him back to his feet. Pope.L crawls on. (Para 1)

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William Pope. L’s Crawls “disrupt our inattentive ways of seeing” but also are designed “for anyone who has lost ‘verticality’” in the world (Pemberton, 2019, para 3). From William Pope. L’s Crawls, we acknowledge that not all humans can walk in the same way, in every location, or during specific times in any historical moment. Context matters. Eight master’s students in art education who are teachers and artists, along with their professor, engage with Springgay and Truman’s (2018) notion of propositions, while also taking a cue from Pope. L and his use of props in his Crawls. For example, William Pope. L has crawled in a brown suit as mentioned earlier, but also in a superman costume, and has used props such as potted flowers, a stuffed animal, and a skateboard strapped to his back. Springgay and Truman’s proposition is a concept filtered from Whitehead (1978) through Manning and Massumi (2014). They explain, “Propositions are different from research methods or a research design in that they are speculative and event oriented… and are not intended as a set of directions nor rules that contain and control movement” (p. 2). The authors of this visual essay gathered specific objects, or props, in conjunction with a proposition or written provocation that orients ambiguously and idiosyncratically, rather than determining a specific cognitive, aesthetic, or kinesthetic destination. Hence, we as authors created PROPositions for walking, playing with notions of the propositional score, of utilizing props as an absurd foil to meaning making and traditional sculptural preciousness, and an attention to propositionality where the space in which we move is critically explored (albeit this final aspect is beyond the scope of this visual essay, but was theory-made within our course). Each of us filled a knapsack with various props for a potential a/r/tographic walk. Each of us set out on a different walk as an actuality, a real walk through space and time, and as a potentiality, a speculation of what could be. Within our graduate course we responded to a/r/tography and research-creation specifically and artistic research in general, and we were signaled by what William Pope. L’s Crawls set out to think, do, and feel walking uniquely, as a type of artistic inquiry, a thinking, doing, feeling, and making performance.

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The following visual essay1 is a particular form that could be read by a tertiary audience. Each of us, as artists, inquirers, and teachers, documented our walks in order to construct a form, or a visual essay, for what artist Harrell Fletcher calls a tertiary audience—experiencing the documented artwork through a mediated form, where the audience does not construct the artwork while experiencing the artwork directly (primary audience), nor does the audience experience the artwork directly even if readers/viewers have not constructed the work (secondary audience).2 We hope, however, the simple propositions and images within this visual essay might incite a doing as articulated by deSouza (2018) when stated, “Where and how we encounter artworks are crucial to how they are activated” (p. 29). Therefore, we present this curated form as one that goes beyond a simple retelling of what happened in our individual contexts and moves to a singular work where it will be activated by you, the reader, within this book as deSouza suggests viewers might become interactors or enactors that “engage with, assess, and continue to think and act upon these works” (p. 29). In this visual essay, we have: (1) written a brief proposition, score, or speculation for an actual or potential walk; (2) documented an aspect of a propositional walk enacted or imagined; and in some cases (3) presented a very brief response or provocation addressing the walk. These are not presented as a call to reenact the performances, but to incite new thoughts and possible pedagogical actions in different contexts.

1  Please note there are no figure numbers or titles because this is a visual essay and the images are critical texts, meant to be read as such, rather than as illustrations. 2  see http://www.harrellfletcher.com/somethoughts under the heading “12.24.18: Audience”

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5.2   Misuse a Tool: Daniel T. Barney Proposition—Misuse a tool to follow something small or large. I used an inexpensive USB otoscope as a prop that I attached to my mobile phone. I created a documentary mini-series of an ant on a walk. Normally, I use the otoscope to see inside my ear (top left image) or inside my throat (top right image), but using it as a micro video camera positioned me as a documentary videographer. The proposition to misuse a tool is an open invitation to create an event-oriented (Manning & Massumi, 2014) experiment that has the potential to reorient the artist educator (Barney, 2019).

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5.3   Healing Walk: Corinne Christopherson Proposition—Take two walks. First, walk with someone with whom you want to build trust. One of you may wear a blindfold and have the other lead the walk. Switch roles. Second, walk alone mindfully. In the first walk of the proposition, I chose to walk with Jordan, a friend in one of my classes at the University. I let Jordan choose our walking location and he picked a peaceful trail that overlooked the city lined with trees by the mountainside in our town. We do not know each other well, so at first the walk was a bit awkward as we guided each other, holding hands. As time went on, however, the walk became more comfortable and intimate as we shared vulnerable stories of triumph and sadness about our families. There was a unique sense of trust that grew on both sides of the

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walk; Jordan trusted me to guide him safely, while I trusted him as I shared venerable problems that needed solving, and vice versa. I tried to give Jordan the best advice I could in addressing his anxieties and I hope he felt my empathy and support. While I don’t know if Jordan’s advice addressing my problem helped my situation, I did feel more at peace confiding to someone and having them truly listen. The process of sharing was healing, and I felt a total sense of trust and confidentiality in our conversation. Jon Kabat-Zinn (1994) sees mindfulness as a practice of “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-­ judgmentally” (p. 4) as a way to end suffering. As for the walk I took by myself, I found a calm beautiful trail with lush trees away from the noise and bustle of my city. It was an escape from daily stress, allowing my mind to slow down as I contemplated my life, where things were going, my purpose, and what was most important to me. As I wandered, I paused to take notes and create drawings in a journal.

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5.4   Walk: Shayne Eliason Proposition—Practicing perception. Take a series of long, deep breaths, release any anxiety about the past or future. Create a pair of glasses that change the way you see the world. Put them on as you walk. Pause along the journey and cover your eyes completely. Be still. Listen, feel, and perceive the data collecting on your skin, hair, nostrils, lips, and tongue. Keri Smith (2016) says, “We need to push ourselves into new ways of seeing and thinking, alter our course regularly, use all of our senses during our explorations, forget what we know, question things, wake ourselves up” (p. 15).

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5.5   Walk: Rebecca Lewis Proposition—Walk while using the following 7 senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, kinesthetic movement, and proprioceptive observance (the sense of self-movement and body position). Walking as survival has been in my family for generations. My grandfather in his late nineties took three walks a day, the same two-mile trek through his San Diego urban neighborhood where he had been walking the past sixty years of his life. When my mother was left in her forties with fifty dollars and two children to raise in the 1980s, she went for walks. In twenty years of marriage my husband and I have remained under the same roof despite our differing views, backgrounds, hobbies, parenting styles, and life perspectives, partly because of the walk. There is something marvelous about a long excursion by foot by choice. According to Dan Rubinstein (2018): Walking can do more than boost confidence. It has been shown to promote new links between different parts of the brain, and to stimulate the growth of neurons and their ability to transmit messages. This can improve our memories and our ability to focus on complex ideas--it helps our brains navigate the intellectual puzzles of daily life. (p. 68)

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5.6   Walk: Amber Logan Proposition—Take a virtual walk Sometimes we don’t have time, money, mobility, access, health, strength, or mental ability to go somewhere we want to go. Whether that is to visit family, to vacation, to travel, to go home, to re-explore a place, or to enter a place we are not invited. Whatever the reason, during this digital walk, I discover the site through virtually walking place. First, I took a walk from my college campus to my apartment, recording the journey using a voice recording application. I passed by other people walking, talking, passed cars, walked up stairs, and was holding two plastic bags in my hands. It took about twelve minutes. Then, I took a virtual walk using Google Earth. I chose to walk from my childhood home, to the park to my best friend’s house, to my elementary school, and finally, I ended my journey at my other best friend’s house. For most of the journey I was in street view. I recorded my virtual walk using a screen casting application, recording my interactions in this new, but familiar reality.

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5.7  Sound Relations; Sound Perceptions: Amy Ollerton Proposition—Record the sounds of which you are unaware. Sound may be invisible, but it is still tangible. Other bodies sense sound beyond human ears. Some plants won’t release pollen unless an insect creates a specific sound wave, while some flowers make sweeter nectar when they sense the vibration of bee wings or similar frequencies (Buchmann & Hurley, 1978). What sounds are you not hearing? What sounds were here before the ones you currently experience? I asked my junior high school students to use a tape-recorder to record sounds on a neighborhood walk. We played the sounds back in our classroom then recorded over, deleted, or extended certain sounds. Recording this way is like using a notebook. One can cut in at any point, edit, write over, or erase them entirely.

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5.8  Paths as Liminal Spaces: Kaleb Ostraff Proposition—Find a body of water, fill a vessel of some kind with water from this source, find a path leading away from the water and begin to walk on it, slowly or quickly, release the water from the bag. Walk until the path ends or your bag is empty. The water will eventually evaporate, and the evidence of the walk disappears; the path returning to its previous state. Document your trail, journey, and experience. I consider paths, trails, and walk-ways to be liminal spaces or a meeting ground of the past, present, and future. I propose that the act of following paths and making paths through walking is a space, beyond the mind, where past, present, and future come together in “unending, dynamic movement” (Mondloch, 2005, p. 36). The idea of the proposition is to not dictate exactly what each person will do but to provide a space to explore new possibilities and interactions to result in new thought. This proposition engages the shul; a liminal path or track that Stephen Batchelor (1997) defines as “a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example… the impression of something that used to be there” (p.  80). Art educator, Jack Richardson (2017) states, art “is not a way of explaining the world; it is a way of coming to know the world, more specifically, a world that does not yet exist” (p. 95). Richardson emphasizes working in the fold, which is the space between the past and the future, leading toward the production of new thought. This in-between space is described as “the point of vibration where the virtual and the real achieve contact” (p. 102), “a fulcrum dividing what is known from what is possible” (p. 106), and “what is and what might be” (p. 108).

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5.9   Walk: Priscilla Stewart Proposition—Go on a long walk with someone to a high point in an environment. Ethically collect ideas, views, smells, things, and conversations along the way. Take time to sit, eat, and be with your companion. What is wilderness? How do we know what we know? What kinds of relationships do we have with the nonhuman world? What is a memory? Use a sketchbook to stop and draw along the way or to take notes about the conversation. Do a drawing together. Take time to make a collection of small rocks, fossils, bones, leaves, or sticks. What connections did you make, not only with the person but also with the place, the environment, the time, the objects, and your thoughts? This proposition is thinking not about what I know, or about what my fellow walker knows, but about the space between us, which could be described as conversation. As a teacher, artist, and researcher I often think about these intra-acting roles that are placed in conversations with an a/r/tographic approach. A good teaching conversation does not have a predetermined outcome, otherwise, it would be a speech. A good research project also does not have predetermined outcomes. A good conversation has the sense of unknown outcomes as does a good curriculum or research project. I could interpret this walking proposition as a curriculum. Curriculum, like other methodologies might describe ways of knowing that are valuable, which in this case, would be two people having a certain kind of experience, including reflection on that experience as a type of memory for future doings and imaginings. As a teacher I hope for my students to become engaged with the aesthetics of a place and experience, to step back and notice what was formerly not noticed, and to slow down (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017).

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5.10   Walk Home Remotely with Another: Sophia Su Proposition—Take a picture as you leave or return home for the day. Send it to someone you care about. Ask for a photograph from that person. Share images in this manner for an extended period of time as you both leave and return to your own homes. I have been in the United States for fourteen years, away from my family who live both in China and in Taiwan. In an effort to connect with my parents who lead busy lives, I began this experiential proposition of leaving home and returning home as a type of connecting conversation even though we do not live in close proximity to one another. Jean Vanier (1992) suggests we put others first by giving respect and dignifying each

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other by the way we listen and offer a type of self-dying “so that the other may live, grow and give” (p. 35-36). While I cannot be physically present with my parents, this proposition was what I could do to bring our thought and daily movements into a closer proximity where I offer my own view, while I also move to listen to theirs.

