Unsettling bodies of knowledge: Walking as a pedagogy of affect

Walking, thinking, learning

In light of the endless array of historical and contemporary walking practices (Hall et al., 2018), walking wanders easily into all kinds of disciplines and schools of thought, often trespassing their boundaries (Solnit, 2002). As a consequence, a large body of writing is dedicated to the thought, practice and institutional conditions of walking (Amato, 2004; Burckhardt, 2015; Gros, 2014; Solnit, 2002). This wealth of practices and concepts – and thus the interrelations of embodiment, affect and cognition – underlines clearly that reflecting the interplay of walking, thinking and teaching is far from new (Goertz, 2018). The generative potential of walking was perhaps most famously captured in Nietzsche’s (1998: 9) aphorism that ‘only thoughts which come from walking have value’, while an emphasis on Sitzfleisch (sedentary life, literally: seated or seating flesh) could only produce predictable, formulaic thinking. ¹ But already many ancient philosophers are said to have walked while teaching. Socrates, named ‘the street-corner philosopher’ was known to walk during teaching (Goertz, 2018) while Aristotle’s nickname ‘walker’ comes from the Greek verb peripatein, simultaneously denoting ‘to walk’, ‘to converse’ and ‘to engage in dialogue while walking’ (Gros, 2014: 130). Such peripatetic practices of thinking, teaching and learning seem currently in vogue again in the corporate world. Its techniques of ‘walk and talk’ or ‘thought walks’ and images or stories of former president Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘walking and talking’ have perhaps taken the place of the image of the wandering philosopher (Goertz, 2018). In educational contexts, such instrumentalised understanding of walking updates the age-old intimacy of walking and teaching, where ‘math walks’, ‘gallery walks’ and indeed walking as urban inquiry are now mobilised to increase creativity, environmental consciousness and learning outcomes (Springgay and Truman, 2018).

Walking as embodied knowing

Understood as an ethnographic practice of learning in urban contexts, walking unsettles the sedentary division between knowledge and movement: ‘Movement (. . .) is not adjunct to knowledge, as it is in the educational theory that underwrites classroom practice. Rather, the movement of walking is itself a way of knowing’ (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008: 5). This way of thinking and feeling on the move, moreover, is not in a distant or objective relation to an assumed stability of the organised world; knowing implies moving through, and with, ‘a world-in-formation’ (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008: 2). Any world-in-formation is of course institutionally and materially regulated and disciplined. Walking and its learned rhythms invariably entail elements of ‘dressage’ (Lefebvre, 2004) and have been, and still are, heavily gendered and racialised (Nash, 2018; Solnit, 2002). Yet at the same time, walking has always been a primary practice of opposition, protest and revolt. In a more minor key, walking can be seen as the perhaps quintessential subversive activity within the urban everyday (de Certeau, 1984; Jacks, 2004). After all, walking is necessarily improvisational and invariably contingent upon its environments and the ways these intermingle with the walkers’ bodies.

In the sense of a Situationist ‘drift’ (to which we return to below), walking thus calls for a sensuous exploration of differences (Debord, 1994). This implies a fundamentally sensory and affective engagement with our surroundings, a ‘thinking-feeling’ that blurs the divisions between cognition and feeling, representation and enactment: ‘The rhythms of walking allow for a particular experiential flow of successive moments of detachment and attachment, physical immersion and mental wandering, memory, recognition and strangeness (. . .)’ (Edensor, 2010: 70). Apprehending these affectively charged and multi-sensory situations then becomes a way of ‘thinking on our feet’ (Dewsbury, 2000: 493) and of ‘circumambulatory knowing’ (Ingold, 2004: 331). Engaging with embodied knowing calls for educational experiments with urban-ethnographic walking to enter and become immersed in different experiences and evocations of learning. With Whybrow (2010: xviii; orig. emphasis), we therefore suggest that the physical act of walking in the city can be transposed metaphorically to practices of inquiry: ‘moving in and around or between the spaces of the city emerges as a possible paradigm for interdisciplinary knowing, for the way in which we may come to know and be transformed by a variety of “unknown things”’.

