Hawks, robots, and chalkings: Unexpected object encounters during walking interviews on a college campus

Abstract

A feeding hawk, a sculpture of a fallen robot, and chalk markings pointing to a slave cemetery—each of these objects was unexpectedly encountered during walking interviews on a college campus. This article explores these object encounters in turn as provocations toward the potential for walking as a method to generate interventions in the reproduction of hegemonic spaces. Specifically, this paper takes up the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of the rhizome and the assemblage to explore how the practice of walking makes possible creative and imaginative explorations in the relationship between objects and place. Methodologically, walking produces the possibility for affirmative difference in the interview, a positive embrace of reading objects as complex and connected through an embodied enactment of rhizomes and assemblages. Inquiry that thinks with rhizomes and assemblages connects disparate encounters, moments, and objects through affirmative difference, embracing connections and relations. This article suggests implications for how the walking interview might engender reflective entanglements of theory and methodology, resist extractive methods, as well as produce imaginative reconceptualisations of place, and interventions and disruptions of hegemonic narratives.