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The mid-1990s marked a paradigm shift in the way physical activity is promoted, and walking is now considered the most suitable type of physical activity for widespread promotion. Accurate measurement underpins public health practice, hence the aims of this chapter are to: (1) provide a typology for the measurement of walking; (2) review methods to assess walking; (3) present challenges in defining walking measures; (4) identify issues in selecting instruments for the evaluation of walking and (5) discuss current efforts to overcome measurement challenges and methodological limitations. The taxonomy of walking indicates that secondary purpose walking is a more complex set of behaviours than primary purpose walks. It has many purposes and no specific domain or intensity, may lack regularity, and therefore poses greater measurement challenges. Objective measurement methods, such as accelerometers, pedometers, smartphones and other electronic devices, have shown good approximation for walking energy expenditure, but are indirect methods of walking assessment. Global Positioning System technology, the ‘Smartmat’ and radio-frequency identification tags are potential objective methods that can distinguish walkers, but also require complex analysis, are costly, and still need their measurement properties corroborated. Subjective direct methods, such as questionnaires, diaries and direct observation, provide the richest information on walking, especially short-term diaries, such as trip records and time use records, and are particularly useful for assessing secondary purpose walking. A unifying measure for health research, surveillance and health promotion would strongly advance the understanding of the impact of walking on health.

Michael E. Brown's book, The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences, demonstrates that prominent attempts to account for the social dimension of human affairs rely on an unstated notion of a “course of activity,” that is diametrically opposed to the conceptualization of sociality that is presumably intended to realize it. I want to focus on the idea of a “course of activity” in order to locate his work in and clarify its importance to the development of dialectical reason from Heraclitus through Hegel and beyond. Of special importance is the bearing of his research on the critique of contemporary theories of agency and sociality, and, since considerable attention has been paid, in this regard, to the arts and humanities, some of what I will say about this refers to art and its avant-garde moments—-particularly in my work on Dada and Brown's account of two avant-garde theatrical performances. 

This chapter examines what is entailed by separating agency from individuality and what it means for the idea of a “course of activity,” (going on) and its relation to the concept of sociality. This also bears on questions of ontology, as Brown's course of activity is generative and nonrepeatable. The course of activity and nonrepeatability are linked to both avant-garde practice and theoretical notions that reframe our temporal understandings. These include the avant-garde of dada and surrealism, and the reformulations of bourgeois time of Jean Duvignaud, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The question raised here is that of a teleological understanding—how we link the present course of activity with future events.

This chapter suggests that welfare management is becoming a matter of being able to use the open space in between formal roles, silos and organisations to actualise a not yet possible, qualitatively better welfare here and now. The discourse about the open-ended and futuristic space in between is challenging practices of welfare education. A growing field of studies is criticising the centres of education, learning and research for being a McDonald’s culture, with an overly linear approach, unable to connect passion, sensitivity and intuition with knowledge. This chapter goes further than criticising existing practices. Building on notions of affective studies, the aim is to experiment on how to shift the focus from thinking about open spaces to intensifying thinking-spaces, able to generate the processual relations increasing the opportunity for a qualitative better welfare to occur here and now.

The object of the chapter is an experiment entitled The Future Public Leadership Education Now. It is based on non-representational studies and designed to operate on the affective registers.

The chapter offers a theoretical and pragmatic wandering as wondering. It continues and expands the experiment as an ongoing thinking-spaces moving between the known and the unknown. It aims at gently opening the opportunity for a qualitatively better welfare to occur.

Researchers become welfare artists intensifying affective co-motions as ongoing and form-shifting processes.

In recent years, non-governmental organizations across the globe aim to improve women’s leadership in adapting to the environmental challenges brought on by climate change. Many of these activities involve outreach and network building and, in the process, seek to establish protocols for specific projects and interventions. In this chapter, the authors review the history of development funding, and then present and analyze a different model, a pilot project based in Nepal that encourages monetary contributions from outside of the country to support women’s work in climate change adaptation and mitigation as a result of deforestation. The W+™ Standard is a certification label that endorses projects that socially and economically empower women and improve the environment. It was developed to measure and quantify women’s work in these areas to enable them to receive monetary benefits from promoting biogas cook stoves. Below, the authors assess the economic and social benefits and drawbacks of this model and complement our critique with interview data from the creator of the W+ Standard, and climate change leader, Jeannette Gurung. The authors conclude by giving recommendations for program monitoring and evaluation that can be applied to projects in similar areas.