Bodies of knowledge in management education

These insights into walking as embodied, affective and pedagogical practice chime well with more recent attempts to ‘mobilise’ pedagogical bodies and ‘move’ the practice and theory of management education. Even if we need to look mostly elsewhere for examples and reflections on pedagogies of walking, which depart from a modern pedagogical model where the learning situation is focused on the transfer of knowledge and teacher-experts take centre-stage to inform novice-students taking up a passive and patient role (Freire, 1970; Rancière, 1991), we can point to some encouraging attempts to bring walking methods and the ‘transitional qualities of a body-in-motion’ into the study and understanding of organisation (O’Doherty, 2013: 211; see also Cnossen et al., 2020; Nash, 2018; 2020). Furthermore, numerous experiments in the last decennia show significant efforts to make management education more lively, active and engaging, often directed against ‘an overemphasis on rational-objective analysis and power-point presentations [that] leaves [students’] senses dulled’ (Mack, 2012: 301).

Often drawing upon approaches from the Arts and Humanities, classrooms have been turned into sites where novels are read (Śliwa et al., 2015), films are debated (Bell and Sinclair, 2016; Kearney et al., 2013; Smith, 2009), photographic techniques are employed (Ciolan and Manasia, 2017) and social media and other web-based tools are translated into classroom-based activities (Bachmann and Shah, 2016). Moreover, a host of art-based practices such as collage construction (Colakoglu and Littlefield, 2011), performing (Steyaert et al., 2016), exhibition-making (Huault and Perret, 2016), sculptural work (Beyes and Michels, 2011) and studio-based learning (Barry and Meisiek, 2015; Katz-Buonincontro, 2015) have entered the classroom, opening up management education for complex entanglements between materialities and emotions (Taylor and Statler, 2014; see Fenwick and Edwards, 2010; 2012).

These experiments point to a broader move towards exploring the affective, multi-sensorial and evocative potential of embodied learning and teaching. Arts-based learning figures most prominently, understood and approached as offering creative alternatives to traditional methods of education and seen as opening up to corporeality, materiality and sensory experience (Mack, 2012). This kind of work raises the question of how to explore and understand embodiment and affect in management education and thus how to transgress the ingrained body-mind dualism and the dominant preference of mind over body (Zundel, 2013). Through these studies, then, we can discern the rise of a postdualist practice of management education, one that problematises mind-over-body assumptions and foregrounds embodied processes of learning and teaching and their affective and material registers. In reflecting on walking as the age-old and perhaps pivotal embodied practice of learning, in this paper we seek to contribute to the movement towards a postdualist practice of management education by literally inviting students’ bodies to be on the move.

Moreover, we note little sustained reflection and conceptualisation of how such forms of teaching affect the bodies of learners and teachers and of how we might make embodied sense of the kind of pedagogies these teaching experiments tinker with. As Bell and Sinclair (2014) have pointed out in a rare illustration, higher education is not only usually presented as disembodied; this neglect exacerbates prevalent tendencies of sexualisation and commodification in academic life. Through feminist theory, Bell and Sinclair seek to recover the body and its potential to experience and emanate the eros and eroticism of pedagogic relations. Following a different trajectory of thought, Michels and Beyes (2016) have conceptualised embodied and multi-sensory learning situations as ‘spaces with a mood’ (p. 316), and they propose a pedagogy of atmospheres to ‘feel-think’ such atmospherically charged spaces and how they condition the learning situation. Our attempt to develop the contours of a pedagogy of affect and how it informs and is shaped by practices of walking closely follows and seeks to add to these developments by at once emphasising and unsettling the movements, encounters and potentials of bodies (of knowledge) on the move.

Straying: Feeling lost, slowing down

The ways student ethnographies draw traces of multiple trajectories across Berlin’s streets and squares echoes Benjamin’s conceptual persona of the flâneur and the practices of straying and slow walking, which seem to capture the contradictory feelings unleashed in transitional urban conditions, the uncanniness of simultaneously being immersed in and being alienated from the crowd (Benjamin, 2002; Vidler, 2001). When our students walk through Berlin as if they were straying, we like to believe they adopt what Benjamin (2007a: 8–9) famously advocated as the fourth guide to the city: ²

‘Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his (her) feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre’.

