Walking the lines - Reflections on walking methods in Jordan

Open, digital seminar

Olivia Mason (Newcastle University) is a lecturer in Geography, with a focus on cultural and political geography. Mason's work sits across cultural, environmental, and political geography, and is broadly centred on mobility politics and resource colonialism. In this seminar, she reflects on walking to address broader questions in political geography surrounding power, scale, mobility, embodiment, and knowledge production. Walking still remains a method and practice that has received little attention by political geographers, and this can be traced to a wider absence of discussions of methodology within political geography. Yet the embodied aspects of walking can enable a creative and critical relationship with nature, place, politics and space, reengaging key concepts in political geography such as territory, borders, and the state. Through empirical research conducted on walking trails and with walking groups in the Middle East and North Africa, this seminar explores the situated political geographies of walking and how walking can enable embodied and intimate political geographies to emerge.

The presentation will be followed by a discussion with and questions from participants.

About the series: The seminar series Circulations and Locality in Critical Border Studies is arranged by the Öresund Comparative Borderland Research Group, funded by CEMES

Find the link here: www.cors.lu.se/en/walking-the-lines