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How can walking, as a sensate experience and a recollective engagement with our memories, lead us to imagine new ways of knowing, being and sensing otherwise? This article conceptualizes walking-sensing as a decolonial art and pedagogical practice, which offers anti-colonial critiques and activates decolonial imaginations. By combining walking and sensing together, I first highlight how our experience of walking is intrinsically intertwined with our act of sensing that is already oriented and attuned in the contextual relation to things in the world. The notion of walking-sensing is used to describe not only our physical movement and the sensibilities of our bodies, but also as recollective and communal engagements, such as connecting memories with others, (re)collecting personal and local stories, and imagining the ways of living and being otherwise. I further elucidate how walking-sensing can be a form of anti-colonial critiques and decolonial imaginations that valorize multiple knowledges and sensibilities as well as to pave a path towards a new liberatory way of being in solidarity. With pedagogical scenarios, I demonstrate in what ways walking-sensing can be utilized as a critical intervention towards decoloniality. Lastly, introduce two artists’ art-making practice and how they are linked to the concept of walking-sensing. In this way, I elucidate the inextricable relationship between art and pedagogical practice and how walking-sensing can lead to decolonial resistance.

What does it mean to be a critical, community-engaged scholar as a full-time academic? In the process of developing mutual and subversive community-engaged scholarship, what dilemmas and difficulties does an early-career academic deal with? This paper taps into these questions by reflecting on my experience of developing a community program and colonial logics embedded in prevalent narratives around community engagement and research. I joined academia with the purpose and hope of making an impact on social inequity beyond the boundary of the academy by engaging with local communities, particularly working-class immigrant communities. During my transition from a K–12 teacher to academia, I learned how community practices are distinctly shaped and defined in relation to research and service in the academic discourses. With predominant research practices and community service that re-inscribe colonial relations and maintain the status quo, becoming a community-engaged scholar does not simply mean a scholar who works with or for communities. It entails a strong intention to subvert the hierarchical relationship between the academy and community, challenge the colonial politics of knowledge production, and re-define the academy as a platform for social change and activism.

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