References Barney, D.  T. (2019). A/r/tography as a pedagogical strategy: Entering somewhere in the middle of becoming artist. The International Journal of Art & Design Education, 38(3), 618–626. Batchelor, S. (1997). Buddhism without beliefs: A contemporary guide to awakening. Riverhead Books. Buchmann, S. L., & Hurley, J. P. (1978). A biophysical model for buzz pollination in angiosperms. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 72(4), 639–657. https://doi. org/10.1016/0022-­5193(78)90277-­1 deSouza, A. (2018). How art can be thought. Duke University Press. Fiduccia, J. (2015). Lacks worth having: William Pope.L and land art. Shift, Issue 8. Retrieved from: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&so urce=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwizkt_tqPXqAhVZHjQIHRniCvkQFjABegQI A h A B & u r l = h t t p % 3 A % 2 F % 2 F s h i f t j o u r n a l . o r g % 2 F w p -­ content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F11%2F2_Fiduccia.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3mp1 Mix5g9VabePsCZ2GFZ Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness in everyday life. Hachette Books. Lasczik Cutcher, A., & Irwin, R.  L. (2017). Walking-through paint: A c/a/r/ tography of slow scholarship. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 14(2), 116–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2017.1310680 Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. University of Minnesota Press. Mondloch, K. (2005). Thinking through the screen: Media installation, its spectator, and the screen. The University of California. Pemberton, N.  T. (2019). Crawling through New  York City with artist Pope.L. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-­desk/ crawling-­through-­new-­york-­city-­with-­the-­artist-­pope-­l Richardson, J. (2017). Folding Pedagogy: Thinking between spaces. In J.  Jagodzinski (ed.), What is art education? (pp.  93-109). https://doi. org/10.1057/978-­1-­137-­48127-­6_4 Rubinstein, D. (2018). Born to walk: The transformative power of a pedestrian act. ECW Press. Smith, K. (2016). The Wander Society. Penguin.

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Springgay, S., & Truman, S.  E. (2018). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in) tensions, and response-ability in ­ research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1077800417704464 Vanier, J. (1992). From brokenness to community. Paulist Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality. Free Press.

CHAPTER 6

Walking a Square Meter of Territory: An A/r/tographic Appropriation of Everyday Place Through Printmaking Jessica Castillo, Ricardo Marin-Viadel, and Paloma Palau-Pellicer

Abstract  This visual essay details an A/r/tographic Visual Walking project where the authors created a one-meter squared engraving made up of one hundred 10 × 10-centimeter pieces and organized them into a series. The project employs the ground of the streets of our neighborhood as an engraving matrix, visually disclosing the way in which daily surroundings influence the construction of one’s identification. It also proposes the concept of ‘Displaced Engraving’ as an arts-based educational research technique to develop a direct and sensitive interaction with the urban environment. J. Castillo • R. Marin-Viadel Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] P. Palau-Pellicer (*) University Jaume I of Castellon, Castellon, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking with A/r/tography, Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_6

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Keywords  Printmaking • Engraving • Urban landscape • Visual art • A/r/tography

6.1   Displaced engraving Relief engraving began with the use of a plank of wood as a mold (Fig. 6.1), thus the technical name ‘xylography’. In the middle of the nineteenth century, wood was replaced with linoleum (a material that was patented for home construction) for its low price, ductility, and resistance, and because it offered the possibility of greatly enlarging the format of a printed image. The research for new supports that could be used as matrices to create engravings brought about the birth of new graphic modalities. Francesc Aracil (2001) points out three of such graphic modalities, namely: (a) the subtractive method, which consists of extracting material from the matrix; (b) the additive method, which consists of gluing materials to a support in order to create a matrix; and (c) mold systems, which replicate volume (similar to those used in sculpture) to construct the matrix. New technical strategies have caused the matrix concept to become unstable, putting tension on the tradition of engraving. This change in the meaning of printed work in the contemporary world has not only differentiated from tradition and moved toward contextual art but also intertwined different techniques to coexist in the artistic space (Valent, 2014). Consequently, “displacement in the field of engraving covers the essential deliberateness of activating this complex device involving a captured position in art, the present, and history” (Jorajuria, 2012, p. 11). Currently, three new engraving concepts have been proposed that are especially significant for our investigation (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.1  Collage artwork

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Fig. 6.2  Collage artwork

First, the concept of ‘Engraving Displacement’ by Carlos Gallardo (2018), developed in his piece A la carne de Chile. His artistic practice employs metaphors that integrate political arguments into his work, thus, redefining traditional engraving. Engraving’s serial nature made him associate it to an industrial activity: the sacrifice of thousands of cows for food. The matrix is re-conceptualized and disappears in Carlos Gallardo’s piece. Secondly, the concept of ‘Post engraving’ by J. P. Mellado (2020) calls institutional predominance into question and holds the opinion that the use of technological strategies to a create series of images is based on an implicit theory. This theory questions the notion of register and enables a substantial displacement from the classical model of engraving, allowing a new graphic culture to emerge. Thirdly, the concept of ‘Expanded Engraving’ by M.  Bernal (2016) indicates that the matrix contributed to its own physical disappearance by moving and broadening itself to include all that is susceptible to printing. Bernal confirms that this creative series has detached from previous paradigms to take on the function of generating unique objects.

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The three aforementioned concepts share these common ideas: (a) the enlargement of contemporary engraving to profound revisions of its historical attributes; (b) the expansion of the possibilities of traditional matrices, up to their disappearance; and (c) the reappraisal of engraved images’ multiplicity and organization into series. These three concepts are the basis for the engraving used in this a/r/tographic walking project because they employ the idea that a graphic experience expands the technical and conceptual limitations of creation. This theoretical displacement is related to physical, graphic, and investigative displacement, giving shape to the final work of art.

6.2   The Construction of Identity Through the Emotional Assessment of Heritage: A Strategy to Understand One’s Surroundings The process of identity construction based on heritage combines three concepts that interact: identity, heritage, and emotion/affectivity. Engraving implies altering a surface, changing it, giving it new information. For this reason, engraving and identity are comparable terms and we can therefore find many connecting points between the engraving creation process and the identity construction process. In agreement with A. Efland (1996), ‘identity’ is the representation that groups or individuals have of their position in social space and their relationships with other agents within that same space. This implies an essentially distinctive, long-lasting, and recognizable representation of themselves. Consequently, identity is a microcosm of ideas, values, beliefs, categories, memories, and/or objects; it is a relational structure in continual motion, within which the boundaries between the two spheres of public and private are blurred (Fig. 6.3). The engraving matrix undergoes changes in shape and content thanks to the print. At the mercy of the print, the subject/matrix constructs its identity progressively: full of information, forged under convergent processes and always under constant construction. The engraving matrix, like the subject, is hidden under the prints that transform it: so that fixed and stable identity becomes an open process that changes throughout one’s life. Contemporary, multiple, incomplete, ruptured identities … coexist in the subject, provoking tensions, changes and constant contradictions. (Garro-Larrañaga, 2014, p. 26)

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Fig. 6.3  Process of inking and printing

Heritage is one of the prints that shapes identity because it is not so much an object as it is a relationship between goods and people with respect to property, belongings, identity, and worth (Fontal-Merillas, 2013). Heritage is a live entity, an archetype that draws itself in order to understand and imply not only the tangible, but also the immaterial: the memory of belonging. Thus, heritage is the stage for change and cultural enrichment organized into a rhizome of relationships that include the subject and his/her environment. Heritage is a builder of identities that cannot exist if it is not used. In accordance with O. Fontal and S. Cepeda (2018), “links in heritage can be understood as a sort of bridge between people and the context in which they live” (p. 385). Therefore, the identifying processes of heritage are based on links between subject and object, the places where emotions and social meaning converge. Affection, attachment, and the sense of belonging are dimensions that are affected by heritage. An individual constructs a referential universe through contexts that his/her surroundings place in his/her path by experiencing it and giving it meanings. Thus, reality becomes subjective, experienced, and filtered:

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Feelings generate new knowledge and go back to being feelings once the object that provoked them is perceived again. In as much as an object can remember, an individual can feel even without the physical presence of these associated feelings. Based on this concept, emotion stems from a process. In other words, an initial Philia impression requires elaboration over time; its transformation is not immediate. (Gómez, 2014, p.69)

6.3   Walking Strategies and Artistic Displacement Space is the stage in which the subject develops a link with everyday life, softening perceptions and observations. Its emotional and affective worth gives rise to its symbolic reconstruction and with it, its appropriation, as something that is moving and transcendental because places belong to us and build us. Walking becomes an exercise that identifies one with a space, causing new materiality to emerge. Our project is based on three visual references that have systematically explored engraving’s connection to everyday urban spaces. Thomas Kilpper (2020) intervened with large, wooden, manually printed engravings on streets and buildings and arranged them on the ground with political and social messages. According to him, location is a history bin. In Don’t Look Back (2020), the artist considered a method for sculptural intervention or installation to be directed at people that are not regular museum visitors. The artist carved the ground of a basketball court of an old Second World War military base in Germany, transforming it into a gigantic engraving matrix. There, he brought together different people whose stories told an unofficial version of the story of the place. An installation emerged from his research about the collective political memory of the place. It was composed of graphic images giving voice to invisible protagonists of history. The same researchers move about (step on, walk through, and observe) the place in a re-vindictive act of appropriation (Fig. 6.4). At the beginning of the 1990s, Pascual Fort (Cirlot, 1997) developed the ‘Barcelona’ series (Ruiz, 2008) using molds of metal plates on the streets as matrices for an engraving of seismic proportion. The mark of the metal plates is an indication or symbol narrating the history of the ground we walk on. The artist walked through the streets of the city, assessing the aesthetic elements of the functional structures embedded in the ground such as the grate on the drains and above all the metal plates used as covers for the different types of services: water, sewer, electricity, and so on. Each engraving tells part of the city’s story, as do the personal walks. Raubdruckerin (2020) is a business and artistic engraving and fashion

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Fig. 6.4  Making prints from the ground

design by Emma France Ralf, who uses furniture elements and urban surroundings of large European cities to directly stamp onto pieces of clothing and accessories. The principal motivation behind this project was to stimulate one’s perception of one’s surroundings and be sensitive to the hidden beauty in everyday life.

6.4   A Meter Squared of Territory I need to rediscover other places whilst looking for streets to walk through, move about and experience. Action doesn’t come to a halt; I look for strokes in the shape of a haiku through my steps, trying to reveal the immediate sensations of my experience in nature. Artistic practice invites me to reflection evoked by my own mobility, based on the idea of memory or strangeness and my experience of how foreign or characteristic spaces are at the same time. (Martínez-Morales, 2016, p. 39)

A Meter Squared of Territory is an engraving created from walking research around the neighbourhood in which an author lives. This space is a great stage within which life occurs, and it invites many opportunities for its inhabitants to be discovered. The emotional appropriation of everyday surroundings and memorable places, because they were always walked through on daily displacements, intensifies the appreciation of our feet’s touch to the ground that we step on. In exploring walking, one’s whole body and one’s gaze recognize what our feet have. We know that there are a plethora of urban decisions, civic rules, technical necessities, and political impositions that leave their print on the ground we walk on. Thus, displacing ourselves with sensitivity on the relief of the urban pavement means we

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discover marks and three-dimensional cues conforming the enormous palimpsest of horizontal surfaces in the urban territory, a permanent and variable visual speech of cultural elements. One of the artistic techniques based on alterations in the relief of a flat surface is engraving. This means that the urban pavement can be interpreted as an enormous matrix with certain engraving properties: the ground we walk on can be copied, reprinted, and redefined in accordance with our personal and collective use of urban routes. Engraving and identity converge under the metaphor of the print as an impression that is born, stays, and joins many other impressions. The project A Meter Squared reflects on the artistic techniques of engraving and stamping, displacing and enlarging them to posterior acts of investigation and action from their traditional roles. The walk developed in this work is composed of successive conscious and emotional journeys around the neighborhood. These are not extraordinary displacements, but on the contrary, involve going to the supermarket, the school, the bus stop, and the gym. These journeys are repeated over and over again, and information is continually experienced through the eyes of the habitual passer-by, opening up the possibility of discovery and surprise for those that learn to look meticulously. In these daily displacements, it is possible to identify the exact location of small territories of special interest. At night, when few passers-by are about, we return to these places. We only need water-soluble ink, a small paint roller to spread the ink over the relief of the ground and a piece of tissue paper. The purpose of the chalcographic press is to firmly press paper against the ink covered matrix; the sole of our shoes also work when we walk over the paper. Each small surface chosen as a matrix stays printed on the paper in the same way that we walk, repeatedly going over our own steps in a rhythmic cycle. The qualities of the ink, especially its solubility in water, make it noninvasive and non-transgressive in places where an image is retrieved. The scarce quantity of ink that remains on the ground once the print is made will be easily erased with each step. Later in an engraving workshop, each semitransparent stamp is mounted on industrially produced paper or material: a map, a newspaper, a commercial, or political propaganda brochure. Both images merge into one (Fig. 6.5). A Meter Squared of Territory is therefore an aesthetic search for a public space. The final piece makes symbolic use of constitutive objects, appropriating from the space “where a common person achieves individuality from

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Fig. 6.5  A Meter Squared of Territory

a collective identity, a radical human space which looks to change life as is just as does criticism of everyday life” (Jiménez-Pacheco, 2016, p. 24).

