sutton074

Matei Candea is the guest who will join us this Friday on the walk from Overveen to the beach and back to Zandvoort. Matei currently explores questions on interspecies sociality next to lecturing at Durham University. While walking he will help us to sort out or (or at least become aware of) a particularly tricky issue: Dealing with excess and abundance There are all but endless articles, books, authors, concepts. There is a lot of ‘world’ to go and do research on and once you have done this research, your material (interviews, observations, or other objects to analyze) tends to be excessive as well. What to do? You cannot read everything, cite everyone, use all possible concepts. You cannot relate every story either, analyze every detail. Thus, a few questions present themselves. How to recognize which literature is – and which other literature isn’t – relevant? How to distinguish which interview partners or places to head for? How to handle the limits of your possibility? Is the r...

Not only the new academic year has started. The walking seminar will resume as well. The next three dates are: 30th September 19th October 18th November

A wonderful encounter took place yesterday - between Anna Tsing from University of California Santa Cruz, the US, and The Eating Bodies Team. While walking through the most picturesque Dutch landscapes we were talking about the process of ontologies and the ontologies of process, about the slowing down (of writing) and speeding up (of reality), about experiments and surprise as new research methods, about "bads" (capitalism and destruction of resources) and "goods" (appreciation of food). What a wonderful encounter, indeed.

The next two walking seminars will take place on 24th June 26th August

This Friday some of you might have been walking in "real nature" and might have moved a lot of meters vertically. We were walking a lot of meters horizontally, namely 16 000 m. And while walking we were wondering: What is the point? What is the point? There are two kinds of ‘point’. One resonates with what is also called the ‘argument’. The point of an article may be to argue (for instance) that the walking path from Breukelen station into the polder is a fine one for holding a walking seminar – but not as good as walking path Z (well, which one?). The second ‘point’ rather evokes effects and is thus linked up with what these days is also called ‘interference’. It may be the point of writing to tell the truth, to relate gripping stories, or, let’s abbreviate, to improve the world (or some specific part thereof – which one?). What, against this background, is the point of the text you are currently working on (the chapter, article, summary, introduction)? A...

Last week it was The Walking Seminar that became mobile. It moved to Denmark. In Copenhagen, Bodil Christensen, Gry Jakobsen and Line Hillersdal are researching 'taste', 'eating bodies', and 'place' and after an inspiring workshop they took us for a walk on the outskirts of the city that looks like this from above:

The landscape in Breukelen might look nice and innocent. But. There is always already politics. And this is what we talked about during the last walking seminar: There is always already politics. So much of it and in so many versions. State politics. Policy. Party politics. Intellectual politics. Politics embedded in the questions asked, the money flowing, the passions fostered, the ways in which some things are framed as ‘problems’, the ways in which some things (and not others) are performed as ‘real’. And then there is research. Let’s say: yours. Where is it situated, against which kinds of practices that might be called ‘political’? Where do you want it to move? What do you want to move with it? What are the twisty and thorny roads going here and there – that might take you in ‘bad’ directions? What can you do, practically, to make your work stand out more as ‘political’ or rather less; what to make it be more or less ‘political’; and in relation to which kind of ‘politics’? (Maybe...