Methodological Innovations in Gender Research: Public Lecture Series

Louise Platt: “A Manifesto for Walking Mums: Walking and Worlding”

23.03.2023
10:00 - 11:30
Institut für Soziologie: Abteilung Geschlechtersoziologie
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Anmeldung bis 23.03.2023, 09:00

This lecture will address the relationship between walking and worlding. Specifically, I demonstrate how mothering is made legible through walking-with a baby (and other mothers). I employ the active verb ‘worlding’ to illustrate how walking-with contributes to the emergent, relational and embodied nature of mothering as a more-than-human experience. Even during the ‘unprecedented times’ of the Covid-19 pandemic (during which this research took place), our everyday affective and embodied encounters shape the worlds we inhabit and the lives we live. Walking here is considered as a ‘worlding refrain’ (Stewart, 2010) a movement that repeats (with difference) to create mothering worlds in motion. By using ‘walking-with’ specifically, I acknowledge that walking is never solitary but, ‘emerges as a multifaceted, multi-sensorial stimulation located within a particular lived landscape’ (Malone and Bozalek, 2021, 142). Indeed, Ingold and Vergunst (2008, 2) argue that walking is social, and ‘lives are paced out in their mutual relations’. At its most fundamental level, walking-with a baby (in a pram or through babywearing in a sling or wrap) is an entanglement of bodies, a negotiated practice where bodies intra-act. However, walking-with is always a multiplicity of ‘withs’ – mother-child-pram/sling-othermothers-landscapes-covid-rules-restrictions and so forth. As Truman (2021) states, the -with is merely not additive, it is a milieu of relations. The work will draw on the Manifesto for Walking Mums that was produced in January 2023 which seeks to find better walking experiences for walking mothers and their infants. Using visuals to capture the worlding of walking the work demands an attunement to the needs of these users in urban/suburban spaces.

Louise Platt is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in the Business School. Her work is interdisciplinary and focuses on placemaking and place experiences. She has written about festivals, walking, community and leisure. She is on the editorial board of Leisure Studies Association and the World Leisure Journal.

This lecture takes place in the context of the

Elisabeth List Fellowship: Everyday Creativity in (Post)Socialism)

Anmeldung unter: https://soziologie.uni-graz.at/en/sociology-of-gender/research/current-projects/public-lecture-series/registration-elf-platt-online/