An Initiative of the A+H Research Office
Walking Summit | Research Grant Program | Community of Practice
As scholars, researchers, and thinkers, faculty members often do their work at desks, in offices, in front of computers or other devices. Walking as Inquiry invites faculty to experiment with thinking on their feet—quite literally. The initiative asks what we might notice, understand, and create when we engage more embodied forms of inquiry and knowledge production.
This is not a new idea, of course. Walking has long served as a mode of intellectual, artistic, and political practice. The peripatetic philosophers walked while teaching. Romantic and transcendentalist thinkers walked and thought and wrote. Flaneurs walked to observe the modern city. Activists walk to claim space and demand change. Contemporary artists walk to make maps, collect stories, and generate new forms.
As history reminds us, walking operates at human scale and in so doing creates distinctive conditions for attention, perception, and encounter. It produces forms of embodied knowing that resist purely theoretical or archival modes of research.
But we also acknowledge that walking is neither neutral nor universally accessible. The history of philosophical or literary walking has often centered the experiences of white, male, able-bodied, economically secure walkers with the leisure and safety to roam.
To take walking as both a method and topic of research requires that scholars and artists grapple with questions of mobility and constraint: Who has the right to walk? Whose walking is surveilled, policed, or prohibited? What infrastructures enable or prevent movement? How do borders, race, gender, disability, and environmental conditions shape the experience of walking?
This initiative invites IU faculty to engage these questions while developing research that moves—literally and conceptually—through landscapes, cities, and contested spaces. We aim to build a community of practice around modes of embodied scholarship and facilitate projects that honor walking's generative possibilities while remaining alert to its politics, its exclusions, and its entanglements with power.
Indiana University is pleased to announce a new research initiative that places walking at the center of arts and humanities scholarship. This program recognizes walking as both a methodology for generating knowledge and an object of critical study, inviting faculty to explore how movement through space shapes thinking, creativity, and research—while attending to the ethical, political, and material conditions that make walking possible for some and precarious or impossible for others.