6.5   Conclusion This visual a/r/tography project is a graphic conclusion to an everyday urban setting. It was explored through the artistic action of walking over the identifying experience of the urban surroundings in which one lives. The visual result is a graphic piece that represents an intimate relationship with the place in which one lives. It is a personal story that rediscovers the

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limits of engraving techniques and the aesthetic qualities of the everyday urban setting. In our work of art, a neighborhood transforms its outward appearance and allows for diverse experience-based extraction of meaning, where small stories emerge, making interactions evident as in the surprise of the print. This artistic piece will subsequently become a learning device that can be used in school and social educational contexts because engraving, taken from its matrix, broadens educational possibilities and collective participation; it accents the symbolic content and not the technique. Acknowledgements  This investigation was conducted thanks to the financing given by the National Science and Technology Research Commission: ANID-­ PFCHA/DOCTORADOBECAS CHILE/2016- 72170041.

References Aracil, F. (2001). La obra gráfica de José Fuentes Esteve (1975-1996) [The graphic work of José Fuentes Esteve 1975-1996]. Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Bernal, M. (2016). Los nuevos territorios de la gráfica: imagen, proceso y distribución [The new territories of graphics: Image, process and distribution]. Arte, Individuo Y Sociedad, 28(1), 71–90. Cirlot, J. (1997). Pascual Fort. Esmalts, gravats, relleus [Pascual Fort. Enamels, engravings, reliefs]. Diputación de Tarragona. Efland, A. (1996). Postmodern art education: An approach to curriculum. National Art Education Association. Fontal-Merillas, O., & Marín-Cepeda, S. (2018). Nudos Patrimoniales. Análisis de los vínculos de las personas con el patrimonio personal [Heritage Nodes. Analysis of personal heritage links]. Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, 30(3), 483–500. Fontal-Merillas, O. (Coord.) (2013). La educación patrimonial. Del patrimonio a las personas [Heritage education. From heritage to people]. Trea. France, E. (2020, May 20). Raubdruckerin. Emma France. http://www.emmafrance.de/work/raubdruckerin Gallardo, C. (2018). A la carne de Chile [To the meat of Chile]. Editorial Larrea Marca Digital. Garro-Larrañaga, O. (2014). El arte y la construcción del sujeto: una reflexión con Nan Goldin acerca de las narrativas familiares [Art and identity construction: Reflections about family narratives with Nan Goldin]. Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, 26(2), 255–269. Gómez, C. (2014). El origen de los procesos de patrimonialización: la efectividad como punto de partida [The origin of heritage processes: Effectiveness as a starting point]. Educación artística: Revista de investigación (EARI), 5, 66–80.

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Jiménez-Pacheco, P. (2016). Claves epistemológicas para descifrar el derecho a la ciudad de Henri Lefebvre [Epistemological clues to figure out the right to the city of Henri Lefebvre]. Estoa. Revista De La Facultad De Arquitectura Y Urbanismo De La Universidad De Cuenca, 5(8), 21–28. https://doi. org/10.18537/est.v005.n008.03. Retrieved from https://publicaciones. ucuenca.edu.ec/ojs/index.php/estoa/article/view/755 Jorajuria, R. (2012). El artista contemporáneo frente al cúmulo de ruinas [The contemporary artist in front of the pile of ruins]. Estampa, 11, 10–11. https:// issuu.com/dngautumn/docs/estampa11. Kilpper, T. (2020, April 1). Don’t look back | Camp King Oberursel | 1998/2002. Thomas Kilpper. https://www.kilpper-­projects.de/ dont-­look-­back-­camp-­king-­oberursel-­1998-­2002/ Mellado, J. (2020, May 1). El concepto de desplazamiento del grabado. Informe de campo [The concept of engraving displacement. Field report]. http://www. portalguarani.com/1755_justo_pastor_mellado/7436_el_concepto_de_desplazamiento_del_grabado_infor me_de_campo__por_justo_mayor_ mellado_.html Martínez-Morales, M. (2016). Andando … La acción de andar como práctica artística desde una perspectiva a/r/tográfica [Let's go … The action of walking as an artistic practice from an a/r/tografic perspective]. Universidad de Jaén. http://hdl.handle.net/10953/722 Ruiz, C. (2008). El molde de bloque como matriz. Una mirada personal al relieve en la gráfica contemporánea [The block mold as a matrix. A personal look at relief in contemporary graphics]. Universidad politécnica de Valencia. Valent, G. (2014). Del grabado a la gráfica artística [from engraving to graphic art]. Arte e Investigación, 10, 101–107. http://papelcosido.fba.unlp.edu.ar/ ojs/index.php/aei/article/view/246

CHAPTER 7

Pedagogical Bipedalism Jun Hu

Abstract  Human walking may be understood as a pair of feet engaged in regular intervals creating an equilibrium of movement. It is not the single foot that counts, but the plurality of movement and interaction. Three ways of perceiving a pedagogy of walking are advanced in this essay as important to consider for a pedagogical bipedalism: (1) walking as a dynamic way of seeing, (2) walking as a pedagogy of the oppressed, and (3) walking as rhythmical knowing. These ways of walking emerged from three studies that examined walking as instructive in a/r/tographic pedagogical perspectives: an a/r/t field trip course for college students majoring in art education and two art projects for the young special needs: the blind walking of the blind and the virtual walking of the autistic. Together, these studies help conceptualize bipedalism of walking as a pedagogical strategy for a/r/tography. Keywords  Pedagogy • Walking • A/r/tography • Blind walking • Virtual walking • Pedagogy of walking

J. Hu (*) Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking with A/r/tography, Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_7

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7.1   Introduction Human bipedal walking provides me with an embodied paradigm to reflect on the dynamics of a/r/tography. Plato defined the human being as a ‘featherless biped’ in his dialogue Statesman (Rowe, 1995), for the human is the only terrestrial creature whose walking is featured by constant bipedalism that employs an upright spine and two feet. As humans walk, the exchange between the left and right foot produces a pace at regular intervals. How have these specific features of walking influenced my understanding of a/r/tography? I draw insight out of my Tai Chi practice on how bipedal walking conditions enact passive dynamics. For over ten years, I have been practising Tai Chi, a Chinese sport that is very demanding in how one moves, ensuring the movement is as smooth and natural. While perfecting Tai Chi movement daily, I have found that two elements are crucial. One is to keep your spine upright, the other is to avoid an even distribution of weight on both feet. Simply by shifting the center of weight between the two feet, gravity pulls your body into a movement that rotates around the axle of your spine, re-adjusting the spine upright to follow with a posture change. Doing so is a dynamic process, enabling graceful and rhythmic movement. According to experience, it takes an average person roughly three years to master the skill, but, to my surprise, it turned out to be nothing but the basics of walking. I realized it when I was watching a video, ‘Steve Collin’s Passive Dynamic Robot.’1 It is a bipedal robot that can walk down a slope in a remarkably humanlike motion. It fascinated many YouTube viewers for its awesome combination of simplicity and efficiency. The scientists who designed it termed its mechanism ‘passive dynamics’ (Collins, et al., 2001; Collins, et al., 2005) for the robot walks with no power or control system and is pulled by gravity. What I had spent years learning was simply what the brainless robot did. From my embodied experience of walking in Tai Chi, I propose passive dynamics as a mechanism of a/r/tography. If one perceives the identities shifting in-between artist, researcher and teacher as similar to the weight shifting between the two feet, and the slash ‘/’ to the upright spine, we have an opportunity to reimagine a/r/tography through the way we walk. Enlightened by ‘Steve Collin’s Passive Dynamic Robot’ (2001, 2005) and my embodiment of Tai Chi walking, I have come to appreciate a 1

 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Q2Lx8O6Cg

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metaphoric understanding of a/r/tography and want to relocate the slash ‘/’ to re/de/territorialize art, research and teaching. In Tai Chi, the passive dynamics lie in the distraction of forces of resistance from one foot to bring gravity into action, setting off the interaction between two feet rather than positively exerting muscle strength to make a step. In a/r/tography, the passive dynamics lie in recognizing what is unknown or unpredictable rather than what is already known and foreseeable as an incentive to be creative as an artist, to be as curious as a researcher, and to be as inspired as a teacher. This understanding supports a/r/tography as a living inquiry that is sustainable, self-motivated and open-ended based on a vital relationality (Irwin, et al., 2018) in bipedal walking. Some recent research on infants’ onset of walking provides evidence that the human instinct for walking has an intellectual aspect that has been under-appreciated. Recent studies show that walking is a milestone of human cognitive development. It has been observed by cognitive scientists that, from crawling to walking, the change of posture makes a difference in the infant’s visual experience (Kretch, et al., 2014), and the infant demonstrates increased and more sophisticated social interactions (Clearfield, 2011), as well as increased competence in language comprehension and expression (Walle & Campos, 2014; He, et al., 2015). The development of the infant’s increased ability to walk is parallel to the infant’s ability to tap or move in response to music (Larsson, 2014). With bipedal walking as a form of living inquiry that supports the understanding of passive dynamics as its motivating power, I raise three ways of perceiving the pedagogical potentialities for walking in a/r/tographic learning.

7.2   Three Ways of Perceiving a Pedagogy of Walking 1. Walking as a dynamic way of seeing. How does a dynamic way of seeing make a difference when viewing others and objects? 2. Walking as pedagogy of the oppressed. What implications might there be between an uprightness in walking upon our rights, and an engagement with justice with art education? 3. Walking as rhythmical knowing. How might the pace and duration of walking be taken as an intuitive way of communication beyond language capacity?

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7.3   Walking as a Dynamic Way of Seeing The joy of encountering something novel is always part of my motivation to take a walk, for I am often refreshed by surprise findings in the landscape. To some extent, recreational walking ‘re-creates’ my relationship with nature. In an East Asian cultural context that cherishes landscape poetry as the highest genre of literature, and landscape painting of all visual arts, nature has always been cherished as a source of wisdom, so it is in the long-standing Chinese pedagogical tradition of ‘Read ten thousand books, walk ten thousand miles’.2 l developed an A/r/t Field Trip course (Hu, 2018) recognizing this tradition with the intention to encouraging my undergraduate art education students to experience their a/r/tographic identities. Taking three to four weeks to experience historical sites and natural wonders along a route of 5000 kilometers, mostly the Silk Road in Northwest China, walking (metaphorically) is recreational not only in the sense of tourism, but also in the sense of an a/r/tographic pedagogy facilitating students intertwined identities as artists, researchers and teachers. During the intensive field trip travel, there is a dynamic way of seeing when both the viewer and the viewed are in a state of constant change. The experience opens opportunities for students to have new insights, to question and rethink taken-for-granted perceptions, and to experiment with various artistic inquiries. For example, my student Wei Li felt an a/r/tographic transformation process when he was traveling uphill in a coach bus moving from the hot desert to the icy-cold and snow-covered Dadongya Mountain Pass, rising up to the altitude of 4120m on the Tibetan Plateau. He took photos of the snowy landscape all the way up, as the view was shockingly beautiful and something he had never experienced before. He decided to use this transformative experience as the theme of his a/r/tographic assignment to create art and teach a workshop. Yet, the next day, as he reviewed his photos, he felt at a loss, for surprisingly all the heightened experiences he had felt were not apparent in the photos (see Fig. 7.1). This sharp contrast in comparison between the two experiences conditioned his a/r/tographic inquiry by raising the 2  Translation from original Chinese text “读万卷书, 行万里路, 二者不可偏废” with references from a book in Qing dynasty: 钱泳(清)《履园丛话》。“读万卷书, 行万里路”一语似 为古训, 有更早的渊源, 如: 明末画家董其昌的《画禅室随笔》卷二十画诀中: “读万卷书, 行万里路, 胸中脱去尘浊, 自然丘壑内营, 立成鄄鄂。”清代梁绍壬《两般秋雨庵随笔》卷 五《眼镜铭》: “读万卷书, 行万里路, 有耀自他, 我得其助”。

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Fig. 7.1  Dadongya Pass at Mt. Qilian; Altitude: 4120 m; Photo by Wei Li

question: Where did that transformation come from? In the end, he found out that it wasn’t in what he had seen, but in what he had sensed as his breath quickened and his heart beat raced, which were the symptoms of high-altitude sickness that had endowed an aesthetic cloak over his view. Based on that new insight, he developed an art-making strategy counting on the sensation of fear, for it quickens the breath and the heartbeat. He designed an art workshop that invited classmates to document their fear as a form of art. After some further research on performance artists that resort to fear, he offered this instruction for his art workshop: Try something that is terrifying to you, document it by whatever means, and experience the consequent pleasure that comes right after the act. In his workshop, fellow student Shengjie Wu tried climbing up a pole to experience his fear of heights (see Fig. 7.2), and another student tried holding a spider in the palm of her hand. They documented with video and photography, and presented them as art works.

