Kieran Keohane

Defining the principles and practices of walking as critical pedagogy, this book engages with social questions and challenges related to understandings of the Anthropocene. Through a series of chapters that operationalize walking as a form of participatory pedagogy, it explores issues including migration and borders, sustainability and climate change, gender and feminist thought, the labour market, crime and rehabilitation, and urban life and regeneration. Showing how walking enables us to learn creatively, convivially and critically on the move in city spaces, while thinking relationally, the authors demonstrate the importance of space, time and place: the layers of history embedded in the present, and the importance of active, embodied, participatory, collaborative, creative and place based learning. A pioneering approach to walking as a form of engagement and learning, Walking as Critical Pedagogy will appeal to researchers and students across the social sciences interested in new methods and research methodologies, and creative ways of teaching and learning about – and engaging with – major global issues in society.

The introductory chapter, co-written by all the authors, contextualises the book in the literature on critical pedagogy and the new walking studies and theoretically and methodologically sets out the principles and practice of walking as critical pedagogy subsequently explored in each of the book chapters.

Chapter 4, ‘Cork’s “Wandering Rocks” Walking as Urban Sociology’, is co-created with students in the second-year undergraduate module ‘The Walking Classroom: Walking the Anthropocene’ and a second-year module called ‘Sociology of the City’. The walk engages in conversation with key theorists of teaching and learning as a reciprocal gift relationship (Marcel Mauss 1950), particularly in relation to ideas on urban, community and city life with thinkers such as Georg Simmel (1971 [1909]), Robert Park and Ernst Burgess (1925), Jane Jacobs (1961), Lynn Loffland (1993), Carlos Moreno (2024), James Joyce (1992 [1922]) and Walter Benjamin (1992, 1999). The students move from library to street and co-create a walk that inspires our sociological imagination and actions, walking as critical pedagogy. The walk is a gift given to readers from the students as part of a reciprocal gift exchange. Reference to the ‘Wandering Rocks’ relates to ‘Joyce’s representation of the city as a constellation of fragments, snapshots, scenes, cinematic jump-cuts and zoom-ins’. The metaphor ‘gives us an ontology, epistemology and a methodology of the city as a complex of multiple realities and parallel universes’ as a ‘form of life that we can understand from the insider-outsider standpoint of a participant-observer, the alert and attentive pedestrian’ and seen, through the multimodal experiences and narratives of the students, the city will forever bear the traces of their performative engagement with places, spaces and routes as both bricolage and critical pedagogy.

This paper discusses how the film The Banshees of Inisherin represents and employs key sociological concepts and ideas, namely those of liminality, schismogenesis, stasis and transgression, relating to the social pathologies of contemporary civilization.

This paper traces a deep affinity between teaching and learning, talking and walking. This affinity runs as a red thread from the Greeks walking to Delphi; to Walter Benjamin’s (1992a) flâneur, the urban stroller in Paris and Berlin; to Jane Jacobs’ (1961) celebration of New York's ‘sidewalk ballet’; to Simmel’s (1971) discussion of the metropolis, mental life, and modernity's zeitgeist; to the Chicago and Birmingham schools’ ethnographies of street scenes and subcultures by Park and Burgess (1925) and Hebdige (1979) ; to Maggie O’Neill's ( 2018 ) O‘Neill and Roberts (2019) use of ‘walking methods’ as a way into the fragile, precarious, liminal worlds of migrants, refugees, and sex-workers. O’Neill's renaissance of a deep tradition of walking-talking sociological methods resonates very well also with James Joyce's artistic, moral, political, and pedagogical method, whereby the author and his protagonists, (who are mostly people who have been crushed down and pushed to the margins by overwhelming global historical forces) and his readers (a literate, middle-class, cosmopolitan, general public) participate in and co-create a transformative walking-talking classroom convened and conducted through city streets, as exemplified in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.