Walking Again Lively: Towards an Ambulant and Conversive Methodology of Performance and Research

This peer-reviewed article is part of my on-going research of walking and spatial narrative practices as participatory mechanisms that engage percipients in co-production and co-presentation of knowledge of complex social issues and geographies. Solicited by the Nomadic Work/Life in the Knowledge Economy Research Team (University of Limerick) and editors of the journal special issue, the article presents new findings and analysis of the method of walking, talking and mapping developed through my practice-based research project way from home (http//:www.wayfromhome.org) and applied in a workshop and walks with refugee and arts organisations in four locations in the UK Midlands, which I led as a consultant on the AHRC KT project ‘Trans-national Communities: A Sense of Belonging’ led by Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard (Loughborough University). I developed the method discussed in partnership with refugee support organisations in Plymouth between 2002-2006 as a way to elicit and present refugees and asylum seekers’ experiences and practices of home memories and home-making. It has been applied in various international and national contexts including a workshop with practitioners, NGO’s and government workers for the Meeting of Creative Community Development Projects in Catalonia event organized by Servei de Cultura de l’Ajuntament de Granollers in Spain (2006). The special issue of Visual Studies referenced in Output 3 contains O’Neill and Hubbard’s analysis of their replication of my method in ‘Trans-national Communities’. Further references to the way from home project are included in Mike Pearson’s Site-Specific Performance (2010), Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner’s survey of women walking artists in Performance Research Journal (April 2011), and in a chapter in Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (2013) where I am interviewed by curator Tracey Warr. This output follows on from my article published in the Research in Drama Education special issue on Performance and Asylum in 2008