Dossier Walking-with the Past: Embodiment\, Environment\, and Narrative
\nLocus. Journal of Culture Studies
\nCall for Papers
\nGuest editors: Marieke Borren and Susan Hogervorst
\nAs an everyday act of embodied locomotion\, walking rarely becomes an explicit object of reflection\, let alone an entry point into questions of history and memory. Yet as we move through streets\, landscapes\, ruins\, and memorial sites\, alone or collectively\, walking can reactivate personal memories\, disclose hidden histories\, and inscribe new narratives into shared spaces. Examples range from commemorative marches and heritage walking tours to psychogeographical drifts that excavate urban and peri-urban spaces as palimpsests\, and the prominent role of walking in first-person biographical accounts of displacement. In literary and cinematic representations\, moreover\, walking often mediates between personal memories and the meaningful environments in which they unfold.
\nThis dossier of Locus explores walking as an embodied mnemonic\, narrative\, and pedagogical practice. We are particularly interested in the philosophical question of how walking mediates between body\, environment\, memory\, and history. We therefore invite contributions that approach walking from one of three interconnected perspectives: (1) embodiment and bodily memory\, (2) environment and place\, or (3) narrative and representation.
\nWalking-with the past: a phenomenological perspective
\nWalking may have a particularly strong relation to memory because it is never a purely present activity. From a phenomenological perspective\, the moving body can be understood as a sedimentation of histories and habits: bodily comportment is shaped by past experience\, social norms\, technologies\, infrastructures\, and built environments. Walking is thus not simply an activity performed by a body in space\; it is an embodied way of inhabiting an already meaningful world.
\nAt the same time\, environments are not neutral backdrops or abstract spaces. They constitute structured fields of affordances that enable and constrain particular forms of movement. Streets\, paths\, ruins\, memorial sites\, and infrastructures invite certain trajectories\, rhythms\, and styles of walking while discouraging others. Historical transformations of built environments may thus become sedimented in bodily habits\, while changes in bodily practices can disclose otherwise unnoticed historical layers of place.
\nWalking consequently unfolds in a dynamic relation between historically sedimented bodily habits and environments that themselves bear traces of past events. This raises questions not only about memory and history but also about the phenomenological constitution of bodily subjectivity\, place\, temporality\, and world.
\nThese questions resonate with phenomenological approaches from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty to more recent work on embodiment\, place\, habit\, and environmental experience\, as well as with approaches in 4E cognition and ecological approaches to perception\, including work on affordances and the embodied and situated character of cognition.
\nFrom a cultural memory perspective\, walking can likewise inscribe collective and personal histories into places and reactivate past experiences in the present. Collaborative walking practices in public history\, commemoration\, heritage education\, and psychogeography can make historical layers experientially available through bodily movement. In this sense\, walking may be understood as a form of embodied historical inquiry: a way of encountering the past not merely as an object of representation\, but through situated\, sensory\, and affective engagement with places and environments.
\nThe notion of &ldquo\;walking-with the past&rdquo\; therefore points to a relational and co-constitutive understanding of historical experience. The past is not simply something walkers represent or remember\; it may be encountered\, activated\, and partially re-enacted through movement in places where histories have been sedimented.
\nPossible questions include:
\nWalking and embodied memory
\nWalking\, environment\, and place
\nWalking\, narrative time\, and representation
\nWe particularly welcome philosophical contributions\, including phenomenological and critical-phenomenological approaches to embodiment\, bodily memory\, temporality\, place\, historicity\, habit\, affordance\, and environmental experience. We also welcome contributions from 4E cognition\, ecological approaches to perception\, cultural memory studies\, history\, heritage studies\, psychogeography\, narrative studies\, and the walking arts\, including work that brings these perspectives into dialogue.
\nTypes of contributions
\nWe invite proposals for:
\nThe full call\, including further information about the dossier and submission guidelines\, is available on the Locus Open Journals website.
\nAbout Locus
Locus: Journal of Culture Studies is an interdisciplinary\, diamond Open Access journal published by the Department of Culture Studies at the Open University of the Netherlands. It provides a forum for scholarship across the humanities and culture studies\, including philosophy\, and particularly welcomes interdisciplinary dialogue between academic research and cultural practice. In addition to stand-alone articles\, the journal publishes biannual thematic &lsquo\;dossiers\,&rsquo\; special collections of articles on topical debates. These dossiers cover diverse themes such as the cultural imagination of human and non-human animals\, the coloniality of natural history collections\, performativity\, and embodiment.
We recently completed the migration of Locus to the Open Journals ecosystem. While our current platform is new\, all back issues and articles remain fully available through our former platform. \;
\nSubmission information
\nSubmissions are accepted in English and Dutch. All submissions will undergo editorial review.
\nFor inquiries about the theme\, please contact Marieke Borren: marieke.borren@ou.nl.
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