Walking Interludes – Bodies Carrying Exhibit Programming

Description by speaker Sunjay Mathuria

Walking Interludes is a reflective reading about walking, place, race, identity, and memory. In this reading, I share short excerpts from my field journal that I kept during my research visits to Belfast and Lahore. In an autoethnographic style, these vignettes focus on movement (walking) through the cities and consider the affective and embodied surges and textures of place. I reflect on the ways I am visibly marked as a racialized body in Belfast, a city still grappling with division. In Lahore, I draw on themes of intergenerational memory and belonging in a city from which my great-grandparents were displaced during Partition.

As an urban researcher, it is important to foreground walking as a self-reflexive, embodied practice and acknowledge the ways in which walking narratives are articulated through footsteps, sketching out our own entanglements with space, as we become enmeshed in the textured spatial networks of the places in which we walk.

Thus, this reading invites researchers to consider the ways they are situated within their research, and in particular, the relationship between body, movement, and place.

I will begin with some context: what are walking methods and why are they important? I will then read excerpts from my field journal for around 10 minutes, with an accompanying slideshow of photos I took projected behind me. At the end, I invite audience members to reflect on and share their own walking experiences. This reflection period should be around 30 minutes.

Please note: This event may be of interest for those who use walking methods in place-based research. You can bring a notebook or your field journal to jot down some thoughts.

About the speaker

Sunjay Mathuria (he/him) is a PhD Candidate in Geography at Concordia University and a former urban planner. In his doctoral research, he uses walking methods and narrative analysis to examine the dynamics of memory-making in cities that have experienced spatial trauma. He is also generally interested in the representations of place, race, and class in literature, television and film.

Event language(s): English