Abstract
Mindful walking is an alternative way for a researcher to gather empirical materials through physical engagement so that she may ultimately make them more visible to others who may not be physically present. The empirical materials collected through mindful walking facilitates further theorization in ethnographic research. In this sense, walking can be explained using the following four concepts: curious spectator or flâneur, entangled pathways, ways of knowing, and meditation. To illustrate the promise of mindful walking, I describe in detail the insights I was able to develop through using this method for my doctoral dissertation, which involved an ethnographic case study of an art museum. A substantial portion of my empirical materials for this research comes from the embodied experience of walking; this method of conscious observation through emplaced movement afforded a unique perspective of the museum, its surrounding community, and how they coexist within an entangled social web.
Keywords
Introduction: Lived Experience of the Surroundings
Whenever I travel to a new place, I explore the area on foot. Through walking and seeing what is going on around me and other people, I get a sense of the new surroundings in the alive, spontaneous conditions of the moment. Sometimes, I get lost and walk into a place where, according to locals, visitors should not venture. While it could be dangerous to be alone in a new place especially where one does not speak the dominant language, all observations of and interactions with environments provide information that shapes a researcher’s holistic experience of the place. She is a curious spectator, but soon becomes part of the place.
During the summer of 2005, I stayed in London for 2 months. I had traveled there from South Korea where I was attending college. My English skills were limited, and I trusted that some time in the raw environment of England would help me improve my English communication skills in a way that classroom learning could not. For 2 months, I walked through various parts of London and visited every popular, infamous, and lesser known area I could find. I also traveled to several nearby countries.
On the way back to London from a visit to a friend in Lyon, France, I found myself completely lost. My flight from Lyon to London had been delayed and arrived in London after midnight. To save money and deliberately avoid a sanitized experience, I decided to take a bus instead of a cab to the dormitory where I had been staying. Accidently, I got on the wrong bus, which dropped me off in a run-down urban residential area. It was dark and deserted. I had never been to that place, although the landscape had a certain familiarity as if I had seen it in some forgotten movie. I remember looking at a series of two- or three-storey row houses that were defaced with graffiti and traces of vandalism; the streetlights flickered. I started walking. I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being lost and the frustration of not knowing where I was going. In addition to that, I felt that someone was following me. So, when I saw a taxi, I jumped in front of it begging the driver to take me home. The off-duty taxi driver was kind enough to do one more trip before ending his day.
My experience of London and nearby places as a visitor was greatly enriched by the fact that I strayed beyond the comfortable confines of Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, fabulous museums, and bustling tourist areas. In addition, through mindfully and observantly exploring the city and surrounding areas, some of which I encountered serendipitously, I was able to experience or gather information about the city of London beyond my own assumptions or popular media representations. If I had not explored different parts of the city on foot, had not taken risks, or had not been lost, my view of London would have been narrow and similar to common tourist perceptions. This holistic, mindful, and adventurous perspective also creates a hopeful expectation that I will find new input through more interesting areas and new views of the city each time I visit.
Mindful Walking as a Research Method
Conducting a community-based, qualitative research project is similar to traveling to a new place. When a researcher explores a new focus, phenomenon, or culture in a community that she has not previously experienced on a deep level, she strives to develop a holistic understanding of the phenomenon through embodied experiences gathered in a variety of ways. Of course, there are countless other factors that shape the researcher’s understanding of her research focus. Metaphorically, mentally walking through what is already known is a way of initially conceptualizing a qualitative research project. To begin to understand the situation holistically, it is invaluable for the researcher to carefully connect all the important empirical material lines, including people, environments, objects, and structures in her mind. Practically, walking is a physical way to start exploring a research focus, especially one that deals with relationships among people, organizations, places, communities, and environments. My walks in the field were not goal-directed in the sense of getting to a preconceived destination. Instead, I walked with physically and mentally flexible, free movements in a stream of consciousness as if I were writing freely without thinking about grammar, structure, or word choice.
