Walking is Research That’s Good For You

Everyone knows that walking can help you stay fit and healthy. It strengthens muscles, improves circulation, regulates your sleep cycle, lifts your mood and lowers blood pressure. What’s more, moving, meandering and mindfully traversing enables you to creatively mind wander.

But how can walking through your neighbourhood or a public space be considered research?

Walking as an embodied way of knowing

Walking as a methodology places the walker/researcher in the middle of the research environment. The things we encounter during a walk affect our experience of being in and knowing a place, bringing us to consider objects and events as collaborators in the colonisation of space. Cultural and material properties and our encounters with them influence (and are influenced by) how we make sense of the world. So, walking is a methodology for understanding.

A form of research-creation, walking can be a way to trace the histories of a place or its inhabitants, human or otherwise. It can be an embodied experience, felt through your feet and through your feelings. Consider your hesitation navigating new spaces, your senses made more acute by uncertainty as you wander through unfamiliar terrain. Walking allows for multiple senses and perspectives to be engaged. Museums and galleries are well-suited to this methodology, as are outdoor environments. One way that walking theorists have included diverse abilities is by positioning the practice of walking metaphorically as an immersive, reflective process.

Wayfinding or serendipity?

Using an audio walk can add context to wayfinding. The recordings archived by Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), created through the collaboration of artists, researchers, students and community members, serve as a good example. But wandering without coordinated guidance, drifting through public spaces, offers a contemplative and felt experience which shapes a different understanding.

Walking can be serendipitous, or it can begin with a prompt or a question. For example, art education students use movement through a gallery or public space to investigate themes like identity, diversity and inclusion. But walking ‘with’ a space doesn’t always mean physically moving through it. The Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s amazing online education site offers accessible themes to help us meaningfully explore artworks. On the street, you can follow an idea or a proposition like: walk to a place that’s unfamiliar and collect the things that you find (or are found by) along the way. Even kicking a stone along a path will draw your attention to events and encounters that you may not previously have noticed.  

Walking focuses on the relationships between the researcher and the question. Unlike some forms of science which try to ensure objectivity by isolating the subject being studied from the researcher, ‘walking’ argues that the researcher and the subject are both influenced by the investigation. In a gallery or museum, a visitor begins with their own preferences and biases, ignoring some artworks and focusing on others. By acknowledging and challenging these assumptions before a visit, the researcher can gain fresh insights as they purposefully move through the space.

What do the research findings look like?

As the researcher documents and shares what they have found with others, these insights lead to new narratives about the artworks and raise fresh questions for future visits. Arts researchers approach the performative process of walking to document a journey which unfolds, mapping their experience by examining the individual and collaborative transformations that occur.

Making time for good things to happen

Thinking while walking in nature has been popular for a while. Rousseau, Thoreau and Whitman all lauded its practice. In the last few decades, the Japanese concept of shinrin yoku or ‘forest bathing’ has transcended both geography and culture. Contemporary arts-based research practice has embraced and extended the process to understand and explore places.

If you’re in Montreal, then you are in a walking city. Enjoy the physical, mental and social benefits of walking. Even better, make a routine of it by planning a regular weekly meet-up with a friend -- you’ll be less likely to cancel when you have a walking partner. And if your walking buddy has four legs and a tail, you’re probably already feeling the gains. Research shows that dog owners who take regular walks are more likely to achieve goals like 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise.

Making a mindful connection to the places and spaces you transit through may even bring new awareness to something you’ve been pondering.

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