Abstract
I am pleased to have been invited to join the Qualitative Social Work editorial team as European Review Editor, taking over from Lisa Morriss who has now moved into the role of Editor. Lisa has provided us with some great reviews over the past few years which she has always managed to link to intriguing and promising themes within social work. My thanks goes to Lisa for all her hard work – always conducted with much energy and spirit.
My first review for 2019 is by Ali Roy. In this issue, Ali reviews the book, Walking Through Social Research. Edited by Charlotte Bates and Alex Rhys-Taylor (2017). This subject is a passionate one for Ali, and it was in his first Editorial for Qualitative Social Work that he explored the relevance and impact of the mobilities turn for social work research (see Roy, 2017). Ali noted that up until recently, studies of social work practice had shown little interest in mobilities, and, in turn, mobilities researchers had shown little interest in social work and welfare practice (Roy et al., 2015). However, since the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University hosted an event entitled ‘Work on the Move’ (2015), Ali found that researchers in this area have become more and more interested in exploring the concept of workers on the move.
I am a social worker and a researcher, and I also agree with Ali’s finding, that movement and social work are two areas of practice that have not always been connected or considered to be important to one another. In fact, it wasn’t until I read Jeyasingham’s (2018) excellent paper ‘Place and the uncanny in child protection social work’ that it properly dawned on me just how significant relationships between social workers, the intimate spaces of service users’ homes and the neighbourhoods in which they were located were for social work practice. More recently, Tom Disney et al. (2019) have contributed to mobilities research by demonstrating that new technology, normally reserved for mapping, can reveal how mobile working is shaping social care practitioner wellbeing and practice. Using global positioning system (GPS) devices to explore the actual movements of social workers, Disney et al. (2019) examined whether movement affects social workers’ ability to practise effectively. Their findings demonstrate that journeys and distances to and from families are rarely reflected on, but they can impact the way in which practice is conducted.
As mobilities research embraces the social work field, in many novel and ground-breaking ways, Ali’s review of Walking Through Social Research is therefore timely. Not only in the way it provides detail and consideration to each of the authors’ contributions but also because it highlights how approaches to walking are aspects of research which are leading us to new areas of discovery.
References
Charlotte Bates and Alex Rhys-Taylor A (eds) Walking through social research. Routledge: Abingdon, 2017; 202 pp., ISBN 978-1138674042, £90 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Alastair Roy, University of Central Lancashire, UK
Introductory comment
This timely edited collection offers a series of different departures on the acts and imaginaries of walking as a social research practice, providing a very broad range of possibilities for conducting research which involves walking. Since the millennium, scholars such as Büscher and Urry (2009) have argued that mobilities research offers access to different researchable entities and that thinking on the move allows researchers to explore the centrality of movement to the social and material realities of our lives. While a great deal of mobilities research has focused on tracking mapable and calculable movement, this edited collection reflects a more recent interest – for social researchers, at least – in the knowledge-based affordances of movement, the interconnectedness of different forms of movement and the meaning of movement itself. As Bates and Rhys-Taylor argue in the opening chapter, ‘As an investigative method, walking encourages us to think with all our senses, to notice more, and to ask different questions of the world’ (p. 5). The different authors introduce their own approaches to walking as a research practice, with some offering clear guidance on their own method and others keen to argue for approaches which retain a connection between body and place, focusing on the embodied and aesthetic experience of walking.
A walk through the collection
Emma Jackson – Railway Lands – explores the railway lands of Kings Cross and St Pancras, focusing on the reordering of space introduced by two waves of change, the arrival of the railways in the late 19th century and the Eurostar in 2007. Jackson leads a walk through the spaces within and beyond these railway stations. Through this walk, she registers the explicit and implicit, the intended and unintended, forms of movement in these spaces (‘standing at this point we can see, hear and feel that this is a place of motion’), focusing on the ways in which the processes which surround the development programmes of these stations lead to some people’s access to these spaces being facilitated and encouraged whilst others is increasingly proscribed.
Les Back – Marchers and Steppers: Memory, City Life and Walking – offers a walk through Lewisham – capital of the reggae sound system culture in Britain – in order to provide a lens on the postcolonial history of racism and resistance in the area. During the walk, Back visits several sites including the site of the New Cross Fire that killed 13 people attending a house party in 1981. Combining autobiography and reportage, the chapter demonstrates the ways in which each new walk can bring something different and unexpected, arguing for the value of proximity and of returning as elements of a research practice. With reference to the work of Maggie O’Neill and John Perivolaris (2014), Back argues that ‘walking is not just a technique, but also a form of pedagogy or a way to learn and think not just individually but also collectively’ (p. 21).
