Ways of Walking

Panelists

Nikki Fairchild and Carol Taylor

Nikki Fairchild is Associate Head (Research and Innovation), School of Education and Sociology, University of Portsmouth. Her research is theoretically informed by critical feminist materialist and posthumanist theory-praxis. She employs creative methodologies to disturb knowledge production and relationality entangling with gender, place-spaces, time, temporality and childhoods. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Posthumanism and on the Editorial Board of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood.

Carole A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender, Department of Education, University of Bath. Her research utilises trans- and interdisciplinary feminist, new materialist and posthumanist theories and methodologies focusing on entangled relations of knowledge, power, gender, space and ethics in higher education. She is co-editor of the journal Gender and Education and serves on Editorial Boards of Teaching in Higher Education, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning and Journal of Posthumanism.

Genevieve Rudd

Genevieve Rudd is a Norfolk-based Community Artist and Founder/Director of not-for-profit organisation Under Open Sky Ltd. Her creative projects encourage closer looking and ask about the places and people around us. This year, the organisation is leading ‘Women Walking Wild’, funded by National Lottery Community Fund. Mindful nature-connection and creative walking sessions are co-led by Genevieve and eco-therapist Beth Stephens with women in Great Yarmouth.

www.genevieverudd.com and/or Under Open Sky Ltd social media @UnderOpenSkyLtd, on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

Emmie Alderson

Emmie Alderson is a performance maker whose work is rooted in the approaches of walking, writing and theatre/archaeology. Within her practice she investigates places to unearth the traces of events embedded in landscapes, reassembling them into intimate poetical experiences. At the core of her performance work is an interest in exploring female history and paying homage to women from both the past and the present.  She has presented her project ‘A Pilgrimage for Sylvia’ at arts festivals across the Northwest, and was a collaborating artist on Ryan O’Shea’s audio project ‘11 Minutes (Bristol Time)’, an Arts Council England & BBC audio commission which explored the history of Bristol’s Exchange Clock. Currently she is undertaking a practice as research PhD at The University of Salford, exploring the creative potential of pilgrimage as performance and as a performance-making approach.  

Abstracts

Walking with Fear

This paper is a posthumanist feminist materialist exploration of the gendered nature of walking in urban environments. Fairchild and Taylor propose fear as an affective intensity, marking womens’ bodies, remaking and reconstituting place and space as an affective more-than-human intensity that shapes the ways women react to, behave in, and inhabit urban environments.

Women Walking Wild

Through the presentation, Rudd will talk through her deep connection with place (working in my hometown), slow building of community trust (short-term projects, long-term relationships), and exploring the interconnect between arts and the natural environment, in the context of climate crisis.

The Pilgrimage Project

This is a lecture performance that unpacks the creative potential of pilgrimage as performance. Alderson will draw on her series of micro-pilgrimages performed in Manchester, Sheffield, and the Peak District, investigating where the creativity lies in the process of pilgrimage and forge connections between performance, place making and pilgrimage.