Walking seminar 7 March 2025

What are you walking on, what are you walking for, and who walks with you?

Photos: Yunni

On this sunny Friday, the second edition of the walking seminar took place. We explored walking as a metaphor for the intention, purpose, and ways of caring in our craft as ethnographers.  

First, we asked, what are we walking on?

Is it a clean path, easy to walk on, paved by our scholarly frontrunners. Or do we need to cut the path ourselves while walking (more on this in Mol and Law 2002)? Does the path lead through an overgrown, muddy and murky terrain as in last month’s seminar? Perhaps we’ve chosen to wander off the beaten track on purpose, looking for new avenues and unexpected trajectories. And yet, whose footsteps are we following while doing this? What knowledge and citational chain are we expanding through our research? And where do we imagine this path to lead as we tread along?

What are we walking for? 

What kind of a difference would we like to make with our research? What kind of practices would we like to interfere with? Do we aim for academic interventions? Perhaps public ones? And how do our aims and ambitions fit into the complex and unsettling worlds we live in? To phrase the question differently, what is our story good for? 

 Who walks with us?

What kind of companions do we need to be able to walk on our path? Who are our friends, our allies, perhaps our discussion partners? Do we prefer to walk (and think and write) together? Or do we prefer contemplating in solitude? Do we need more-than-human companions, dogs, gods, birds of prey? Would a compass come handy? Perhaps binoculars? And what about a well charged phone?

We reflected on the companions that carry us as we do our work. The companions of knowledge production come in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes these companions are the non-humans who we look to in our knowledge production processes or comfort us at home. At other times, the weight of our work becomes too heavy to carry alone and must be distributed across a network; doing the labors that materially and conceptually move us forward in our processes.

And finally, for how long can we walk? And if we cannot anymore, how can we care for our exhaustion? What are our limits that must be taken into account? Do we know when to take rest and how to stay healthy to be able to keep on walking?

After 19,000 steps (estimated from a walker's smart watch)  across soft and hard terrains, we decided to care for our exhaustion by taking the bus back to the train station instead of adding another 35 minutes or so to our journey by foot. To catch the bus we had to run! Summoning this last burst of aerobic energy, however, had the effect of making the padded seats of the small public bus an ever more welcome reprieve. We needed a rest.

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” (C. Jung)

Walkers: Andie, Ildikó, Nicolas, René, Yunni, Anna, Tony, Oli, Yunhan, Leo.

Walking seminar 31 January 2025

 The murky and sticky business of ethnographic practice

In ethnographic practice, clarifying what we– the ethnographers– are observing, can be a tedious process of cleaning, framing, and foregrounding an object of interest within the hinterland of messy and sticky observables. The very act of purifying these research objects through the ethnographic process can become the object to examine. Moreover, the ways in which it is vexing to purify an object of inquiry can be the object to examine.

Ethnography works with (participant) observation and thick descriptions, but what if this thickness becomes opaque- in our writing and/or in the murky realities of everyday practice? How to work from, within, the thickness of descriptions toward a point? And what was, is, again, the question?

How to clean the murkiness? Or are there moments when we want to stay with it?

Is the murkiness encountered in the course of fieldwork or is it made by asking certain questions and writing certain storylines? When is the murkiness a problem to undue and when is it something to immerse yourself into or appreciate?

 

What sticks to you in the muck, demanding extrication, and how do you navigate letting go of or giving intentional care to these sticky things? If you become stuck or held back from progressing in your research or writing by sticky or murky situations, what techniques do you use to regain some mobility in your work? 

 

And if you feel the murkiness is the point, what do you do to stay with it? How to attend to murkiness in writing while still being generous to your readers? Which writing styles or genres can hold the murkiness and which become obfuscated beyond repair?

Walkers: Fenna, Ildikó, Andie, Frej, Tara, Nicolas, Jeroen.