#WalkCreate: Understanding Walking and Creativity During COVID-19: Summary

Introduction to the Special Issue

“…As an innovation in social research methods the turn to walking builds on and attaches to the previous "turns" in sociological research, such as the narrative, biographical, visual and sensory "turns" as well as the performative "turn". Walking also resonates with geographical traditions of embodied "field-work" and recognition of the social and spatial nature of knowledge production (Lorimer 2003;Dewsbury & Naylor 2002;Rose et al, 2022). There are important connections too, with walking, in the long history of social research that seeks to understand social inequalities, through, for example, the work of Engels, Mayhew and Orwell, the pioneering research by the Chicago School of Sociology with migrant and marginalised communities and gender politics in the writing of Virginia Woolf, the suffragette marches and gender based protest movements.…”

“…Social science is increasingly "on the move", underpinned by advances in digital methods, a focus on our mobile lives, and the growth of creative, sensory, arts-based multi-modal methods, used by sociologists, ethnographers, anthropologists, geographers, environmentalists, biographical researchers and arts based researchers.As an innovation in social research methods the turn to walking builds on and attaches to the previous "turns" in sociological research, such as the narrative, biographical, visual and sensory "turns" as well as the performative "turn". Walking also resonates with geographical traditions of embodied "field-work" and recognition of the social and spatial nature of knowledge production (Lorimer 2003;Dewsbury & Naylor 2002;Rose et al, 2022). There are important connections too, with walking, in the long history of social research that seeks to understand social inequalities, through, for example, the work of Engels, Mayhew and Orwell, the pioneering research by the Chicago School of Sociology with migrant and marginalised communities and gender politics in the writing of Virginia Woolf, the suffragette marches and gender based protest movements.As the papers in this special issue evidence, the act of walking engages all the senses, the importance of looking, hearing, feeling and we argue, the art of paying attention (Ingold this volume).…”