Walking with ethico-politico-urban-wonder

Walking is an everyday practice for able-bodied folk. Yet it can cultivate much more than getting you from one place to another. Walking cultivates awareness and interactions with others and public spaces (aka civic engagement). Combined with the (re)thinking of social practices through artist, participant and audience process-making in participatory arts, further attention to the ethicality of interpersonal interactions can be cultivated. From years of researching two participatory arts projects (The Walking Neighbourhood hosted by Children and Walking Borders: Arts activism for Refugee and Asylum Seeker Rights), I have distilled four concepts as central to the potential of walking as pedagogy. These concepts are: embodied and emplaced sensorial awareness, relationality, spatial politics, and divergence and détournement. Theories from social anthropology, post humanism, critical philosophy and sociology inform the explanations of each concept at play in walking as pedagogy through participatory arts projects. To exemplify these explanations, storied research insights gleaned from sensory ethnographic research of the two walking arts projects are provided. As participatory arts projects, the two walking projects offer particularly nuanced ethical awakenings. Collectively, the chapter advocates for combining participatory art with walking pedagogy to produce long-lasting ethical and political learning for urban co-existence, in essence—ethico-politico-urban-wonder