A recurring theme in the student groups’ scripts of their performative presentations as well as in individual reflection papers is the sensation of getting lost and feeling lost, especially when the students set out to walk towards or into the neighbourhoods, streets and squares that become their fieldwork sites, as bodies that, for a while, stray and rove. Feeling lost is often thematised as a viscerally felt experience of a lack of structure (in comparison to their more structured study lives on campus), a plunge into the unknown that manifests itself in spells of insecurity, in slowing down to deal with uncertainty and also in struggles within the group about how to deal with the situation, how to start documenting, with what means, and to what end? The students begin to experience how they become part of urban atmospheres and how these atmospheres are made up of sounds, colours, smells and the human and non-human agents that populate them. Yet at the same time, and of course utterly depending on the specific fieldwork sites, there are feelings of alienation, of not belonging, of being out of place as a business school student; bodies are literally led astray.

‘It was sunny when you started walking on the boulevard. Now it’s grey. It seems like the old, symmetrical buildings want it this way. They demand one emotion, sadness. They bring memories to surface. One you don’t really have, one of a story told so many times. One that is far and close to you. One that makes you stay with the herd. Creativity seems blocked by all this atmosphere. The general affect seems to be one of conforming. (. . .)

You almost reach the end of this perfectly arranged street. You bodily feel that the symmetry is gone. It almost annoys you. Colours. Life. The intersection. Chaotic movement. You start smiling. It’s like you are free now. Width still, but different this time. Different in your emotions, different in its setting’. [student script ‘Walk wi(d)th me!’]

This affective destabilisation of bodies on the move is an important part of the learning process, we think, since it provokes a sensual openness and often a shattering and reconsideration of preconceived images of the ‘creative city’ of Berlin in general and specific districts in particular. Streets are reframed in the experiences of students as spaces that, as Kracauer pointed out (in 1931), can ‘escape the authority of urban planners and architects and reveal the heterogeneity that their designs deny’ (Federle, 2001: 43; see Kracauer, 2009). In our reading, the above description illustrates how an experience of conformity and sadness mingles with assumptions about the hip district of Friedrichshain. In the embodied practice of straying, student-researchers ‘allow in the unknown by jolting perceptions of the familiar out of any banalising complacency’ (Whybrow, 2010: xvii). Benjamin’s ‘different schooling’ ushers in a different apperception of everyday urban space, one that students often struggle with for a while, which makes them slow down and begin to apprehend the affective swirls of urban life and how these new encounters shape their own embodied experiences and responses.

Drifting: Experimenting with alternative practices and perceptions

Students, by hours of walking, become immersed in the collective urban flow and start to sense the difference between how Berlin is represented in the media, in public imaginaries and the stories of friends, and how they themselves get hooked by the unfamiliar sides and sites of the city, as they come to apprehend everyday urban life and its complex knots of routines, rhythms, conflicts, joys and inertias. This kind of attunement provokes a second kind of walking practice, one that is more deliberate and systematic, yet at the same time experimental and sometimes quite radical. The walks of our ethnographers here become a form of drifting, resembling the ways in which the Situationist International enacted mappings digressing from and disruptive to the functional, routinised, usually non-conscious forms of moving through the city (Sadler, 1999). Walking is translated into practices of drifting through what is called dérive or an unplanned journey (Michels et al., 2020). Through the notion of psychogeography, which recognises that the self cannot be artificially separated from the urban environment and that a re-thinking of the city demands a collective effort, walking is connected to affect, play and subversion, ‘[as] the street-level gaze that walking requires allows one to challenge the official representation of the city (. . .)’ (Coverley, 2006: 12).

For us, it is often surprising how open some student groups are to radicalise their walks and embark on psychogeographical trajectories in their attempts to enact affective mappings of Berlin or even conduct their own interventions into urban life. Consider a group that follows the affect of dirtiness as it infuses their own bodies. They drift through the city led by hints and sites they feel and consider to be dirty and encounter practices and sensations as well as minor creative economies of dirt, increasingly problematising their own embodied preconceptions about what constitutes dirtiness as they walk and drift along. Or consider a group that decides to drift through the city by way of public transport, spending 24 hours in a row on Berlin’s circle line (Ringbahn), documenting the manifold and contrasting affects the students encounter in a bleed of sites flitting by, with the Ringbahn as physical and atmospheric demarcation line between those who live ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of its circle, the changing atmospheres and encounters within the compartment, and the manifold practices attached to a ‘simple’ public transport line:

