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Abstract
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These Interventions in walking methods in political geography recognise that it is timely to enrich political geography by attending to our methods. We suggest in this introduction that consideration of walking as method, its possibilities, limitations and attention to the theorizations and practises of walking under the label of 'psychogeography' offer productive ways to address broader questions in political geography surrounding power, scale, mobility, embodiment, and knowledge production. Our prompt for assembling these interventions emerged from our work on walking and landscape geopolitics (Mason, 2020; Sidaway, 2002, 2009), the political geographies of walking in Jordan (Mason, 2021; Mason, 2023), walking in Asian and African post-colonial cities (Paasche & Sidaway, 2021; Sarma & Sidaway, 2020), along Myanmar's borderlands (Sarma, 2020, 2021), and mapping 'psychogeography's trajectories, connections and affinities' through decolonial frameworks (Sidaway, 2022, p. 549).
A panel during the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference held in Newcastle in September 2022 expanded these discussions, whilst reflecting on the relatively limited explicit reflection within political geography on methodologies. A key acknowledgement of this was made by Megoran (2006) through his advocacy of ethnography to narrate borderlands. Megoran's paper, the title of which begins with a bold injunction, "For ethnography in political geography", has gone on to be highly cited. Yet despite the wide range of quantitative and qualitative methods drawn on in the sub-discipline, reflected in the methodological breadth of papers in Political Geography (O'Loughlin, 2018), this journal and the wider sub-discipline feature relatively few explicitly methodological reflections. Whilst international relations and political science arguably have featured more debates about methods, Youatt (2022) notes that walking has been largely absent from these "sedentarist" disciplines. Elements of walking and mobility therefore remain separate from much modern political thought, despite the important ways walking is frequently entangled with politics, property and sovereignty, and associated with protests and conflict as well as restrictions including efforts to sedentarise the nomadic. Yet, despite the ways that critical discussion on methods, such as walking, could enrich political geography, explicit reflection on method in the subdiscipline has developed relatively slowly since Megoran's (2006) intervention, via, for example, reflections on discourse analysis (Müller, 2008) and assemblage theory (Ghoddousi & Page, 2020). Perhaps this inattention to wider methodological discussion can be connected to the relatively limited uptake of feminist and postcolonial/decolonial scholarship by political geographers. Yet it is feminist geopolitics that has further encouraged ways of knowledge production beyond textual analysis to ethnographic research and attention to the diversity of practices and sites deemed political (Dowler & Sharp, 2001). Indeed, Amoore (2020) asks how critical studies of space and politics could be possible without theories of embodiment, corporeality, and partiality. The consideration of terms central to political geography, such as territory, has been enriched by postcolonial and feminist scholarship and allied embodied methodologies (see Jackman et al., 2020; Smith, 2012; Squire, 2016).
We posit that the embodied aspects of walking can enable a creative and critical relationship with nature, place, politics and space, reengaging key concepts in political geography such as territory, borders, and the state, establishing bridges to concepts more commonly featured by cultural geographers, notably landscape (see Mason, 2021; Peters, 2021; Squire, 2021) and negotiating the concentration of wealth and landownership that more often features in economic geographies (such as Christophers, 2019) and allied political economy...
Language: en |