Walking Methods

This book introduces and critically explores walking as an innovative method for doing social research, showing how its sensate and kinaesthetic attributes facilitate connections with lived experiences, journeys and memories, communities and identities. The book situates walking methods historically, sociologically, and in relation to biographical and arts-based research, as well as new work on mobilities, the digital, spatial, and the sensory. The book is organised into three sections: theorising; experiencing; and imagining walking as a new method for doing biographical research. There is a key focus upon the Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (WIBM) on the move to usefully explore migration, memory, and urban landscapes, as part of participatory, visual, and ethnographic research with marginalised communities and artists and as re-formative and transgressive. The book concludes with autobiographical walks taken by the authors and a discussion about the future of the walking interview as biographical method. Walking Methods combines theory with a series of original ethnographic and participatory research examples. Practical exercises and a guide to using walking as a method help to make this a rich resource for social science researchers, students, walking artists, and biographical researchers.

As a research methodology, walking has a diverse and extensive history in the social sciences and humanities, underscoring its value for conducting research that is situated, relational, and material. Building on the importance of place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and rhythm within walking research, this book offers four new concepts for walking methodologies that are accountable to an ethics and politics of the more-than-human: Land and geos, affect, transmaterial and movement. The book carefully considers the more-than-human dimensions of walking methodologies by engaging with feminist new materialisms, posthumanisms, affect theory, trans and queer theory, Indigenous theories, and critical race and disability scholarship. These more-than-human theories rub frictionally against the history of walking scholarship and offer crucial insights into the potential of walking as a qualitative research methodology in a more-than-human world. Theoretically innovative, the book is grounded in examples of walking research by WalkingLab, an international research network on walking (www.walkinglab.org). The book is rich in scope, engaging with a wide range of walking methods and forms including: long walks on hiking trails, geological walks, sensory walks, sonic art walks, processions, orienteering races, protest and activist walks, walking tours, dérives, peripatetic mapping, school-based walking projects, and propositional walks. The chapters draw on WalkingLab’s research-creation events to examine walking in relation to settler colonialism, affective labour, transspecies, participation, racial geographies and counter-cartographies, youth literacy, environmental education, and collaborative writing. The book outlines how more-than-human theories can influence and shape walking methodologies and provokes a critical mode of walking-with that engenders solidarity, accountability, and response-ability. This volume will appeal to graduate students, artists, and academics and researchers who are interested in Education, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Affect Studies, Geography, Anthropology, and (Post)Qualitative Research Methods.

This book provides both an overview of, and an insight into, the rapidly expanding field of creative research methods. The contributors, from four continents, range from doctoral students through to independent and practice-based researchers to senior professors, providing a clear view of the applicability of creative research methods in all types of research work. Chapters offer examples of creative research methods in practice, and advice on how to transfer or adapt those methods for different disciplines and settings. Research ethics and research quality are considered throughout. This is a timely handbook which provides information for novice researchers and inspiration for experienced researchers, and is essential reading for anyone interested in creative research methods.

Despite its importance to how humans inhabit their environments, walking has rarely received the attention of ethnographers. Ways of Walking combines discussions of embodiment, place and materiality to address this significant and largely ignored 'technique of the body'. This book presents studies of walking in a range of regional and cultural contexts, exploring the diversity of walking behaviours and the variety of meanings these can embody. As an original collection of ethnographic work that is both coherent in design and imaginative in scope, this primarily anthropological book includes contributions from geographers, sociologists and specialists in education and architecture, offering insights into human movement, landscape and social life. With its interdisciplinary nature and truly international appeal, Ways of Walking will be of interest to scholars across a range of social sciences, as well as to policy makers on both local and national levels.

This handbook is a much-needed and in-depth review of the distinctive set of ethical considerations which accompanies qualitative research. This is particularly crucial given the emergent, dynamic and interactional nature of most qualitative research, which too often allows little time for reflection on the important ethical responsibilities and obligations Contributions from leading international researchers have been carefully organised into six key thematic sections: Part One: Thick Descriptions Of Qualitative Research Ethics Part Two: Qualitative Research Ethics By Technique Part Three: Ethics As Politics Part Four: Qualitative Research Ethics With Vulnerable Groups Part Five: Relational Research Ethics Part Six: Researching Digitally This Handbook is a one-stop resource on qualitative research ethics across the social sciences that draws on the lessons learned and the successful methods for surmounting problems – the tried and true, and the new.

This book is the fifth official archival publication devoted to RoboCup. It documents the achievements presented at the 5th Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences held in Seattle, Washington, USA, in August 2001.The book contains the following parts: introduction, champion teams, challenge award finalists, technical papers, poster presentations, and team descriptions (arranged according to various leagues).This book is mandatory reading for the rapidly growing RoboCup community as well as a valuable source of references and inspiration for R&D professionals interested in multi-agent systems, distributed artificial intelligence, and intelligent robotics.

Walking This Path Together is an edited collection devoted to improving the lives of children and families that come to the attention of child welfare authorities by demonstrating and advocating for socially just child welfare practices. In this new, updated edition, authors provide special consideration to the historical and political context of child welfare in Canada and theoretical ideas and concrete practices that support practitioners, educators and students who are looking for anti-racist, anti-oppressive and anti-colonial perspectives on child welfare practice.

This book takes a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural look atmass appraisal expertise for property valuation in different marketconditions, and offers some cutting- edge approaches. The editors establish an international platform and present thescientific debate as well as practical feasibility considerations.Heretic and orthodox valuation methods are assessed based onspecific criteria, partly technical and partly institutional.Methodological evaluation is approached using two types ofcriteria: operational concerns about how to determine propertyvalue differentials between spatial and functional units of realestate in a valid and reliable way (technical criteria); and thekind of market circumstances being operated in (institutionalcriteria). While technical criteria are relatively well-researched,there is little theoretically informed work on the connectionbetween country context and selection of property appraisalmethods. The book starts with an examination of current mass propertyappraisal practices, presenting case studies from widely differingmarkets - from the American and Dutch, where regression-basedmethods have been used successfully for some time; to the EasternEuropean and other emerging economies, where limitations have to becompensated by focusing on the modelling assumptions. The second part of the book looks at sophisticated modellingapproaches, some of which represent combinations of elements fromtwo or more techniques. Whatever the exact modelling approach, therequirements are always high for the quality of the data andsuitability of the method. In the final section, methods areevaluated and compared according to technical criteria and againstinstitutional contexts.With its exceptionally wide coverage ofvaluation issues, Mass Appraisal Methods: an internationalperspective for property valuers addresses property valuationproblems common to different countries and approaches applicable inboth developed and emerging economies.