For example, in my ethnographic case study, Building Strong Bridges between the Museum and Its Community: An Ethnographic Understanding of the Culture and Systems of One Community’s Art Museum, I investigated how a medium-sized art museum is connected to its community and how its overall practices (exhibitions and programs), work culture, management and communication systems, mission, and vision influence the museum’s visitorship and community perceptions. The case study museum, the Avery Art Museum, 1 is located in Watertown, a community within a larger metropolitan area called River City, which I had not visited prior to the commencement of my research.
I conceptualized mindful walking as experienced materials in my investigation of the Avery and the River City communities. I walked to many places near the museum, visiting economically depressed and vibrantly developed parts of the River City area. I also explored the downtown neighborhood of the museum on foot and walked around the Avery’s galleries a number of times, interacting with community members and visitors. All of these conscious experiences became empirical materials for my study. Although walking as empirical materials or a research method is not well represented in the literature, there are several examples that successfully used walking in place-based ethnographic studies.
In her article, “Making Sense of Place: Mapping as a Multisensory Research Method,” Kimberly Powell (2010) alludes to its potential in her discussions of creating physical and conceptual maps. She shares the collective research experiences of her students in an interdisciplinary summer course that explored lived experiences, culture, and the landscape of the El Chorrillo neighborhood in Panama City, Panama through mapping and walking. Her description of the participating students’ projects vividly evokes relationships among places, lived experiences, and community members. For example, one student’s project focused on how several community members experienced and mapped the neighborhood differently based on their emplaced understanding of the place (Powell, 2010). Another student walked around, observed, and photographed the waterfront area that is frequently used by community members but polluted by waste dumping caused by negligence and abandonment (Powell, 2010). Like mindful walking, mapping “highlights and displays the ways in which place configures a sense of self in relation to historical, geographical, and localized environments” (Powell, 2010, p. 553), which, in turn, helps one understand things in a holistic, contextual, and lived manner.
In another example, Sarah Pink (2008) uses shared walking in her case study of an urban tour in Mold, a town in Flintshire, Wales. She used shared walking, eating, photographing, and imagining as a place-making process to comprehend ethnographic spaces through social, multisensory, and embodied experience (Pink, 2008). In addition, in Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (2008) introduce various studies, papers, and collective efforts to conceptualize walking as essential human experience, social activity, and a way of thinking and (re)searching.
While walking enables one to comprehend lived experiences, it is critical to capture the emerging feelings and spontaneous moments though faded memories and images of places are also part of the lived experience through walking. Researchers should not only grasp what they observe but also pay attention to what they think and feel about their observations of and interactions with the research site and participants while these thoughts and feelings are present (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). Throughout my doctoral research, I carried a notebook and pencil with me whenever I walked through the community or the museum, painstakingly jotting down observations, comments, feelings, and preliminary analysis. As many qualitative scholars recommend (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Huberman & Miles, 1994; Stake, 1995), I documented the journal in an electronic form at the end of every working day to assure timely record keeping. I sometimes recorded my own voice at the moment as well.
While one might argue that jotting down and keeping a thorough record of emplaced experiences are similar to a traditional sense of fieldwork, we cannot ignore that our experiences have to be written or presented to keep up with commonly accepted publication and dissertation writing. Sharing is an important aspect of all research. The importance is not in what a researcher’s field notes look like but what they say about an empirical material dot or line in relation to other interdependent entities within the larger pathways, which I will further explain later.
Along with keeping a journal of lived experiences, I also took photographs to help capture and reflect my understanding of the museum and community. Photography has traditionally been associated with the field of anthropology and understood to be capable of representing realistic, true depictions of the studied culture; however, current thinking construes photographs, like textual descriptions, to be necessarily constructed and interpreted through the cultural and personal lens of the photographer and viewers (Harper, 1994). The latter view is associated with a postmodern perspective, which views “the idea of ethnography as ‘partial truth’ rather than complete document” (Harper, 1994, p. 407). In my study, I supplemented my walks with photography mainly as a means of remembering visual information or constructed truth at the moment, a reminder of my observations and feelings, and a way to enrich my thick, written descriptions of the museum and the surrounding community.