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Fig. 7.2  Shengjie Wu’s performance to experience fear as art performance at Wei Li's workshop, 2016

Wei Li’s revelation on the nuanced relevance between art and the sensation of fear was not taught by the teacher in a classroom, but was selftaught in the process of the field trip. Without this profound experience of the field trip, it is hard to imagine how he might have arrived at that

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insight in domestic life. As the field trip went through a series of unfamiliar territories, students encountered many surprises and each developed a unique study. In the A/r/t Field Trip, an instinctive curiosity works like gravity: the relativity between the inexperienced/experienced is like the pairing of feet. An a/r/tographic intellectual process is put into a chain reaction of readjusting the ‘/’ between the inexperienced/experienced by relocating ‘/’ as a troubling in-between. Wei Li’s ingenuity lies in the revelation that the sensation of fear could become the source of aesthetic experience. This revelation could not be made possible without walking in natural wonder.

7.4   Walking as a Pedagogy of the Oppressed Instead of equality, it is the dynamic exchange in between opposing parties that defines justice and righteousness: a lesson I learned from walking. Walking is a metaphor for achieving social justice in a dynamic rather than static way, because human walking is purposeful. Walking will not happen if one stands on one foot alone, nor if one puts equal weight on both feet. Equal weight on both feet results only in immobility. Admitting diversity and effectuating dynamic balance are metaphorically enacted, and urge us to imagine social justice rather than a static equality. It has been inferred in Paulo Freire’s (2001) Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “we need to overcome the contradiction between the oppressed and the oppressor through a mutual process of humanization; social justice cannot be achieved only by the equality appeal of the oppressed, without the restoration of the humanity of both” (p. 44). Taking the radical examples of eight blind pupils in my In/visible Project at Zhejiang Special School for the Visual Impaired (half became blind and half were born blind), I was inspired to consider their positionality. I realized that we needed a movement of ideas to assist these students. Through the passive dynamics of bipedal walking, we might achieve social justice in an artful way. One instructive lesson is that it is the foot that has less distribution of weight that pulls the body into the next step forward. This resonates with how pedagogy is conceptualized as a pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire (2001), who has made it clear that the power of liberation is in the weakness of the oppressed, not in the power that the oppressors yield (p. 44). In my project, I think of ‘reverse inclusion’ as the power to integrate the disadvantaged into society does not come from the

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advantaged, but from the disadvantaged themselves. During a print-­ making workshop that I have been holding at Zhejiang Special School for the Visual Impaired for three years, blind pupils have learned to do print-­ making based on tactile input. From the very beginning, the blind pupils demonstrated extraordinary art talent and their works have been exhibited at Shanghai Art Fair (2017) and Zhejiang Art Gallery (2017) with public and professional approbation for their in/visible power. That power from the blind has set the ground for ‘reverse inclusion’ in the blind walking project that invites normal people to be involved in a print-making workshop taught by the blind pupil. The other instructive lesson is that it is the interaction of both feet that count for walking. It deactivates walking if one stands on one foot only or distributes even weight on both feet. Justice is not a one-way street, and equality is not achieved by sameness. It is sometimes dangerous to take justice for granted as equal rights demand of the weak, as Paulo Freire (2001) warns: if the oppressed struggle for their own emancipation only, they will not “become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both” (p. 44). As early as a child’s onset of walking, constantly adjusting the body upright to avoid falling they are potentially embodying justice and rights in human unconsciousness prior to conceptualization. It is the dynamic equilibrium between two feet rather than the static equality that defines justice and rights. In addition to Freire’s claim that emancipation power comes from the oppressed, he also claimed that the historical task of the oppressed is “to liberate themselves and the oppressor as well” (p.  44). To make that happen, I designed ‘Wormhole’, an installation for blind walking to take place. Built together by my volunteer students and blind pupils, it is a tunnel made of steel frame and elastic milk-silk fabric, some 15 m long; at the height of 70 cm at the entrance and 220 cm at the exit. To participate, one has to put on a blindfold to walk about. Blind walking is the prelude to an art workshop on printmaking taught by the blind pupils. Within the Wormhole, there are obstacles hanging from the ceiling, each hand-made by blind pupils. Some of them feel smooth, round and cool, while others feel spiky, irritating and distorted. When people are walking through, it is a bit scary for sighted people, who are disoriented when blindfolded and feel difficult to keep their balance as they avoid obstacles. In contrast, the blind pupils are at ease. When sighted participants balance themselves walking blindfolded, a new social balance is established through learning the life of the blind (see Fig. 7.3).

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Fig. 7.3  Children’s Day (June 1, 2018) Wormhole project at a community centre, Hangzhou. The girl in blue T-shirt not wearing the blindfold is a fifth-grade pupil at Zhejiang Special School of the Blind

In the Wormhole, there are boxes containing gifts of all kinds, and every participant is asked to bring a gift for exchange. Anybody can bring anything to exchange and leave with anything they desire, but under the condition that one has to finish a print representing the gift they received. The job is completed in the workshop that blind pupils teach. This part of the project is especially attractive to children, who bring their toys to exchange, and are often excited at the sight of the surprising outcome of their art work when they take off the blindfold (see Fig. 7.4). Guo Rui, professor of law and researcher of Harvard Project of Disability, has been promoting equal rights for the disabled. When he took part in the Blind Walking project at Treasure Dragon Art Gallery in Hangzhou in 2018, he was interviewed by a news reporter of Central China Television (CCTV),

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Fig. 7.4  Kuankuan, taught by two blind pupils in blue T-shirts, printed his work about the plastic toy of a handsaw

and said: “Rid of visual ability, more sensual capacity has been opened up. This transforms my understanding of equality as a professor of law”.3 Through bipedal walking, we not only empower the blind but also the sighted. Thus, by creating new relationships in-between two communities, the ethics of social justice is defined not as static equality but as a process of encounter that is complex and dynamic, open to challenge and revision (La Jevic, & Springgay, 2008, pp. 70–71).

7.5   Walking as Rhythmical Knowing Walking is a rhythmical act in pace and is critical to human cognition. Since the human brain is extremely sensitive to rhythm, it is capable of instant synthesis input, as demonstrated in the appreciation and 3  Live broadcast at CCTV New online for one hour on November 30, 2018. 2018年11月 30日, CCTV央视新闻网1小时现场直播: 央视新闻移动网《关爱残疾人 艺术无障碍》. https://www.newscctv.net/219appshare/article.html?vid=76FF8D7B-D007-6920-1DC613063280A4E8&from=timeline&isappinstalled=0

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composition of music. There are studies suggesting that the evolution of this human capacity might have root in distinguishing the sound of footsteps of predators and prey in a complicated mixture of background noise, as well as in synchronizing with partners in group action, which has given humans a survival advantage (Leisman, et  al., 2016). This sensitivity to rhythm is characteristically human, for human creativity in this is unmatched by any other creature on earth. Rhythmical bipedal walking is itself an abstract machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 141) that generates meaning, because the pace serves as the supreme signifier (p. 117), which is “the sign that refers to other signs ad infinitum and that the infinite set of all signs” (p. 115) refers back to itself, or folds upon itself, in an autonomous, self-sufficient formalization of expression. This relevance between rhythmical walking and art also has a clue in the etymological root of ‘metre’ that can be traced to the Greek verb μετρέω (metreo) (to measure, count or compare). ‘Metre’ refers to the rhythm of poetry and is the length unit of approximately a footstep. Does this relevancy between pace and poetry have any implications for art education? I developed a relational art project that explores the potentiality of virtual walking. It is played by multiple participants pasting around coloured paper dots on a grid board. To begin with, each participant is asked to make a pattern with dots in two colours. Then, one repeats the motif consecutively to draw a line. In this way, each walk in rhythmical pace on the grid (see Fig. 7.5). As there are multiple participants, each with its own motif, their lines will intrude on the lines of others and cause conflict. To deal with the conflict, there are two simple rules to follow: (1) ask for permission if you need to go across another’s line; and (2) you can make any rule you like with the consent of all participants. My motivation to design the project was to enhance social skills of young sufferers of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by creating an interactive art environment. This was first offered as an experiment at Yanglingzi Special School, with nine ASD juveniles participating. I wondered if the collective art would be accepted, because the students were used to doing art alone and shunned anything demanding social skills or team work. To my surprise, they embraced it without hesitation and were highly engaged in it without showing any deficiency in necessary communication skills just after a few rounds. In the process, social interaction is activated as the lines run parallel to, deviate from, or run across one another. As students play the game and follow these rules, they learn basic social skills as if walking

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Fig. 7.5  Mosaic animation project participated by nine autistic juveniles at Yanglingzi Special School, Hangzhou, 2017

into each other in this virtual space and ultimately create an exuberantly colorful mosaic art is created (see Fig. 7.6). More surprisingly, they were self-motivated to communicate in a visual language which seemed like a magical process to the vice president of the school who observed the experiment. This project has now been well received as art therapy in several ASD rehabilitation centers, for it is more efficient in enhancing social skills than any existing treatment. This helped me conceptualize walking as cognition in pace. The art-making process is a virtual walking together in their mind, with the rhythmical act of pattern repetition alluding to the pace of walking. It manifests itself when the ASD juveniles proudly point to their final art work, claiming: “I walked from there to here, I met somebody there.” Virtual walking has some of the same cognitive effect as actual walking as it is suggested by cognitive science that the mental process of walking alone can affect cognition as much as actually walking because they are controlled by the same brain area (Leisman, et  al., 2016). Thus, art-­ making through virtual walking, has led to positive cognitive development

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Fig. 7.6  Mosaic collage, by nine autistic juveniles at Yanglingzi Special School, exhibited at Zhejiang Art Gallery, Hangzhou, 2017

for students with ASD symptoms. Having benefitted around 200 young ASD sufferers at major rehabilitation centers in my city, including Zhejiang Rehabilitation Center of the Disabilities and Hangzhou Carnation ASD Children’s Rehabilitation Center, this pedagogy deserves further exploration.

7.6   Conclusion The passive dynamics of human bipedal walking have unconsciously conditioned human cognition that determines human ways of being. The three themes and questions I raised point to the potential impact of bipedal walking: walking as a dynamic way of seeing, walking as a pedagogy of the

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oppressed, and walking as rhythmical knowing. Each are related as an organic whole in my consideration of a/r/tography as a transformative pedagogy that is open-ended, relational, and self-motivated. In the discussion on Wei Li’s case in the course of the A/r/t Field Trip, the focus is on the pedagogical impact of the constant changing situation during the process of walking, which enables a/r/tographic inquiry in the way that “it invites one to move and be moved in search of meaning, conceptually, artistically, physically and relationally” (Lee, et al., 2019, p. 681). In the discussion of the blind walking project, the focus is on the pedagogy of the oppressed that supports social justice art education that is made possible by a/r/tographic strategies that invent radical relatedness between communities (Bickel, et al., 2011) often segregated. In the discussion on the virtual walking project for those with ASD, the focus is on how the rhythmical pace of walking makes meaning, enhancing the social skills of ASD as a relational a/r/tographic pedagogy. These three ways of perceiving a pedagogy of walking are advanced as important to consider for a pedagogical bipedalism.

