Walking Bodies: Papers, Provocations, Actions from Walking's New Movements, the Conference

A curated collection of papers, provocations, and actions from the 'Walking's New Movements' conference held at the University of Plymouth in November 2019. The experience and variety of walking practices have never been so broad, relevant, or unpredictable. Walking Bodies charts some of their very latest developments. Editors Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind, and Phil Smith put out a call for artists, activists, academics, radical walkers, and psychogeographers to discuss, perform, and share their experiences of current walking cultures. In these essays, provocations, artworks, and documentations, new terrains emerge and diverse energies and thinkings reflect the huge response to the initial call and the demand for tickets to the conference. Walking Bodies evidences anxieties, exclusions, and gradual but major changes of direction for walking arts, towards more considered and embodied practices that re-navigate their terrains and challenge assumptions about trajectories through the unhuman world. Here are the beginnings of differently negotiated, shared, provoked, and provocative ambulations.