Following is an illustrative excerpt (in italics) I share from my dissertation to further demonstrate how mindful walking can be usefully applied as a research method.
Dissertation Excerpt Illustrating Mindful Walking as Inquiry
When I arrived in the neighborhood where I had rented a room, it was very quiet . . . It is about 10 blocks north from the downtown area and up on a hill. The neighborhood was somewhat rundown—houses and streets were in disrepair. I learned from my landlord that the neighborhood is mostly occupied by middle-income families and college students who attend a well-known chiropractic college located adjacent to the neighborhood.
The next day, Sunday, I decided to walk to the Avery Art Museum and explore the city on foot; it took me about 20 minutes to get to the downtown area. The walk was beautiful, and I observed different styles of buildings and houses . . . When I got closer to the downtown area, I noticed an increase in the number of larger, taller buildings. The styles and eras of the buildings were mixed, mostly ranging from 1890s to 1930s . . .
It was around eleven o’clock in the morning when I arrived in the waterfront area. I did not see a single person on the street and could not even find a café that was open. All shops were closed and the downtown was empty. Later, I ran into a couple who were also looking for a place to sit and eat but they could not help me because they were also visitors to River City. I also saw a number of homeless people on the street. I later found out that there are two homeless shelters in downtown Watertown. I grew up in the bustling city of Busan in South Korea where shops are open on Sundays. Most South Korean metropolitan cities, especially Busan, include a mix of residential, entertainment, and business centers. Therefore, downtown areas are busier on weekends . . . Because of my background, downtown Watertown seemed odd to me even though I have learned that many cities in the United States have different zones for businesses and residences, and shops tend to close on Sundays partly for religious reasons.
I walked to the waterfront to see the Central River running through the heart of River City. The river view was stunning (Figure 1). When I looked at the city view with the river behind me, I noticed a shiny rectangular green glass building looking down on the river. It was the Avery Art Museum . . . The Avery building is distinctive and reminded me of a well-refined minimalist artwork (Figure 2). A Renaissance Revival style stone building right next to the museum on the left side of the main entrance creates a sharp contrast with the Avery’s look in terms of size, style, color, and sensation. While the grey stone building, which is a bank, is taller and narrower, the Avery building looks like two rectangular boxes stacked on top of the other . . . (Jung, 2012, pp. 105-108).
The river view from the Avery Art Museum.
The back façade of the Avery Art Museum.
Layers in Walking
In many ways, my mindful walking to learn about the Avery and its community is related to flâneur, as conceptualized by Walter Benjamin (1999) and other scholars, which is explained below. Yet the walking that I describe in this article has many layers and moves beyond the simple flâneur. It can be theorized suing the following four concepts: curious spectator, entangled pathways, ways of knowing, and meditation.
Curious Spectator
Walking in London and River City on foot, experiencing the cities as if I was reading the cities’ visible and invisible stories parallels how Walter Benjamin explored early-20th-century urban shopping areas, or “a world in miniature” called The Arcades (Benjamin, 1999, p. 3; Solnit, 2000). Covered with roofs made of new building materials at the time, such as steel and glass, these hybrid indoor/outdoor streets included a variety of shops that sold and displayed luxury items in Paris (Benjamin, 1999). Benjamin’s urban walking or strolling can be captured or characterized by the person who does the walk, a flâneur. The French word, flâneur means a “stroller, idler, or walker” (Crickenberger, n.d.). While there is not an agreed definition of flâneur in academic literature, the common idea is that flâneur is “the image of an observant and solitary man strolling about Paris” (Solnit, 2000, p. 198). Benjamin (1983) describes the flâneur as an unwilling detective, stroller, and asocial observer.