‘Endless graffiti galleries. Fat, colourful letters, squeezed next to each other in a seemingly endless space. Ringbahn, an adventure playground of adolescents. “Trainwriting”, as the painting of the trains is called, is the ultimate risk for sprayers, it is a dangerous action in depots or at stations that are perfectly planned – like a bank robbery. The adrenaline is almost as important as a good colour. On YouTube you can easily find the corresponding video, produced by the crews with narcissistic precision. Typical sequence: masked figures stormed out of the track bed, the doses in shoulder bags, then already dusted the paint on the walls and trains. A few outlines, done. The presence of the train driver bothers no one. (. . .) The crew is long gone before the police shows up’. [from the script of ‘24 Spheres: A Journey on the Edge of Berlin’]

The practice of drifting provokes a different kind of embodied and reflexive learning, one that experiments with different, more-than-representational, even subversive ways of exploring how bodies are affected and the kind of different experiences and impressions this enables. If drifting as a practice of learning ‘works’, then it crosses over from a logic of acquisition and reception to one of digression, creation and invention (Dey and Steyaert, 2007). Students change their own habitual practice of moving through the city and of learning to register, and they sometimes invent alternative ways of appropriating and experiencing urban spaces.

Witnessing: Estrangement and taking positions

As these impressions indicate, walking and the kind of urban ethnography outlined here provoke forms of witnessing (Dewsbury, 2003). As we walk the streets, we are witnessing others and through these encounters, emotions are provoked, unsettled or stabilised. As students walk the city, they also become witnesses of the many stories people tell them as they make casual encounters, undertake quasi-interviews or cross boundaries by immersing themselves in uncharted spaces, like Berlin’s nightclubs, or enter behind the screens of people’s public lives. When we meet students in the evenings during reflection sessions, we often hear how they experience emotions of surprise, shock, disbelief and even estrangement vis-à-vis their usual mundane movements through the urban everyday. This performative effect can be aligned with Bertolt Brecht’s (1976: 176) acknowledgement of the ‘theatre whose setting is the street’, in which the bystanders must take a position on what is happening. In Brechtian theatre, estrangement or Verfremdung intrudes into the everyday as we are urged to confront the familiar becoming strange. During the ethnographic exercises, our participants are developing a different kind of witnessing of the everyday through uncanny experiences, slowly becoming aware of the multiplicity of everyday spacings and the complexities of everyday life. Students, reflecting back on their urban walks, often testify that this is a completely new urban experience for them way beyond the tourist-like encounters they had so far. ³

While it is impossible to do justice to the varieties of witnessing at work in the course, we here point to three common scenes of learning even if their specific manifestations again vary widely. First, business school students are confronted with alternative worlds and different practices of urban creativity than the ones they tend to think of when entering the course – indeed, ‘contrast’ is a popular analytical point of departure in trying to make sense of the fieldwork material. Engagements with a different world for instance include encounters with queer movements, squatted houses, homeless persons, street musicians and drug dealers, but also immersion into remnants of working-class culture, bourgeois settings in neighbourhoods presumably unhip as well as experiences of profound hospitality and generosity in migrant communities. In fact, witnessing how the students witness and come to terms with the sheer diversity of everyday urban creativity – most of it far beyond or in contrast to what they encounter in the textbooks, lectures and classroom discussions of their sedentary student life – is perhaps the most moving experience of a course that sets its teachers on the move, too.

Second, most groups are confronted with conflicts and struggles around gentrification and the everyday injustices and inequalities that have increasingly shaped Berlin’s more central districts. Students are thus compelled to reflect upon these impressions as manifestations of an urban development in thrall to so-called entrepreneurial ideas of governance and control (Steyaert and Beyes, 2009). The sensory impressions gathered on their walks thus force them to grapple with the atmospheric and existential consequences of economic theories too often taken for granted.

