Walking Together

This book examines walking together as a research method, a social practice, and a paradigmatic social phenomenon. Anchored in long-term fieldwork in post-apartheid South Africa, it explores how walking together exposes the dissonance between lived racialized power asymmetries and methodological ideals that assume universal accessibility of public space. In doing so, the book turns a critical eye toward recent developments in social ontology and phenomenology that underpin walking methodology, interrogating their own theoretical commitments, their claims to universality, as well as their attempts to account for power inequality. The book further shows how the history of walking is deeply intertwined with the history of participant observation, revealing how methodological ideals have been shaped by the embodied, uneven conditions of research on the ground. Combining peripatetic ethnography with theoretical reflections on pace bias, hidden particulars, and agency, the book builds a case for a more accountable walking methodology, and offers conceptual tools for working with, rather than smoothing over, difference.By unsettling idealized accounts of walking together, this book offers a fresh approach to movement-based methods that centers lived complexity. It will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, philosophy, sociology, urban studies, mobility, and methodology – as well as anyone curious about the politics of bodies in public.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Anna Bloom-Christen is an anthropologist with a focus on research methodology. Her work explores how individuals articulate togetherness, how attention evolves through shared action, and how knowledge is transmitted through embodied participation. She studied Philosophy and Anthropology in Basel and St Andrews and earned her PhD with a dissertation on racialized embodied experience of South African public space. Her postdoctoral project Divided Attention investigates attentional habits in divided societies. She also works with first-generation university students, engaging both with their understandings of philosophy and with how they experience its teaching and institutional culture.