As a flâneur walks about Paris, I started walking in River City, without a designated destination or a laid out map in hand. It was spontaneous, serendipitous, meditative, and solitary. While I walked about River City in a manner of Flâneury, it was more about learning to understand the unfamiliar through exploring and getting lost. As I became more engaged with the research topic and the people who were involved with it and more familiar with River City, I found myself desiring to know and understand more about them. As I felt that I was becoming a part of my research focus, I was no longer the “disinterested spectator” (Alter, 2005, p. 11) or a lost stroller.
Often flâneur is associated with a bourgeois who had the luxury of time and money to idle in the arcades of Paris (Tester, 1994). He was a spectator and enjoyed the intellectual activities of reading the city. While my initial walk in my research site is similar to the concept of flâneury, my walking method differs in that I was not purely enjoying or contemplating without the purpose. Nor did I pretend that I was not part of the surroundings and therefore, asocial. Unlike disinterested, male, and modernist spectator, the flâneur, I will be better described as a postmodern Flâneuse (McLaren, 1997), who is insider and outsider of the research focus and charged with the desire to learn more and know what people in River City felt about its art museum. It was not about me trying to be the third person omniscient of the story of the museum and its community but a genuine researcher who wanted to pay attention to what really mattered to tell a holistic story of the museum in relation to its community from multiple perspectives. While I was not looking for destination or result when I was doing my initial walks for my research, in a larger sense, I had a clear purpose, which was to earn a PhD.
Perhaps I wanted my walk to be associated with the concept of dérive and wanted to describe myself as a surveyor of the city, who not only studies the city but aims to make some kind of positive changes. French situationists, also known as the Situationist International, developed the concept of the flâneur into that of the dérive, which is “an experimental mode of behavior associated with the urban condition of life,” and therefore studying, examining, and constructing a new city life and landscape (Vachon, 2004, p. 50). The act of dérive involves walking purposefully to understand how urban city landscape, architecture, spaces, and places affect emotions and behaviors of people living in the city, and therefore, helped develop a new approach to urban planning based on psychogeography 2 to design more suitable and playful urban spaces for the future (Vachon, 2004). Situationists became surveyors of the city who wanted to make changes in asocial, homogeneous, and placelessness urban life in the late 1950s Paris (Relph, 1976; Vachon, 2004). Through my walks and empirical materials collected through them, I desired my study to be something useful to the museum and community for the future.
Entangled Pathways
My walks were mindful and conscious. In other words, the walking was not walks for transportation simply to get to a particular destination. It was also different from unconscious, nonobservant walking, or distractive walking such as that which might happen when talking on a cell phone while walking. Instead, mindful walking is an interactive way of knowing, allowing the entire body, and all of its senses to experience the surroundings, to trace, and connect different areas, to intuitively sense when and how to avoid potential dangers, and to live in the entangled social pathways.
When a researcher uses her emplaced movements and multiple senses through mindful walking, empirical materials gathered become somewhat different from traditional forms of materials, such as interview scripts, archival materials, and observational notes in a closed setting (e.g., classrooms and offices). In mindful walking, the body is engaged in the act of walking (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008), which then becomes the lived experience, information received in multiple ways: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, overall sensing, and mentally connecting. Therefore, walking itself becomes empirical materials that are often described as lived memories and feelings. While I argue that the lived experience or walking is the empirical materials, it is also a material gathering or experiencing method in a practical sense. The potential experience that is to be sensed will not be felt unless the researcher does the walk. Therefore, the walk itself is also the means to empirical materials. The body, the instrument to experience materials; the walk, the means to empirical materials; and the experienced, the empirical materials, are inseparable.
