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Geographical scholarship is increasingly concerned with how knowledges count in human-nonhuman relations, including questions of what it takes to achieve responsible practice, and the forms of expertise that shape corporeal encounters. This paper highlights how the outdoors comes to be known matters for the integrity of human and non-human bodies performing and encountered in outdoor spaces. It examines some of the ways of knowing demanded in accomplishing responsible outdoor access with dogs, in terms of constituting response-ability -or the capacity to respond -across species and geographical difference. Through mobile and visual ethnographic methods enabling episodes and repertoires of canine-human enactments to be witnessed and recounted, we identify ways of knowing the outdoors that exceed cognition of the formal scriptings of conduct, yet are crucial to preventing its transgression through engendering capacities to respond. We identify in particular the role of anticipatory knowledges, and argue that better account needs to be taken of the embodied preparatory and pre-emptory ways of knowing that make the mutual doings of response-ability across spatial and species difference possible. These encompass a set of temporally interleaving spatio-corporeal competencies that render the crux time-spaces of 'irresponsible' human-nonhuman ruptures preventable rather than merely recognisable. They work by shaping and being attuned to how dog and human bodies become articulate to each other in relation to the shifting ecologies, topographies, terrains and proximities of an outdoor excursion. Consequently, we raise the question of the work of responsibility done (or not) in terms of our human obligations to animals when attentions become focused on codified rather than the broader range of outdoor knowledges.

This article raises questions about the role of footwear within contemporary processes of identity formation and presents ongoing research into perceptions, experiences and memories of shoes among men and women in the North of England. In a series of linked theoretical discussions it argues that a focus on women, fashion and shoe consumption as a feature of a modern, western ‘project of the self’ obscures a more revealing line of inquiry where footwear can be used to explore the way men and women live out their identities as fluid, embodied processes. In a bid to deepen theoretical understanding of such processes, it takes account of historical and contemporary representations of shoes as a symbolically efficacious vehicle for personal transformation, asking how the idea and experience of transformation informs everyday and life course experiences of transition, as individuals put on and take off particular pairs of shoes. In so doing, the article addresses the methodological and analytic challenges of accessing experience that is both fluid and embodied.

This article addresses theoretical problems around the notion of 'choice', using empirical data from a three-year, ESRC-funded study of identity, transition and footwear among both women and men. With a focus on female participants who wore, or had worn high-heeled shoes, it draws on Budgeon's argument for viewing the body as event, as becoming, and Finch's use of the concept of display, to explore the temporalities of high-heeled shoe wear, particularly as an aspect of 'dressing up'. Data from both focus groups and year-long case studies allowed everyday and life course patterns of highheeled shoe wear to be explored -in many cases, as they unfolded. This material has led us to critique the linear, goal-oriented nature of a modernist 'project of the self', and to argue that identification, as a dynamic process, may often be erratic, partial and temporary. Emphasized femininity, it is suggested, can be 'displayed' episodically, as an aspect of 'doing gender', a perspective that problematizes notions of a 'post-feminist masquerade' that inevitably secures gender retrenchment. Through an examination of the occasions and non-occasions that pattern the temporalities of women's lives, therefore, the article demonstrates a distinction between displaying femininity and doing gender, one that simultaneously sheds light on their relationship with one another. Keywords Body, choice, footwear, gender, transitionThis pair, really high, really uncomfortable but classic, beautiful, sexy, they make my legs look so long, but I can't wear them outside of the house, so every now and then I have a party where people are only allowed to wear ridiculous shoes and we all sit around in our ridiculous high heels, [laughs] comparing. Eva (32) 1