Third, a recurring motive is the confrontation with testimonies, narratives and objects from the past, and the way Berlin’s loaded history keeps shaping its affective landscape. In embodied and emotional terms, students are witnessing the often uncanny weight of the city’s history (Beyes and Steyaert, 2013), which haunts and shapes what people experience and do in this city and which leads the student walkers to supplementary desk-research on the history of specific sites: They try to find a stance on, and a vocabulary for how the past conditions the possibilities of urban life.

Walking/learning

A more-than-representational approach to urban-ethnographic walking can be featured in a threefold way: as an experience of getting lost and straying as a form of defamiliarisation; as a situationist drifting aimed at disturbing and reconfiguring our sensing of urban psychogeographies; and as a way of confronting participants with the ethical and political position of witnessing. Paraphrasing the Wrights and Sites (2006) ‘Manifesto for a new walking culture’, these mobile pedagogical practices constitute a manifesto of new walking practices for students interested in the affective spaces of urban life.

Across these three features, turning walking into a core element of teaching has at least three implications. First, ‘on your feet’ implies that learning and teaching is a matter of being on the move and thus of breaking with the disciplinary shaping of sedentary, usually docile bodies of learning in classroom settings. Instead we encounter an open, unstructured learning situation, which is constantly emerging, requiring that students actively structure their own learning. In the learning reports and responses, most students refer to this experience as overwhelming, an ‘unsettling uncertainty’ (Latham and McCormack, 2009: 260), yet many other sensations and affects are encountered. Learning then works through embodied experiences and apprehensions which shape what can be felt and thought, perceived and expressed. Walking as learning almost by default foregrounds the student bodies’ capacities to affect and to be affected; hence the centrality of affects of feeling lost and uncertain, or experiencing a sense of adventure, or shock, or, of course, of joy. In taking to the streets, students can discover again what their bodies can do or become.

Second, this kind of indetermination elicits creative practices of enacting fieldwork that go beyond exercising or representing traduced knowledge. In reflecting back on the course, some students are pleased as they understand that their little, inventive tactics during the fieldwork are part and parcel of ‘doing ethnography’, and they appreciate the open, creative experience of learning to not just follow teachers’ instructions but to become inventive in a collective effort of movement and experimentation. Others draw upon the discourse of structure that lingers in evaluation booklets and keep wondering about the value of a little help, until they enter a more inventive mode. So they initiate some of the practices of ethnography: immersing, waiting, observing, taking notes, drawing maps, writing down a story, taking pictures, doing small talk, negotiating to get approval to film someone, transcribing, constructing interpretations, conceptualising, forming hypotheses as thick understandings, experimenting with visualisation, verbalisation, documentation, finding a red thread, etc. While this kind of processual and collective involvement as creatively partaking in urban life is to us more important than any conceptual or reflection paper, it extends to what we call the ‘performative presentations’ at the end of the fieldwork trip. In staging the results of their walks and talks, hang-outs and interventions, the students seek to both inventively recreate and reflect on their embodied experience. These experimental sessions take on the character of exhibitions and little scripted performances; and they involve all kinds of objects and media in order to conjure up the multi-sensorial power of walking as learning. Whatever position one takes on the inventive side of this intervention, whether leaving the expected feels like a shock or is sensed as reasonably smooth, walking is intimately tied to inventive forms of inquiry and learning (Steyaert, 2009).

Third, walking as learning forfeits to some degree the teachers’ position of mastering and transmitting knowledge and instead instigates an embodied positioning vis-à-vis the daily issues and problems of urban life. As teachers, we cannot anticipate the situations of straying, drifting and witnessing the students will get into and how they might resonate with what they encounter. For sure, we present an initial understanding of the city, its affects and atmospheres as well as urban creativity, and – importantly – we practice and suggest selected fieldwork techniques. Yet beyond this, we are taken for a ride along the students’ research projects, and we become co-strayers, co-drifters and adjunct witnesses of the students’ explorations and experiences. A way of conceptualising this is to apprehend the city – its streets, neighbourhoods and sites – as a pedagogical medium that breaks up the one- or two-dimensional transmission between teacher and learner (Rancière, 1991). Instead the city is a third space (Serres, 1997; Steyaert, 2014) that reconfigures our habitual interactions. We can neither know nor foresee what kind of sense impressions and experiences its sites affords the students and how their bodies react to them. We therefore need to presuppose and call upon the equality of ‘bodies of knowledge’, of each body’s capacity to be affected and to creatively make sense of and work with urban encounters (Lambert, 2012).