References Bickel, B., Springgay, S., Beer, R., Irwin, R. L., Grauer, K., & Xiong, G. (2011). A/r/tographic collaboration as radical relatedness. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 10(1), 86–102. Clearfield, M.  W. (2011). Learning to walk changes infants’ social interactions. Infant Behavior and Development, 34(1), 15–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. infbeh.2010.04.008 Collins, S., Ruina, A., Tedrake, R., & Wisse, M. (2005). Efficient bipedal robots based on passive-dynamic walkers. Science, 307(5712), 1082–1085. Collins, S.  H., Wisse, M., & Ruina, A. (2001). A three-dimensional passive-­ dynamic walking robot with two legs and knees. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 20(7), 607–615. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Freire, P. (2001). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. Hu, J. (2018). Pedagogical reform: From a field trip to an A/R/T field trip. In A. Sinner, R. L. Irwin, & T. Jokela (Eds.), Visually provoking: Dissertations in art education (pp. 19–29). Lapland University. He, M., Walle, E. A., & Campos, J. J. (2015). A cross-national investigation of the relationship between infant walking and language development. Infancy, 20(3), 283–305. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12071

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Irwin, R. L., LeBlanc, N., Ryu, J. Y., & Belliveau, G. (2018). A/r/tography as Living Inquiry. In P. Leavy (Ed.), Handbook of arts-based research (pp. 37–53). The Guilford Press. Kretch, K. S., Franchak, J. M., & Adolph, K. E. (2014). Crawling and walking infants see the world differently. Child Development, 85(4), 1503–1518. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12206 Leisman, G., Moustafa, A.  A., & Shafir, T. (2016). Thinking, walking, talking: integratory motor and cognitive brain function. Frontiers in Public Health, 4, 94. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2016.00094 Larsson, M. (2014). Self-generated sounds of locomotion and ventilation and the evolution of human rhythmic abilities. Animal Cognition, 17(1), 1–14. La Jevic, L., & Springgay, S. (2008). A/r/tography as an ethics of embodiment: Visual journals in preservice education. Qualitative Inquiry, 14(1), 67–89. Lee, N., Morimoto, K., Mosavarzadeh, M., & Irwin, R. L. (2019). Walking propositions: Coming to know a/r/tographically. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 38(3), 681–690. Walle, E. A., & Campos, J. J. (2014). Infant language development is related to the acquisition of walking. Developmental Psychology, 50(2), 336–348. https:// doi.org/10.1037/a0033238

CHAPTER 8

Walking A/r/tography with Youth at Risk: Mapping Movement and Place Alexandra Lasczik, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Katie Hotko, and Tahlia McGahey

Abstract  This chapter shares an overview of the Australian branch of the Mapping A/r/tography Project, which sought to engage in transnational storytelling across historical and cultural routes of significance through the methodologies of a/r/tography, walking and mapping. The inquiry included young people from a secondary school for youth at risk who became researchers through a participatory research framework, and engaged in a deep mapping of connections, ecologies and experiences of the world heritage listed Gondwana Rainforest site through the languages of ecology, Art and creativity. This process mobilised affective knowing as an opening to creative teaching and learning, and emergent geographies

A. Lasczik (*) • A. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles • K. Hotko • T. McGahey Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University, Bilinga, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking with A/r/tography, Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_8

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of self and other through walkographic inquiry through the development of collaborative and creative exchanges that address storytelling through geo-specific understandings of a/r/tography. This Australian site of the Mapping A/r/tography Project afforded a unique opportunity to initiate innovative pedagogy and curriculum and practical actions that sought to privilege the agency of young people as researchers. Keywords  Youth at risk • Mapping a/r/tography • Walking inquiry • A/r/tography • Mapping

8.1   Orientation This chapter introduces the Australian site of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership Development Grant (PDG) entitled Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational Storytelling Across Historical and Cultural Routes of Significance. The Australian site for the project is novel in that it included children and young people from a primary and a secondary school, who became a/r/tographic researchers through a participatory research framework. The young people and the research team engaged in a deep mapping of connections, ecologies, and experiences of the world heritage-listed Gondwana Rainforest site of eastern Australia through the languages of ecology, Art, and creativity. This chapter gives an initial overview of the work of the young people’s engagement in the inquiry as but one stream of the overall Australian project. These young people attend a school for disengaged youth and are considered to be at risk for detachment from schooling. The school privileges the Arts as a pedagogical framework for engagement, learning, and social and emotional wellbeing. Reframed on the Australian site as the Walking A/r/tography project, we sought to initiate innovative pedagogy, curriculum, and practical actions through our collective commitment to advancing walkography (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018), which actively draws from a/r/tography and movement-based inquiry. We engaged walkography as a methodology for exploring emerging transcultural perspectives that are mapped in the intersection between art practice and philosophy as a matrix of the sensing

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body in movement. This image-rich chapter focuses on the layers of mappings and movements of the secondary researchers. The chapter begins with an unpacking of the methodologies of a/r/tography and walkography, followed by an exploration of the site chosen as the focus for the inquiry. This is followed by an introduction to the young people, the research design and processes. A concluding discussion explores project findings and outcomes. It is important to note here that the young people’s creative inquiry and analytical voices come through their imagery and poetry, rather than as more traditional quotes from transcripts of interviews. Given that the inquiry is embedded in a/r/tography and walkography—the language of the visual—the research contributions of the young people are portrayed here as visually poetic. Thus, the images included herein are to be considered as critical texts, rather than as mere illustrations (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018). Given the scope of this chapter, and the young people’s propensity to let the artwork speak for them, such inclusions are ethical and necessary.

8.2   A/r/tography and Walkography The methodology of walkography engaged in this project emerges unevenly from a/r/tography, to focus on walking, mapping, and documenting the sensing body in movement. Walkography traces its lineage through contemporary modes of walking as a Visual Arts practice. In order to ground walkography as an a/r/tographic and Visual Arts practice, this section will first explore the significance of the Visual Arts in inquiry, followed by an exploration of a/r/tography. Finally, the section ends with understandings of the emergence of walkography and its engagement in this inquiry as well as participatory and ecological research, before shifting the focus to the specific design of the study and the particular methods engaged herein. The discussion that follows is focused through the context of the young people’s experience. The Visual Arts and Inquiry The Visual Arts could be broadly defined as creations that can be viewed and experienced, and includes the fields of Art, craft, media and design. The Visual Arts can include but is not limited to, artforms such as painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and video. Engaging in the making and viewing of the Visual Arts can develop young

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people’s aesthetic awareness, creative problem-solving skills, collaboration and embodied sensorial learning. From the earliest stages of human history, the Visual Arts, both in its production and viewing, have been an integral part of human life (McKay, 1972). It is not just the final product that is important in the Visual Arts, particularly in a research and educational context, but rather the processes of artmaking that provide limitless opportunities for learning, engagement and inquiry. Active encounters with materials through the artmaking process engender a sense of “flow, engagement, happiness and enjoyment” (Peisker, 2019, p. 478). Every child should have the opportunity to learn in and about the Visual Arts (Gibson & Ewing, 2011); it is a transformative process—raw materials becoming other things and ideas and imaginations taking form (Neelands, 2014). Engagement in the Visual Arts provides opportunities for young people to express themselves in ways beyond words. Children ‘speak’ through a hundred languages (and a hundred, hundred more) (Malaguzzi, 1993), and working in the Visual Arts provides space for communication beyond words. This is especially important in educational environments that privilege the needs of youth at risk. Elliot Eisner (2002) highlighted the importance of the Arts in making vivid that expression of experience is not limited to written and spoken language alone. Artmaking allows for thinking-­ with and thinking-through materials employed to create artworks (Sullivan, 2010). Engaging in the aesthetic experience heightens affect, a potentially generative force. According to Eisner (2002), this can be achieved both in the work of Art, and the work of Art, in both product and process. Such thinking-with and thinking-through materials are certainly enabled in the methodology of a/r/tography. The Methodology of A/r/tography A/r/tography is an Arts practice-based education research methodology that developed out of the artful practices of a group of Canadian researchers from The University of British Columbia (Sinner et al., 2006). Irwin revealed the term in an article in 2003, and Irwin and de Cosson followed with their seminal book A/r/tography: Rendering Self Through Arts Based Living Inquiry in 2004. Since that time, a/r/tographers globally have encompassed artful ways of knowing and living in the world, engaging the Arts and education as the form or mode of inquiry (Irwin & de Cosson, 2004). A/r/tography was founded on post-structural, hermeneutic, and phenomenological foundations (LeBlanc & Irwin, 2019) to become its own practice and theoretical

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disposition. It is a form of living inquiry that engages with making (poiesis), knowing (theoria) and doing (praxis) as well as the liminal spaces between these becomings to create knowledge (Irwin et al., 2017). A/r/tography was initially conceptualised upon the lived experience of the a/r/t identities and how their subjective experiences contribute to complex phenomena. In the last twenty years, a/r/tography has evolved and the “theory forming and informing a/r/tography has experienced a transformation. Drawing from post-qualitative inquiry, feminist theories, new materialisms, and posthumanistic ontology, a/r/tography has grown concerned with more nuanced understandings of artistic processes and practices” (LeBlanc & Irwin, 2019, p. 1). These elements have informed the development of the methodology of walkography, a process-­based inquiry practice that privileges embodied (and disembodied) walking and movement. The Methodology of Walkography A walkography is located within a lineage of experimental walking practices in the Arts and in education, and draws from a/r/tography as an inquiry method, particularly with respect to its fundamental rendering of living inquiry, the engagement of image and text in research portrayal and analysis, concepts of liminality and pedagogies of slow scholarship (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2018). The walk of the walkography can be literal, metaphysical, intellectual; it transcends ableist notions of physicality and is by definition peripatetic. The walk can be positioned as drawing,1 theorising, reading, or writing. Indeed, the concepts of walking-through and moving-with (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018) in walkography are shifting, unstable, transmutable, allegorical, “conceptualised as an assemblage of reverberative and resonating sensations, pedagogies, materialities, events, encounters and aesthetics” (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018, p. xx). Similarly, the ‘graphy’ of a walkography relates to the ‘graphy’ of a/r/tography as the documented form of the inquiry, most usually as a visual or poetic text. Recently, work has been completed that seeks to engage a/r/tography cartographically, where the carte or map as conceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) through concepts of affect (as c/a/r/tography), is worked through the sensorial and movement practices of embodied artmaking (see, for example, Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017; Rousell & Cutcher, 2014; Rousell et al., 2019). These developments engage 1  As the artist Paul Klee once said, “A line comes into being … it goes out for a walk, aimlessly for the sake of the walk” (Klee, 1961, p. 105).

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ambulatory practices such as painting, performance drawing, and walking, through collaborative engagements as has been utilised in this study with the young people positioned as researchers. Therefore, the project’s titular concept of mapping a/r/tography has been taken up on the Australian site as a walkography through an ontology that seeks to flatten hierarchies and power relationships. In flattening ontology, researcher roles are levelled. The ontological intent of child-framed participatory methodologies, such as ‘children and young people as researchers’ is to flatten power relations between adult and child researchers. The positioning of the child as an agential subject rather than a passive object has been an unmistakable tenet of child-framed research methodologies (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles & Rousell, 2020). Kellett (2006, p. 2) argues that children should be “acknowledged as experts of their lives”, and at the theoretical–philosophical level, this concept has gained much traction. At the practical level, there are more examples than not of research where children’s roles as researchers continue to be as ‘objects’ and ‘others’. It has only been in the last five years that research playspaces have emerged through play and creativity. As argued by Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Rousell (2020), “play and creativity have the potential to open theoretical doors or windows into childhood, revealing alternative spaces in which children’s theoretical acumen is acknowledged” (p. 8). In this project, research playspaces were created as a series of mapping experiments through walking. “Thought experiments are basically devices of the imagination” (Brown & Fehige, 2014, p.  1), and together with walking, become thoughts in experimentation. Such experimentation ranged from mapping the Gondwana Rainforests using an iPad and visual diary, and analyses through further individual and collaborative artmaking and poetry, explored below. The devices and visual diaries opened up what Winnicott (1971) framed as a transitional space or what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) conceptualised as a plane of immanence which “is the single wave” (p. 36) that rolls and unrolls concepts. It is important to note that the images that follow are positioned not as figures, or illustrations, but rather as visual essays that portray the researchers’ playspaces—their data creation and creative analyses. These playspaces were created through the mapping the movements of the walk, through drawings, paintings, rubbings, composings, video, photography, poetry, and further studio work. The reader will encounter them as steppingstones through the written text as sites to pause and to linger, slowing the reading (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2018). Such reading can also be considered as a walking-with and through the playspaces (Fig. 8.1).

