Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman of WalkingLab will give a Keynote introduction at the European Congress for Qualitative Research for Ali Madanipour. Their lecture will examine walking methodologies as counter-cartographies and as affective time. Like Madanipour, WalkingLab is interested in methodologies that disrupt linear and progressive conceptualizations of time. Our brief introductory talk will examine three WalkingLab projects that re-map – as a form of counter-cartography – erased and neglected histories. Taking up the ways that maps produce and reinforce geopolitical borders, and the geographies of race, we consider the ways that re-mapping offers possibilities for conceptualizing spacetimes that are regional and relational, as opposed to state sanctioned and static. As counter-cartographies the walking projects disrupt dominant narratives of place and futurity, re-mapping Land, ‘returning it to the landless.’ Walking methodologies enact what Madanipour refers to as ‘experimental temporalities,’ a kind of affective time that enables researchers to think about futurity not as something elsewhere or separate from the present, but a time that is immediate and intensive. Focusing on the issue of temporality within qualitative research methodologies Springgay and Truman take up WalkingLab research via affect theory, Afrofuturism, and the anarchive.