Education’s affective encounters

In reflecting back on walking as learning and our practices of straying, drifting and witnessing as more-than-representational encounters, the contours of a pedagogy of affect take shape. In general, a pedagogy of affect is attuned to the movement of human and non-human bodies and forces. Again, we do not claim that conventional teaching practices and classroom locations are devoid of affect; on the contrary, teaching invariably is an atmospheric phenomenon (Michels and Beyes, 2016). Yet a pedagogy of affect would take the affective and embodied constitution of learning situations as part and parcel of teaching, as something to work with, set in motion and reflect upon. What, then, are the critical conditions or ‘lessons’ we can draw from our urban ethnography experiments for a pedagogy of affect that can inform other embodied practices of learning?

First, in making room for the student bodies’ capacities to affect and to be affected, a pedagogy of affect opens up to and has to work with a much higher degree of indetermination than any kind of reproduction of knowledge to be represented. As Mack (2012) has pointed out with regard to what she calls an ‘artistic-aesthetic [management] learning’ predicated on corporeality and materiality, such an affect-based approach is a risky undertaking. In presentations of prior versions of this paper, colleagues have raised concerns about what might be called the pedagogical responsibility of sending students out into the streets. Yet if a pedagogy of affect is not to become a performative contradiction in the sense of ‘teaching’ disciplined bodies about affect, we should acknowledge that the students’ bodies and minds are equally capable to register, witness and think, to move and be moved. In foregrounding the body’s centrality for a pedagogy of affect, our point is not to set up a new duality between mind and body, but to emphasise through the postdualist notion of affect the inherent relationship between thinking, moving and feeling moved and its unstable, indeterminate manifestations.

Second, a pedagogy of affect entails and fosters a specific kind of collective, prosaic creativity and experimentation in education. The ‘creativity’ in our course’s title works in multiple ways: to critically position this course against impoverished notions of the creative as little more than a lucrative resource that gives the city an entrepreneurial edge; to help open up the students’ imagination about how and where creativity takes place in everyday urban settings, which are full of surprises and potential; and to allow learning itself to become a more inventive and experimental practice (Dey and Steyaert, 2007). The attempt to problematise creativity, make it unfamiliar and simultaneously affirm its potential might appear paradoxical, yet as we have seen, defamiliarising established ways of seeing (taught in the business school) and affirming the potential of alternative ways of creative world-making is what happens when the students start walking, acting and experimenting. In developing a sensorium for the multiplicity and movements of spaces, learning becomes a process of prosaic and distributed creativity in its own right: a way of participating, engaging and imagining how to engage and to participate differently. A pedagogy of affect thus fosters a creative sensibility in the form of an embodied partaking in what can be felt and expressed, and it radicalises the attempts to work with different teaching material and styles of presentation and writing.

Third, if a pedagogy of affect consists of an embodied and evocative learning process that is both open-ended and indeterminate, creative and experimental, we need to understand the ethical-political consequences of this kind of engagement and its attempts to re-imagine our relationships and resonances with the world and each other as more equal and caring. For one, the hierarchy of knowledge transmission between educational ‘masters’ and as yet uneducated ‘pupils’ is unsettled by inserting a medium or ‘third space’ (like in our case urban locations), in relation to which teachers become co-learners and students their own self-inventive pedagogues. As student and teacher bodies are then ‘in movement’ and more open to affective encounters, they become more involved with the everyday, worldly problems that require as much witnessing as re-imagination. In what might be called a site-specific or ‘situated pedagogy’ (Kitchens, 2009), the pedagogical relation plays out on a more equal, open plane. The student ethnographers slowly become embedded in and more knowledgeable on ‘their’ urban environment and its affective constitution. The logic of disembodied knowledge transmission is then not only interrupted; rather, a sensuous, care-based register (Shevalier and McKenzie, 2012) is initiated that provokes feelings and questions of care: of whose voices the students like to make visible, which narratives they include and amplify and which futures they imagine for ‘their’ sites and neighbourhoods. This is the Brechtian lesson alluded to above: Students position themselves through relating their bodies to everyday practices, imaginations and affects of urban living.