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Fig. 8.1  Youth researcher drawings with dirt. They created rubbings of the earth on-site onto paper and canvas surfaces, using their feet to create them

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8.3   The Research Site: Walking the Gondwana Rainforests This study acknowledges the Australian first peoples’ Indigenous connection to the land (known as Country) and to walking the land as ‘songlines’, ‘strings’, or ‘Dreaming tracks’, ancient passages, and pathways. Indeed, the initial phase of the inquiry was designed to ensure that the researchers (including the young people, their teachers, and the Southern Cross University research team) honour and seek advice from local Aboriginal elders in order that we all understood the correct protocols for being on Country and also the imperative Aboriginal connections to Country. This was an important element of the research training workshop, by way of orientation and respect for the traditional custodians of the Country upon which we would walk, map, and inquire—not to mention the Country on which we all live. The sites of the Gondwana Rainforests that stretch down the east coast of Australia are the most extensive subtropical rainforests in the world. They hold large areas of warm temperate rainforest as well as the majority of the world’s Antarctic beech cool temperature rainforest. At 180 million years old, these unique and pristine areas still hold ancient species of plants and animals, containing evidence of the Earth’s evolution. The Gondwana Rainforest was selected as the site to walk and map because of these ancient connections and also because of its spiritual importance to Australia’s First Nations peoples. What attracted us to this particular site was its geological, environmental, and spiritual significance. Its biodiversity is exceptional, containing habitat for more than 200 rare or threatened plant and animal species. Although the Gondwana spans more than 310,800 hectares, we were most interested in the Queensland sites, close to the school and to our university campus. This area is significant to the Yugambeh, Yugarabul/ Jagera, peoples. It is this acknowledgement of Country as unceded Aboriginal land that drew us to this place as a focus for the inquiry. As McIntyre-Tamwoy (2008) asserts: The complexity of Aboriginal concepts of time may be difficult for non-­ Aboriginal people to grasp but an important distinction between Aboriginal concepts of time …is that the past can still be active in the present…Scientists tell us that the values of the area were created by geological and evolutionary processes but there are other explanations of equal relevance. The time depth of Aboriginal knowledge and connection to landscape is highlighted by creation stories which explain the formation of the physical landscape.

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Such oral traditions provide evidence of the continuing connection of Aboriginal people and the landscape since the geological processes that formed it. (p. 43)

Such concepts of time, knowledge, and connection to Country grounded the beginnings of this study and were folded into its design, its protocols and methods, enacting the walkography.

8.4   The Research Design of the Walking A/r/tography Project This project extends the theoretical work of a/r/tography to explore the activation of a walkography on Country, with disengaged youth. Working with young people as researchers allowed for a flattening of our role as the research team to privilege the agency of the young people in the process (Bickel et  al., 2011). As artists and educators, we engaged ‘arts-based research-as-pedagogy’ (Harris, 2014) to explore environmental and place-­ based concepts. As a research team we engaged walkography as a pedagogical strategy with the young people as a way to explore our sensorial experiences through a series of mappings. Like Art, walkography and a/r/tography do not engage research from a static single disciplinary space, but rather encourage “a wide variety of engagements, including the critical, playful, emancipatory, deliberate and improvisational” (Irwin et  al., 2017, p.  482). In this inquiry, we opened spaces for the young people involved to experience an affective encounter of the Gondwana Rainforests, with multiple entry points to express that experience. This created opportunities for us to make visible what we all experienced during our visits. Walkography like a/r/tography is a living inquiry, and therefore, the artmaking did not stop at the one onsite event (Leggo et al., 2011); our project contained layers of mappings, in the form of preparation workshops, the day spent onsite and then following studio sessions, extending the work and creating the analyses. Not only did we make Art on location as fieldwork, but procreatively, we made more Art in subsequent analytical workshops after the event. Layer upon layer, we collectively and individually responded visually and poetically again and again in our analyses in an iterative and generative process. These mappings are research playspaces, that are embedded in and unfolded through the doing, knowing and tellings (Cutcher, 2015) of the walkography. Such playspaces are rich and fertile sites for creativity, experimentation,

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criticality, and reflection. Before further exploring the project, it is important to understand the contexts of the youth researchers, and the reasons they are at risk of disengagement from schooling broadly in order to give context to the playspaces and walkography of this inquiry (Fig. 8.2). The Youth Researchers The Mission Australia Youth Survey (Mission Australia, 2018) reveals that the top three personal concerns of young people over the past years include coping with stress (49%), school or study problems (34%), and mental health (33%). In Queensland, a considerable factor adding to these issues included bullying. Eighty per cent of respondents reported that they had experienced bullying at a school, TAFE,2 or university in the past year. There are significant numbers of young people across Australia who are struggling to fit into everyday schools due to issues associated with bullying, domestic violence, challenging family situations, anxiety, disability, mental health issues, anger management issues and behavioural disorders, boredom, gender and sexuality acceptance (Mission Australia, 2018). On the Gold Coast, where we live and work, out of approximately 35,000 young people, more than 2000 of them are disengaged or at risk. Indeed, a growing number of young people are disengaging from mainstream schooling each year. An alarming report, Those Who Disappear (Watterston & O’Connell, 2019) describe an estimated amount of 50,000 school-age young people detaching completely from any form of education across Australia at any one time. Within the Independent School sector in Queensland exists Special Assistance Schools (SAS), which provide alternative educational settings for young people with high-level needs, and cater for youth with disabilities, as well as young people who are at risk, have behavioural difficulties, or whose needs are better met by flexible learning offerings. The number of SAS has expanded to 21 schools in Queensland operating over 30 different campuses, which is three times the amount since 2013 (Henebery, 2019). The young people who joined us as researchers in this study attend a SAS, namely The Atlantis School3 located on the Gold Coast. The 2  Technical and Further Education—previously known as Technical College. TAFE is a vocational educational pathway. 3  The Atlantis School is a pseudonym to protect the privacy of the school and its young people.

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Fig. 8.2  The youth researchers walking and mapping the site through photography and seismic drawings in their visual diaries and on a collaborative canvas

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Atlantis School is a co-educational secondary school that caters for a diverse range of needs; however, enrolment requirements stipulate that there must be evidence that the young person has disengaged from mainstream schooling. There is a variety of evidence acceptable and can include low-level academic, mental health issues, low attendance, low socio-­ economic background, behavioural issues, or significant time away from school. The vision and mission of Atlantis College is to revolutionise secondary education for youth at risk. The cohort of secondary researchers in this study were in Year 11, in the second last year of their formal schooling. Not being in mainstream education means the young people do not wear school uniforms and most often do not conform to the rigidity of a regular high school, which is precisely why many attend The Atlantis School. At time of writing, classrooms are termed ‘studios’, all staff are referred to by their first name, and classroom teaching is supported by teams of teachers, youth workers, a nurse, mentors, wellbeing coordinators, psychologists, a deputy principal, a principal, chief executive officer (CEO), and a guidance officer, as well as professional staff. Class sizes remain small; the young people are offered breakfast, snacks, and lunch daily; and positive and tough love relationships are key. Keeping young people engaged and on task can at times be challenging; however, the school culture promotes the notion of family— no one gets left behind. Nevertheless, the teachers who organised the various excursions to the Gondwana site and enabled the studio activities were visibly anxious about whether the young people would behave themselves and engage in the mappings, and by necessity, incredibly organised. They were not sure how the young people would respond to new faces and activities outside of their daily routine. The decision to invite these young people to join us in the project was largely an ethical one. Given their myriad challenges, they have not had many opportunities to walk in a rainforest, to be positioned as researchers, to engage in playspaces or to have their agency revered. Artmaking on Country created opportunities for the young people to slow down and experiment with ideas and concepts that arose from their embodied experience “in unstructured and often unexpected ways” (LeBlanc et al., 2015, p. 357). The young people responded to the environment through multiple modalities, through visual and poetic means, using a variety of Art materials and experiences such as writing, poetry, mapping, and collaborative and individual painting. These are the walkographic playspaces. Further, it is important to understand that the whilst the youth researchers

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were generous in sharing their data collections and creations, they were less willing to engage with the research team regarding their thoughts about their work and the walkography. Rather, their research contributions are mostly visual, with some analytical work created poetically. The lack of more prosaic and traditional ‘reflections’ or ‘interview responses’ is not considered a weakness of the project; rather, that the young people chose to communicate only visually and poetically is a clear strength, since “the limits of language are not the limits of cognition. We know more than we can tell” (Eisner, 2009, p. 8). Art is a powerful text for communication, yet as educators we too often privilege words. Artmaking is a safe space, one where the creative power, expertise, and the agency of the youth researchers can come to the fore. Thus, we ask that the reader linger with the visual texts included in this chapter, as this is where the youth voices are the strongest. Yet ethnographically, we can also report that once they began the research training workshop, the young people’s enthusiasm was clear and palpable and their confidence in their ability and their ideas, artwork, and poetry was subsequently clearly observed, as their teacher notes below. Through our observations of their engagement on site and back in the studio, it was obvious that the young people’s willingness and enthusiasm were strong motivations in their work as researchers (Fig. 8.3). We created with the young people throughout this project, embodied in place as we all moved together in and through the Gondwana Rainforests responding in varied visual ways. During the research training workshops, a key element of childframed participatory research (Cutter-Mackenzie-­ Knowles & Rousell, 2020), we made Art before the event, in preparation, equipping the young people with the materials and techniques that they might utilise onsite. When we visited the Gondwana rainforests at the site of Natural Bridge, we responded visually in-place, letting the materials and the environment itself guide us. On the day, it was hot and very humid as we walked down to the space where we would conduct our fieldwork. As we walked, the young people engaged in individual and collaborative movement maps, which documented the seismic activity of their moving bodies using pastels and charcoal. We photographed the rainforest, ensuring our gaze caught all perspectives, the many species, rocks, waterfalls, and plant life. We used ink, watercolour, charcoal, pastels, and the dirt on the forest floor to map the textures, forms, and lines. We took photographs, took rubbings, sketched, imagined, and made many drawings, including seismic drawings in

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Fig. 8.3  Collaborative seismic work created by the youth researchers as they walked the site. A young person held the canvas vertically whilst the other young people made marks on the surface of the canvas, their moving bodies controlling the marks being made, similar to that of the marks made by a Seismograph

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movement. We mapped our seismic movement in the visual diary and on a canvas as we walked; we sat in reflective almost-silence for hours observing, mark-making, and creating. These are the mappings we created as evidenced by the visual essay portrayed throughout this chapter. The youth researchers were engaged in the artmaking; they were absorbed (Fig. 8.4). After the site visit, we returned to the studio to engage in the layers of analyses. The data collected included photographs, video, drawings, rubbings, movement maps, and plant studies. We began the analysis by viewing all of the data collected and generated from the field work site visit as an entire group. In our reading of the data, we activated the analysis through a suite of propositions for thinking (Whitehead, 1978). The analytical propositions where developed to be applied rhizomatically across, through, and with the data that was generated, as explained earlier. Concepts were ‘created’ as a next layer of mappings that grew out of the process and artefacts from the original site mappings. The propositions became living, visual propositions as critical discourse, thus becoming “vibrant rethinking of academic discussion in order to enable a less linear, more rhizomatic encounter with the thoughts, forces and agencies of education” (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2018, p. xix). Such propositions are enticements for sensation and affect, since a “proposition can be seen as both actual and speculative” and “is a hybrid between pure potentialities and actualities” (Whitehead, 1978, pp. 185–186). Thus, the propositions, and the layers of mappings that they yield are also concepts in movement, concept-creations in flux (Irwin & Lasczik Cutcher, 2018; Lasczik et al., 2019; Rousell & Cutcher, 2014). The propositions we engaged were as follows: • Read the data you see and have created. Note ambiguities, compositions, complexities and symbols through what can be seen, heard, felt. This proposition allowed us to collectively gather concepts apparent in the data, such as green, nature, lines created by dirt, trees, sticks. The shapes of leaves and people, water rushing, the sound of the wind, chest movements, repetitions. The heat and humidity. A collaborative poetic analysis was co-created in this analytical phase, that foregreounds the slow, aesthetic, and affective nature of the experience: ...the curve of the falling water is continually present, with the wind, the walkways and waterways, trees and landscapes,

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Fig. 8.4  Youth researchers engaging in a/r/tographic, walkographic fieldwork onsite

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bold ink renderings of trees and ground litter and the movement of water. Rubbings of the earth, documenting the dirt. We walked quickly down the hill and through the rainforest and then paused at the bridge. A collective sigh, as we photographed the waterway, and so many shades of green in our photos; macro shots of beasties, our aesthetic eye; our long and short videos, humming and singing as we go, together with the constant sound of water running, the warmth, the sweatiness, the sun and the shade. Sitting still and moving through the incredibly hot and humid day...