In addition, empirical materials gathered through mindful walking cannot be entirely controlled or manipulated by a researcher because they often lead the researcher to find connections among the entangled web of empirical materials that leads to further understanding, research, and theorization. As in my opening story of London, my experience through walking was not only shaped by my own awareness and free will but by different social aspects of people and spaces (e.g., depressed urban area, a stranger who followed me, and a kind taxi driver) that exist in the entangled social web that is not under my control.
This way of thinking about empirical materials through mindful walking is well suited to qualitative research that is grounded in ecological perspectives or systems thinking, which conceptualizes that all human beings, species, and natural ecosystems are interconnected and interdependent, forming a web of life (Bateson, 2000; Capra, 1996). When human-created cultures, societies, and organizations are conceived in an ecological sense, then research foci are understood as displaying characteristics of organisms and natural ecosystems (Bateson, 2000). In this sense, empirical materials can be conceptualized as situated in an invisible open cultural, social, and political system that affects and is affected by infinite decisions and interactions happening in the system.
Observantly walking around the surrounding area of the museum, comparing the physical aspect of the museum with that of the community, and interacting with local people helped me understand interconnectedness of the museum and community. I also walked around different areas of the River City metropolitan area, which helped me identify and carry out further research about social, cultural, economic, educational, and demographic characteristics of the community, which I discuss further in the next section. Many of my experiences through walking started to connect to more areas to explore, including histories, spaces, places, and people that exist in invisible social pathways that are complex and difficult to understand. However, my movements, multiple senses, and intuition through walking helped me physically get to more important empirical material lines and connect them holistically.
According to Ingold (2007), this invisible system is made up of invisible lines that connect its various subcomponents and can be described as “pathways that are thoroughly entangled” (p. 103). They are gathering places for things (animated and unanimated) and are experienced through multisensory interactions and movements (Pink, 2008). In my study, I was able to untangle and understand some of the pathways through my emplaced movements, practically connecting and detecting relevant lines that led to more pathways to explore. Entangled pathways have “no insides or outsides, only openings and ways through” (Ingold, 2007, p. 103). It is endless; one could go on exploring these pathways indefinitely. I came to a synthetic closure in my study to complete my degree, but I am still writing and thinking about it. While empirical materials reside within invisible entangled pathways, in a broad sense, entangled pathways are empirical materials that can be explored in multiple ways.
These invisible entangled pathways are the web of empirical materials that is experienced, lived, and subject to change. Walking is an ideal way for a researcher to experience these invisible pathways or empirical materials through physical engagement so that she may ultimately make them more visible to others who may not be physically present. Therefore, the researcher becomes part of the empirical materials through movements that are present and lived experiences.
Experienced Materials as a Way of Knowing
Mindful walking allowed me to experience the River City community and the Avery in ways that cannot be experienced by driving in a car, talking to people, or doing archival or internet research. Walking, for me, was a different way of knowing or gathering subjective information. Rita Irwin explains the process and act of walking as a means to “notice the extraordinary in the ordinary” (Irwin, 2006, p. 76). To demonstrate how materials experienced through mindful walking afforded this opportunity to me, I would like to share two examples from my dissertation research.
First, the empirical materials helped me visually and theoretically conceptualize the museum and the surrounding neighborhood. My initial experience of the emptiness in the downtown area and the visual contrast of the museum in relation to the rest of the downtown area raised these questions: I wonder if the people living in a somewhat run-down section of the city, only 1 mile from the Avery, would visit the museum? What about homeless people? Are they welcome in the museum? These questions and a distinctive visual presentation of the museum compared with the surrounding neighborhood led me to conduct more in-depth research about the community and theorize the museum as a White, privileged place where many may not feel they belong. Therefore, mindful walking created initial empirical material lines to the investigation of further questions that yield new, unanticipated empirical materials.
By exploring the city for the first time on foot, I was able to record my first reactions to the museum: it felt very contemporary, minimal, and lifeless. A significant finding of my study was that many people in the community do not visit the museum regularly or at all and that some avoid it because they think it is an elitist institution intended for only a handful of people. Surely, one factor that contributed to this perception is the physical appearance of the building that looks rather expansive, different, and visually incongruent to most local people. For those who live in the relatively poor 1-mile radius around the museum, it is easy to understand how this foreign-looking space is imagined as a place where they would not feel comfortable.
