Walking Together

Challenging Philosophical and Ethnographic Paradigms from the Ground Up
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-07283-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 186 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Routledge Advances in Research Methods

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.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bloom-Christen, Anna

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Historische & Regionale Volkskunde
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Part 1: Paradigms of Walking 1. Peripatetic Traditions: A History of a History of Walking 2. Walking Together in Philosophy of Action Part 2: Walking Together in Anthropology 3. Walking Together as a Research Method 4. Walking Together in Racialized Public Space Part 3: Walking Together as a Paradigmatic Social Experience 5. Walking Together in Difference: Critical Phenomenology and Nonideal Social Ontology 6. Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

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.