• Write through the borders of your body and the bodies of others in the data you see and have created. This proposition generated an opening to create short, six-word poems and Haiku poetry. Engaging an analytical protocol, the young people read the extensive body of data they collected and created onsite fieldwork through the lens of the Harvard Graduate School’s (2009) visible thinking routine, namely see/think/wonder. This discussion was then distilled into the poetry activity. By refining the writing using constraints such as the 5-7-5 meter of Haiku allowed the researchers to generate new concepts, poetically. They were enabling constraints (Manning & Massumi, 2014) that opened the space for communicating the propositional, analytical concepts, filtering, and re-filtering them down to a refined poetic. Some examples follow: Clouds floating around Water crashing against rocks Sounds of distant wind * Amazing sunshine With features and soothing sounds

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Bright, noisy, and warm * Beautiful nature People walking on the leaves Lovely waterfalls * Cool breeze, lovely trees Magestical waterfalls fall Wanting to see more * We walked through the bush Saw lots of beautiful trees And that’s it really * Magical waterfalls Scenic routes Lanky trees * Whistling shadowy Crashing water on the rocks Flowing downstream slow * Rough grounds, nature sounds Home-made lands; rushing fallings, Ancient walls, air: Time

These poetic, Haiku analyses speak largely to the affective atmospheres experienced during the fieldwork and thus, the transpersonal or prepersonal intensities that emerged when the human and nonhuman collectives and bodies affected one another (Massumi, 2002). These affects, bodies, and atmospheres emerge as becomings, with a tangible and documented materiality. This materiality has impacted the youth researchers to the extent that in reading, viewing, and analysing the data, they returned to their recollections of the sights, sounds, sensitivities and feel of place, documented through the walkography on site, yet lingering in memory and experience. This is a powerful finding. • Find the ruptures in the data you see and have created. Make a further cut. This proposition allowed the young people to land on the ruptures that appealed to them, that they wanted to explore further. They made further

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cuts (artworks) from the original fieldwork data as large-scale individual paintings that took time and focus to create. We collectively decided to push this new work further still, making yet another cut from these individual paintings (ruptures), into one very large canvas painting, created collaboratively, using only the feet to make marks. This was yet a further walk in this walkography, a cut that used the very same feet that walked the site at Natural Arch, to walk-with paint, -with canvas, -with each other. The marks made by the youth researchers were led by similar intensities to those recalled poetically. Yet this time, the affective atmospheres were created and sustained by the materiality of canvas, water and paint, and the collective of bodies in contact with them, that worked with and on them— together with the youth researchers’ analytical focus and their recollections of the site visit. Once again, the notion of enabling constraints were engaged (Manning & Massumi, 2014). In limiting the palette and the types of materials (wet materials going on first, dry chalk and oil pastels as the next layer), the youth researchers could explore the ways in which they could push and pull the paint without creating a ‘muddy’ surface, thereby pushing and pulling the concepts in order to create conceptual clarity. They were free to blend and tap and walk the paint however they were called to do. The relationship between the human and non-human materialities enabled the collective agencies of energy and creativity. The sheer sensual pleasure of foot on canvas engendered a critical mass of aesthetic inquiry, returning again and again to the onsite experience through memory and affect. The resolved painting echoes the youth researchers’ movement of thought (Massumi, 2002), affect, and bodies. The marks they made strongly align with the observations and memories of green, water, rushing, the sound of the wind, chest movements, repetitions, and humidity they recalled in their pre-poetic musings. This is interesting in that the painting echoed this initial analysis, as well as their haiku analyses, together with the documented forms created and captured on site. The thread that is consistently present throughout these a/r/tographic analyses is the concepts of affect, sensuality, the impact of place, and the young people’s deep engagement in the inquiry (Fig. 8.5). The analytical positionings and processes yielded rich, iterative discussion and intimate conversation as the varied individuals and collectives were in dialogue with one another as a whole group, in smaller, friendship groups and in one-on-one encounters as the youth researchers moved around and through the fieldwork site and the studio spaces. The layered

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Fig. 8.5  Youth researchers engaging in foot paintings as an analytical process

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and deeply captivating data creation and generative analyses seemed to illuminate the agency of the young people: they were no longer students, but rather agentic researchers who understood their work would be curated and displayed, written about and published nationally and internationally. Although none of them took up the offer of co-publishing with the SCU research team, they enthusiastically engaged in most of the activities, despite it being challenging at times. Their teacher reflected: I just wasn’t sure how it would go. It could have really taken a turn. I think they were really engaged and really interested in the work. It was absolutely beneficial to them, especially getting them out in nature. Many of these kids don’t have the family life where they get the opportunity to go to the rainforest or anywhere other than the 4 walls of their bedroom; I think this is a very valuable thing for them to experience. Getting them in and amongst nature. Secondly doing curriculum things differently—it’s not your everyday maths task at your desk. It is drawing and painting out in nature amongst trees. Different sounds and ambience just give them that experience outside of their norm. Also, to connect with other adults, even being with their friends among nature. If we had taken the kids out to a shopping mall and did the same things, I didn’t think we would have had the same outcomes. Nature is definitely calming and grounding and earthing and the kids don’t have enough of that in their daily lives. And being away from technology, doing things with their hands and not being attached to their devices. They were taking photos, finding the best photo to take, they weren’t just sitting on their device on an app. I was also impressed with their bravery and their confidence. They were willing to try anything, which you don’t get all the time, especially with those kids. They’re quite… they can be quite reserved, and this is where if you have a good relationship with the kids, they are willing to take risks. And that’s what we saw today. They just went straight into it, even the gestural drawings, which was outside of their previous Art experience. They didn’t take much research training to get them to the point where they were willing—without prompting, they knew what to do.

The conditions that were set for the youth researchers to engage in playspaces of their own choosing engendered high-quality learning and inquiry experiences for the young people. The playspaces the young people created through the walkographic inquiry, were, as Cutter-Mackenzie-­ Knowles and Rousell (2020) note, held and generated through the young people’s co-created transformational educational experiences, enabled by

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improvisation and surprise. As Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Rousell (2020) further assert: There can be no template or blueprint for what a “good-enough holding environment” or “co-research playspace” should look like…The co-research playspace [is] constructed as a flexible architecture of engagement composed of various materials, ideas, media, technologies, tools, designs, and principles which children can then assemble into new and unforeseen configurations. (p. 208)

In this study, the Art materials, ideas, media, technologies, tools, and principles were analogue and digital, experiential, and artful. The young people were positioned and trained as a/r/tographic researchers who then collaboratively engaged in a walkography, walking the site cyclically, mapping the encounters and experiences as a sustainable living inquiry (Irwin et al., 2017). The Walking A/r/tography project was a unique opportunity to initiate innovative pedagogy, curriculum, and practical actions through the engagement with and in playspaces. These playspaces, as well as the collective commitment to advancing the methodology of walkography, drew more broadly from from a/r/tography and movement studies. The team of youth researchers identified, engaged with, and promoted new models of artistic collaborations and pedagogical experiments that represent a coherent strategy for analysing the complex connection of engagement with space/place. Once the research team set the conditions for the walkography, the young people largely lead the experiments with myriad outputs created and generated on site and subsequently in the studio, as we have presented here. Further analysis and engagement, and further explorations of the methodology and its impacts, are yet to come.

8.5   Closing Thoughts The Mapping A/r/tography inquiry on the Australian site engaged a rich cartography of place, culture, history, and identity on and around the Gondwana Rainforest in Southeast Queensland. It engaged with the complex connections between identity, engagement, and place for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This ancient world heritage site aroused transnational and intra-national visual and poetic mappings about human-­land relations and their complex connections through the lens of a/r/tography and walkography.

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Literature suggests that Australia’s most vulnerable young people are better engaged in schooling through targeted pedagogy that fosters creativity and expression (Ewing, 2010; Fiske, 1999); one way to do this is in, with and through the Arts (Cutcher, 2013). In short, Art classrooms are often a soft landing for young people with traditional academic, complex emotional and/or challenging behavioural problems (Kay & Wolf, 2017). Furthermore, the Arts have a special relationship with learning, in that the Arts can be learned and be engaged as a tool through which learning can transpire (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2016). Mental health issues and mental disorders in young people are a major concern within all school settings worldwide and are particularly prevalent in secondary schools across Australia (Olfson et al., 2015). Over the past decade, Mission Australia has been tracking the mental health of Australian young people in schools to determine trends evident in order to inform programs and legislation to help battle this epidemic. Between 2016 and 2018, Mission Australia surveyed 28,286 young people across Australia regarding their mental health status. Alarmingly, 41% of young people in 2018 reported mental health issues, which has doubled since 2016 (21%). Thus, arguably 4 out of every 10 young people in school settings suffer from mental illness (Mission Australia, 2018), which translates to 12 children in a regular classroom of 30; an enormous and distressing figure for educators in schools. In addition, one of the top concerns identified by young people as a factor was coping with school-related stress. This finding reflects a study conducted by Martin et  al. (2019) who found that anxiety and depression are the two most dominant and frequently comorbid mental health disorders witnessed in Australian schools, stemming from the pressures of academic success and social acceptance; two very distinctive yet contrasting measures faced by adolescents on a daily basis. Such figures are more than reflected in the enrolments of The Atlantis School. The authors of this chapter posit that engagement in Arts inquiry is empowering for young people who perhaps have felt powerless in much of their mainstream learning. It is robustly affirmed in the literature around Arts engagement in schools that young people glean myriad social, emotional, and learning benefits (Cutcher, 2013; Ewing, 2010; Fiske, 1999). These benefits are both instrumental and intrinsic and include but are not limited to, cognitive benefits (improved academic outcomes); attitudinal and behavioural benefits (self-discipline and efficacy, improved attitudes,

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increased attendance, decreased dropout rates); health benefits (improved mental and physical health including relief from pain and anxiety); social benefits (social interaction, community identity); and economic benefits. Intrinsic benefits include captivation (a state of focused attention); pleasure (deep satisfaction); expanded capacity for empathy (understanding people and cultures which are very different to the self); cognitive growth (all of the previously mentioned have cognitive dimensions); creation of social bonds (through sharing, discussion, collaboration); and expression of communal meanings (shared history, identity, cultural critique) (Cutcher, 2013; McCarthy et al., 2004). Such benefits have been recognised historically, including in the influential work of Elliot Eisner (2002), who asserted decades ago that learning with and through the Arts enabled children to make informed judgements, respect multiple perspectives, understand the complexities of qualitative relationships and that small differences can have large effects. Such outcomes are the result of the processes of thinking through and with Art materials to say what might otherwise remain unsaid. The Arts enable children to have experiences that they can have from no other source, and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what they and others are capable of feeling (Eisner, 2002). Coupling Arts engagement in a ‘wild’ or ‘natural’ environment is less understood, but the ground-breaking works of Leopold (1949), Carson (1969), and Chawla (2007) gestured to it as the formative foundation of education. Indeed, Leopold (1949) made such seminal observations some 70 years ago: I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the things children lack, is not actually a progressive d ­ ilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. This much at least is sure: my earliest impressions of wildlife and its pursuit retain a vivid sharpness of form, color, and atmosphere that half a century of professional wildlife experience has failed to obliterate or to improve upon. (p. 120)

The rich experiences of artmaking and researching as evidenced in this study by the young people of The Atlantis School, have enhanced their agency and positioned them centrally as designers of their own education. Whilst creative and artful experiences in nature are important, perhaps this outcome is the most essential of all. For the researchers in this study, such

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agency has yielded independence, confidence, and positive engagement in schooling experiences that recognise their competence and authority. Their work is most certainly celebrated within this internationally significant study, the Mapping A/r/tography Project.