Tom Hall and Robin Smith – Seeing the Need: Urban Outreach and Sensory Walking – introduce us to the world of urban outreach workers, conceiving their work as a mode of pedestrian exploration which requires sensory attunement through which workers are able to glean clues from the urban environment which are necessary to provide support and acts of care. In this way, they explore the relationship between mobility and perception, which they rather beautifully configure in terms of the – ontological – difference between ‘looking at’ something and ‘looking for’ it, an idea which has a very clear relevance to social work practice (p. 39). As they suggest, looking ‘at something is always to have it located already [whereas] … Looking for something … is more obviously, always and unavoidably … to be engaged in a search’ (p. 39).
Charlotte Bates – Desire Lines: Walking in Woolwich – engages with the redevelopment of a small urban square in Woolwich, London to consider how the practice of walking affects the ways in which a place is imagined, reimagined (including through design) and lived. With reference to the work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2010), she blends insights from sociology and landscape architecture to consider how we experience space kinaesthetically, describing how the physical and non-physical qualities of space are co-constitutive of our experience of urban living.
Helena Holgersson – Keep Walking: Notes on How to Research Urban Pasts and Futures – offers a reflection on the value of walking on foot through three walks taken in Gothenburg, Sweden. Through these walks, Holgersson reflects on macro-processes of change in the city (from industrial city to post-industrial city) through micro-experience of four citizens (walks led by four different people). The author works with Kuessenbach’s (2003) five analytic themes – perception, spatial practices, biographies, social architecture and social realms – adding into these, the role of the researcher. We are encouraged to see changing neighbourhoods through the experiences and stories of those who lead the walks, demonstrating how walking together affords people the opportunity to portray events and neighbourhoods in an embodied and multi-sensed way.
Andrew Clark – Walking Together: Understanding Young People’s Experiences of Living in Neighbourhoods in Transition – offers a description of a mobile focus group method developed in order to assess young people’s experience of living in deprived urban neighbourhoods undergoing regeneration. The author argues that this approach produces ‘distinctive versions of neighbourhood experience’, allowing researchers to ‘abandon some of their own rhythms’, and to see how groups make collective sense of phenomena. He usefully describes in some detail his approach, as well as describing some of the methodological and epistemological potentials and pitfalls that arise from attempting to capture ‘in written form’, the complexities that emerge from approaches which engage with people’s complex experiences of place.
Alex Rhys-Taylor – Westfield Stratford City: A Walk Through Millennial Urbanism – explicitly engages his sense of smell in this sensorial walk through a public/private megamall in Stratford, East London. The author is interested in how architecture and urban design ‘emplace’ the body, subtly directing people to understand how to behave and where they belong. Through walking the mall, he explores how its spatial arrangement – ‘and it’s sensoria’ – offer ways of understanding class, ethnicity and citizenship in contemporary London. Rhys-Taylor describes that it is precisely through the act of walking that the design intentions might be experienced, revealed and, to some extent, understood, suggesting that this also means that the design intentions do not entirely work.
Mike Michael – Walking, Falling, Telling: The Anecdote and the Mis-Step as a ‘Research Event’ – uses three autobiographical anecdotes to explore the mis-step as a device which offers a speculative engagement with social processes. Michael makes a case that the anecdote is valuable because it is ‘personal to the speaker’, ‘part of their historical record’, ‘marks an extra-ordinary incident’, is a ‘mixture of factual reportage and fictional creation’, and ‘might allow us to draw out broader lessons beyond its specifity’. The chapter offers a quite particular argument about the possibilities of a walking method as a means to understand the world and its unfolding.
Jennifer Gabrys – Air Walk: Monitoring Pollution and Experimenting with Speculative Forms of Participation – introduces us to an airwalk held in the south London neighbourhoods of New Cross Gate and Deptford which sought to understand the social worlds the walk traversed through lived encounters with air pollution. The walk is offered of an example of forms of participation which are more constructive, open ended and experimental, and less scripted and normative. It also explores an interesting and playful use of monitoring technologies which are folded into a commitment to participatory knowing rather than being seen as central to the knowledge produced.
Michael Gallagher and Jonathan Prior – Listening Walks: A Method of Multiplicity – lead us on a walk in Edinburgh in which those who take part are encouraged to listen – to the sounds of spaces – in order to engage with the soundscape of everyday life. Gallagher and Prior provide a detailed procedure for conducting a listening walk, which is offered as a starting point for other researchers to develop and modify. They argue that listening walks provide a repeatable method which can be applied to investigations of many different spaces.
Phillip Vannini and April Vannini – Wild Walking: A Twofold Critique of the Walk-Along Method – take a walk in the Cairngorms National Park with the walker Chris Townsend arguing for walking as a ‘wilder’ way of knowing. They argue that walk-along methods often suffer from many of the same ailments they were designed to cure, still, too often, ‘informed by textualism, cognitivism and representationalism’ (p. 179). The chapter offers a valuable critique on the problems of tracing existing epistemological assumptions into walking as ‘method’.
