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.

Helen Billinghurst is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, researcher, and writer. With a background as a film maker, she now works within the expanded fields of painting and drawing. Her recent doctoral research at the University of Plymouth explored the intersection between studio practice and aesthetic walking. She currently lectures at Plymouth College of Art, and her research interests include the performance of making, site-specificity, and embodied process. Dr. Phil Smith is a performance-maker, writer, and academic researcher, specialising in work around walking, site-specificity, mythogeographies, and counter-tourism. He is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the University of Plymouth. Claire Hind is an Associate Professor in the School of Performance and Media Production at York St John University where she runs the MA in Theatre and Performance.