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Index1

A Aboriginal elders, 142 Aboriginal land, 142 Academic, 64, 146, 149, 157 Aesthetic, 6, 9–11, 19, 22, 34, 42–45, 52, 56, 91, 102, 112, 114, 116, 123, 125, 138, 139, 149, 153 Affect, 3, 18–36, 42, 63, 130, 138, 139, 149, 152, 153 Agency, 4, 6, 8, 12, 64, 143, 146, 147, 149, 153, 155, 158, 159 Agential realism, 8 Alternative educational settings, 144 Aoki, Ted T., 5, 66 Art education, 11, 35, 65, 75, 76, 83, 90, 91, 121, 122, 129, 132 Artist, 4, 19, 21, 64, 71, 72, 81, 90–93, 102, 112, 120–123, 139n1, 143 Art-making, 19, 64, 65, 123, 130

A/r/tographers, 4, 5, 8, 9, 22, 61n1, 69n4, 71n6, 72n8, 75, 75n9, 76n10, 80n11, 81, 81n12, 83, 85, 138 A/r/tography, 2–12, 18, 18n1, 19, 21, 22, 36, 64–66, 71, 83–85, 91, 115, 120, 121, 132, 136–159 Arts-based, 72, 76 Arts-based research, 18 Art therapy, 130 Assemblages, 9, 27, 28, 32, 66, 139 Attunement, 9, 32–35 Australia’s First Nations peoples, 142 Autobiographical, 66 B Barad, K., 4, 5, 7, 8, 28, 63 Barney, Daniel T., 10, 93

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking with A/r/tography, Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7

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INDEX

Becoming, 5–7, 10, 22, 23, 27, 33, 34, 41, 51, 138, 139, 149, 152 Behavioural issues, 146 Being, 4, 5, 10, 11, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 31, 35, 41, 44, 46, 48, 51, 55, 62, 64, 69, 75, 79, 112, 131, 142, 146, 148, 155 Belonging, 22, 35, 72, 111 Bipedalism, 120–132 Blind walking, 126, 132 Body, 3, 7, 8, 12, 19, 23, 32, 63, 65, 67, 69, 90, 97, 99, 101, 113, 120, 125, 126, 137, 147, 148, 151–153 Bolt, B., 4 Bookmaking, 22, 28 Boundaries, 35, 69, 71–72, 81 Buddhism, 62, 63, 69, 72, 81 C Canada, 2, 4, 9, 26, 82, 83 C/a/r/tography, 139 Childframed participatory research, 147 China, 2, 11, 65, 103 Collaboration, 2, 10, 12, 22, 65, 80, 138, 156, 158 Collaboratory model, 2 Community of practice, 11, 80, 90 Complicated conversations, 2, 5, 35 Conceptual, 5, 10, 18, 41, 43, 110, 153 Constructivism, 78 Contemplative, 10, 42–45, 52, 56 Contemporary art, 72 Correspondences, 61 Counternarrative, 21 Creation stories, 142 Creativity, 129, 136, 140, 143, 153, 157

Critical, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 26, 42, 44, 51, 56, 75, 128, 137, 143, 149, 153 Curriculum, 5, 12, 45, 66, 102, 136, 155, 156 Curriculum-as-lived, 5 Curriculum-as-plan, 5 Cutcher, A. L., 3, 9, 65, 66, 76, 102, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 149, 157, 158 Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Amy, 7, 11, 140, 147, 155, 156 D Decolonization, 26 Deleuze, G., 4, 6–9, 45, 48, 49, 129, 139, 140 Democracy, 67 Democratic society, 67 Derrida, J., 71, 81 Desire, 3, 25, 28, 45, 51, 127 Dialogue, 63, 66, 76, 120, 153 Difference, 20, 22, 32, 35, 52, 121, 158 Diffraction, 5, 6 Digital, 6, 10, 28, 40, 41, 43, 98, 156 Disability, 144 Disengaged youth, 136, 143 E Eastern, 85, 136 Ecologies, 12, 136 Embodied, 3, 42, 83, 120, 138, 139, 146, 147 Emergent, 4–6 Emotion, 22, 41, 110–112 Empathy, 95 Empowering, 157 Enabling constraints, 151, 153 Entanglement, 5–8, 28, 31, 66

 INDEX 

Environment, 3–5, 10–12, 26, 29, 35, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 62, 63, 102, 111, 129, 138, 146, 147, 156, 158 Epistemology, 64, 75 Ethics, 29, 32, 64, 128 Experience, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 18–23, 28, 30, 32, 34, 35, 40–46, 48–50, 52, 53, 57, 61, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 75, 76, 79–83, 85, 92, 99, 101, 102, 110, 113, 115, 120–125, 136–139, 143, 146, 149, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159 Experiment, 7, 44, 49, 66, 78–80, 93, 122, 129, 130, 140, 146, 156 F Felt relations, 7 Feminist, 139 Field notes, 67 Fieldwork, 20, 28, 32, 36, 143, 150–153 Flâneur, 9, 65 Flattening, 140, 143 Fletcher, Harrell, 92 Flow, 4, 70, 76, 83–85, 138 Flux, 50, 61, 149 Fold, 28, 101, 129 Foucault, M., 71 Freire, Paulo, 125, 126 G Generative, 5, 6, 19, 20, 35, 65, 66, 83, 138, 143, 155 Geophilosophy, 8 Global-local, 4 Greene, Maxine, 19, 45, 48, 51, 52, 56 Guattari, F., 6–9, 45, 48, 49, 129, 139, 140

165

H Haiku, 113, 151–153 Haraway, Donna, 18, 34 Hermeneutic, 63, 138 Historical sites, 122 Holistically, 42 Hu, J., 11, 65, 122 Human experience, 8, 41, 46 Human-land relations, 156 I Identity, 4, 11, 19, 21–23, 28, 64, 65, 110–112, 114, 115, 120, 122, 139, 156, 158 Ikeda, Satoshi, 10, 73 Imagination, 11, 32, 49, 63, 64, 90, 138, 140 Improvisation, 6, 81, 156 In-between, 4, 63, 69, 75, 101, 120, 125, 128 Indigenous, 3, 10, 18–21, 26, 36, 142, 156 Ingold, T., 3, 7, 20, 21n4, 45, 50, 55, 75, 83 Inquiry, 3–6, 9–12, 20, 21n4, 22, 32, 35, 42, 44, 61–84, 91, 92, 121, 122, 132, 136–139, 142–144, 153, 155–157 International Society for Education through Art (InSEA), 79, 81–84 Intra-action, 6, 8, 28, 63 Intuition, 63 Irwin, Rita, 2–7, 9, 12, 19, 21, 22, 27, 30–32, 34–36, 42, 64–66, 71, 72, 76, 102, 121, 138–140, 143, 149, 156 Ishii, Toshio, 10, 77, 78 K Kabat-Zinn, Jon, 95 Kakizaki, Kaho, 10, 82, 83

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INDEX

Kasahara, Koichi, 10, 61, 61n1, 65, 68, 69, 69n4, 71n6, 72n8, 75n9, 76n10, 80n11, 81n12 Kayama, Minako, 10, 70, 82 Kinesthetic movement, 97 Knowing, 5, 12, 22, 41, 42, 56, 102, 121, 128–132, 138, 139, 143 Kobo Daishi, 62, 69, 69n5, 70 Komatsu, Kayoko, 10, 74 L Lasczik, Alexandra, 7, 11 LeBlanc, N., 12, 64, 138, 139, 146 Lee, Nicole, 9, 10, 47, 49, 52, 65, 66, 83, 132 Leggo, C., 143 Liminal space, 66, 101, 139 Lines of flight, 49 Listening, 35, 81 Live(d) experience, 35, 66, 139 Living inquiry, 3, 5, 6, 9, 66, 121, 139, 143, 156 M Macro Walking, 11 Mapping, 12, 36, 136, 137, 140, 143, 145, 146, 149, 156 Mapping A/r/tography, 2, 7, 11, 12, 18, 18n1, 36, 83–84, 136, 140, 156, 159 Marin-Viadel, Ricardo, 11 Massey, Doreen, 7, 8 Massumi, B., 9, 91, 93, 151–153 Materiality, 4, 22, 32, 35, 43, 46, 139, 152, 153 Material practices, 5, 64 McGahey, Tahlia, 11 Meaning making, 11, 21n4, 42, 66, 91 Memory, 28, 54, 64, 66, 80, 97, 102, 111–113, 152, 153 Mental health, 144, 146, 157

Meshwork, 6–9 Metaphysical, 46, 139 Métissage, 66 Micro Walking, 11 Minecraft, 10, 40–57 Mogi, Kazuji, 10, 78–80 More-than-human, 7 Morimoto, Ken, 9, 10, 53, 54, 56 Mosavarzadeh, Marzieh, 9, 27, 29, 31 Movement, 3–9, 11, 12, 20, 21, 24, 31, 32, 40–42, 48, 72, 76, 90, 91, 101, 104, 120, 125, 136–159 Multimodality, 9 N Narratives, 3, 10, 21, 31, 32, 40, 41, 43, 44, 48, 52, 53, 55–57, 63, 66 New materialisms, and post, 139 New materiality, 112 Non-human, 29, 64, 153 O Objectivity, 63 Ollerton, Amy, 10, 99 Ontogenesis, 6 Ontology, 3, 4, 29, 140 Openings, 5, 21, 30, 34, 35, 55, 114, 151 Oral traditions, 143 Ostraff, Kaleb, 10, 101 P Palau-Pellicer, Paloma, 11 Palimpsest, 114 Participatory, 2, 11, 136, 137, 140 Pedagogical affect, 9, 18–36 Pedagogy, 3–5, 12, 19, 28, 40, 42, 51, 65, 72, 80, 121, 122, 125–128, 131, 132, 136, 139, 143, 156, 157

 INDEX 

Performance, 5, 11, 28, 32, 90–92, 123, 124, 140 Performance artists, 123 Performative pedagogy, 4, 65 Peripatetic, 139 Phenomenological, 138 Photobooks, 5 Photography, 123, 137, 140, 145 Pilgrimage, 61, 62, 64, 83 Pinar, William F., 2, 5, 35, 36 Place-based, 2, 143 Plane of immanence, 140 Plurality, 62 Poesis, 9, 18–36 Poetry, 122, 129, 137, 140, 146, 147, 151 Posthuman, 8 Post-qualitative, 139 Post-structural, 138 Potential, 3, 4, 6, 8–10, 21, 30, 31, 42, 64, 91–93, 131, 140 Potentiality, 64, 66, 91, 121, 129, 149 Presence, 22, 41, 43, 44, 65, 112 Process, 3–7, 12, 18–22, 18n1, 28–31, 35, 45, 51, 61, 62, 64, 65, 72, 76, 83, 95, 110–112, 120, 122, 124, 125, 128–130, 132, 137–139, 142, 143, 149, 153, 154, 158 PROPositional Walking, 10–11, 90–104 Provocations, 25, 33, 41, 91, 92 R Realism, 8 Re/braid, 61, 66 Reciprocity, 22, 35 Reconceptualization, 9 Reconciliation, 18n2, 19, 19n3, 23–26, 33, 34 Re/de/territorialize, 121 Relational, 21n4, 22, 27, 35, 42, 65, 129, 132

167

Relational aesthetics, 42 Research-creation, 91 Responsibility, 5, 6, 19, 22 Rhizome, 6, 8, 45, 111 Rousell, David, 5, 7, 8, 20, 32, 139, 140, 147, 149, 155, 156 S Sacred Sites, 62 Silk Road field trip, 65 Slow pedagogy, 40 Smith, Keri, 96 Social justice, 125, 128, 132 Socially-engaged-artist, 5 Sound, 26, 46, 71, 97, 99, 129, 149, 151–153, 155 Space, 3, 4, 7, 10, 19, 23, 28, 29, 35, 36, 40–44, 46, 47, 63–65, 69, 72, 75, 76, 85, 90, 91, 101, 102, 108, 110, 112–115, 130, 138, 140, 143, 147, 151, 153, 156 Spacetimemattering, 8 Spain, 2 Speculation, 46, 91, 92 Speculative, 7, 8, 91, 149 Spiritual, 3, 19, 22, 35, 42, 75, 78, 80, 142 Springgay, Stephanie, 3–5, 19, 42, 91, 128 The Stanley Parable, 10, 40–57 Subjectivity, 9, 63 T Takao, Takashi, 10, 81, 82 Theory, 6, 8, 12, 20, 22, 45, 109, 139 Thinking-through, 2, 21n4, 138, 158 A Thousand Plateaus, 9 Tradition, 2, 3, 108, 122, 143 Transcultural, 2, 136 Transdisciplinary, 63

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INDEX

Transformation, 19, 34, 112, 122, 123, 139 Triggs, V., 3, 8, 12, 19, 21, 34, 35, 65 Truman, Sara, 3, 91 U Ursino, Joanne, 9, 23–25, 30, 34 V Vibrant tensions, 20 Virtual, 3, 10, 11, 20, 40–57, 79, 98, 101, 129, 130, 132 Visual essay, 10, 11, 90–104, 140, 149

W Walking inquiry, 9, 10, 12, 61–85 Walking propositions, 7, 22, 23, 27, 65, 102 Walking research, 11, 40–41 Walkograpy, 136–141, 143, 144, 147, 152, 153, 156 Weak theory, 20 Whitehead, A. N., 7, 9, 91, 149 Wide-awakeness, 50–51 Y Youth at risk, 11, 136–159