Second, as I walked I observed how different areas of River City are divided by socioeconomic status as well as economic and residential functions. I saw that some areas in River City are wealthier and better maintained than other parts of the city. Sometimes I felt uncomfortable walking in certain areas, where houses were run-down and empty. I was even advised not to walk alone in areas that are considered economically depressed and dangerous because of problems associated with drugs and gang violence. Some houses were abandoned with windows and doors broken, and indecipherable words spray-painted on their façades. Mindful walking allowed me to vividly experience why River City is widely experienced as a collection of disconnected cities and towns instead of a unified community. I could see and feel that people tend not to migrate from one area to another in meaningful ways and do not work together to improve the overall well-being of the greater metropolitan area.
In addition, through walking along the river, I was able to observe large mansions overlooking the river, which appeared to have lost their original grandeur, standing now poorly maintained or even vacant. This visual image powerfully represented to me River City’s history as an economically booming city on the river that had experienced significant economic decline. This led me to conduct further research on the economic development and history of the community, and how it became divided into sections based on social, racial, economic, and cultural differences. All of these findings were instrumental in helping me comprehend the museum’s current practices and visitorship.
Mindful Walking as Meditation
Mindful walking can also serve as an awakening and meditative process that increases awareness. Irwin uses walking to discuss metaphorically the flexibility and fluent concept of spiritual currere. 3 She writes, “It [walking] gives me a chance to breathe in fresh air, to clear my mind, to refocus, to walk in silence” (Irwin, 2006, p. 75). In the same vein, Solnit (2000) writes “walking is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals” (p. 5). This short phrase captures succinctly why I had to pull out my notes or digital voice recorder so many times while walking through River City. Scientifically speaking, meditation is helpful for one’s physical and mental health, lowering heart rate and blood pressure, reducing physical and psychological discomforts, and improving self-esteem (Roth & Creaser, 1997). Therefore, meditation can lead one to achieve the state of mindfulness or the relaxation response, a “personal ability to make your body release chemicals and brain signals that make your muscles and organs slow down and increases blood flow to the brain” (Williams & Carey, 2003, p. 1). When one achieves the relaxation response, she is in the ideal mental and physical state to observe her feelings or intuitions, to be fully aware of her surroundings, and to think deeply. This scientific explanation illuminates clearly why I was able to do productive, focused observation and deep thinking during my various walks, noticing the extraordinary in everyday scenes.
This process of generating thoughts or empirical materials through walking is very similar to the writing process in that they both provide an ideal environment for deep thinking and meditation that engages our intuitive inner senses holistically. Writing allows one to find connections among complex thoughts and ultimately to record them with words, moving from intangible, ambiguous ideas toward more clear and concrete conceptualization and theorization. In other words, writing is another way to explore the entangled pathways. In their article, “Writing: A Method of Inquiry,” Laurel Richardson and Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre (2005) discuss writing as a way of knowing and analysis not limited to the conventional sense of collecting, sorting, coding, and categorizing data. St. Pierre writes, Thought happened in the writing. As I wrote, I watched word after word appear on the computer screen—ideas, theories, I had not thought before I wrote them. Sometimes I wrote something so marvelous it startled me. I doubt I could have thought such a thought by thinking alone. (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p. 970)
If writing is a more solid way to bring to consciousness and record created thoughts, a “tangled method of discovery” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p. 967), walking is a more casual and lived meditative process that similarly creates or brings to full consciousness otherwise invisible thoughts or empirical materials. As I experienced in the course of my doctoral study, through walking and writing, a researcher can use body and mind together to generate a concrete and sharable form of ethnographic narratives that are embodied, lived, and contextual.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.