Charlotte Knowles – Walking W8 in Manolos – provides a final short essay in which she leads a sensory walk of the London postcode W8 – in luxury high heeled shoes – inspired by an ESRC investigation into London’s super-wealthy called The Alpha Territory. Knowles argues that shoes need to fit the walker and the territory and that ‘walking is no innocent by-product of urban life’, but ‘is constitutive of it and a way of knowing about it at the same time’. Through a combination of historical reportage, sensory ethnography and biographical narrative, we are offered a snapshot of how the wealth of residents alters the ‘casual convivialities’ of day to day life (p. 199).
Exploring the relevance of this collection to social work researchers and practitioners
Walking Through Social Research will be of interest to a broad range of readers of Qualitative Social Work. Recent years have seen an accelerating interest in mobile methods in social work research, and this book offers a range of different departures on the subject of walking as method. The strength of the collection is in its breadth and its structure which means that people can easily be led by their particular interests in the affordances of walking as a research and/or pedagogical practice. It will be valuable to anyone who is considering using mobile methods in their research including PhD students, post-doctoral researchers and established research academics. When first published in hard back in 2017, the price (£90) would have been prohibitive for many students, something publishers should take seriously in my view. The book is now available in a paperback edition at about £36.
When I read Charlotte Bates and Alex Rhys-Taylor’s opening chapter, I was reminded of Doreen Massey’s (2008) seminal chapter Imagining the Field. In both chapters, we are encouraged to consider that reflecting philosophically upon our relationship to our own ‘field’ can help to enrich the craft of doing research. Massey (2008) encourages researchers to attend to the ‘spatialities of knowledge’, going on to argue that engaging with concerns about ‘the spaces/places of the production of knowledge’, inevitably also involves considering that these spatialities ‘structure both the epistemological presuppositions and the practice[s] of research’ (p. 74 – emphasis added). I find this a useful connection to the Walking Through Social Research collection because, in it, we are also encouraged to consider how walking can help us to ‘think with all our senses, to notice more, and to ask different questions of the world’ and that these forms of research praxis might help us to craft a more artful social science (p. 5). So, for example, Hall and Smith demonstrate the explicit value of paying attention to the relational qualities of space, demonstrating how the epistemological assumptions of the mobile researcher have much in common with those of the urban outreach worker. Each must search for clues through the ways in which space is co-created through its use. These relational readings of space and place are especially relevant to social workers, who must also wrestle with the ways in which they themselves co-generative the space(s) and place(s) of practice (Wood et al., 2016). Connections with practice can also be seen in the chapter by Back who argues the case for proximity and return visits. Elements of this argument could easily be cut and pasted into a text that made the case for the value of ‘proximity’ and ‘return visits’ to the ways in which social workers develop their understandings through a mobile practice. ‘I am proposing a form of slow release understanding achieved through staying there, taking another attentive stroll and thinking again on your feet’ (p. 35).
Some of the contributors (for example, Clarke and Gallagher and Prior) describe clearly the processes and structures of their chosen methods, which Gallagher and Prior argue might be used to scaffold an inquiry and to provide a containing frame from which to operate. Others (for example, Vannani and Vannani) see the need to move ‘beyond method’, arguing that walking must be seen as a ‘propositional act’ rather than a ‘systematic and instrumental way of collecting data’ (p. 192). Several authors express concerns that walk-along methods can easily suffer from many of the same ailments they were designed to cure (Clarke, Rhys-Taylor), still, too often ‘informed by textualism, cognitivism and representationalism’ (Vannani and Vannani, p. 179).
The book provides a fascinating, thoughtful and eminently usable journey through 12 different empirical examples of walking research. I found the different chapters offered me a fantastic resource in thinking through my own mobile research practice. Taken together, the book encourages an openness to what unfolds in walking research. Hence, even when methods and/or particular mobile practices are introduced in detail (see, for example, Clark, Holgersson and Gallagher and Prior), these are not offered as rigid structures that ought to be followed, but as starting points, or frames of reference, which others might use as source material to stage their own inquiries. We are encouraged throughout to pay attention to the histories and biographies of place (Back), the design intentions of space – and their intended and unintended effects – (Jackson, and Bates), and to engage our senses as devices for knowing (Rhys-Taylor and Hall and Smith). The book makes the case that the context, mode and form of research practice are critical to knowledge making, but also that mobile practices offer no simple escape from epistemological tensions. We come to appreciate the ways in which walking can allow us to be co-present with the histories, lives, designs and practices that make up the spaces and places in which we live and work, helping us to be more observant and attentive to the social, psychic and physical worlds in which our ideas, arguments and understandings must emerge.