ABSTRACT
As a methodology for conducting biographical research, this book suggests that ‘walking’ brings particular advantages for understanding ‘lived lives’, especially when combined with ethnographic, visual, and participatory forms of practice. Walking methods can help articulate the material, phenomenological, embodied, and imagined, yet transitory, sense of lived lives by giving priority to walking and thinking (Weigel 1996). Here, as Weigel, referring to Walter Benjamin, says, ‘the images of our perceptions and ideas, and the metaphors with which we are surrounded, are seen by Benjamin as ‘body-and image-space’ (Weigel 1996: x). Benjamin thinks in images. Another way of articulating this is expressed by Solnit, for whom walking includes ‘that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world’ (Solnit 2014: 29). Walking involves moving in time and space, but it also means becoming ‘attuned’ to our environment – knowing the world through the body, but also through the employment of images. Capturing the sense of walking as an ‘imaginative’ sensory and visual activity is key to the Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (WIBM). There is also a connection to how individuals ‘feel’ their emotional state. For example, Solnit (2014) refers to the way in which walking modulates alienation.
