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This paper explores the consequences of researching temporary protest organizations through embodied ethnography, paying attention to how, when and why a researcher takes sides.

The authors employed embodied walking ethnography to study Lyra's Walk, a three-day, 68-mile protest walk held in May 2019 to advocate for peace in Northern Ireland. Data were primarily ethnographic, complemented by an analysis of social media, photos, videos and media coverage.

First the authors argue that embodied walking ethnography can provide an inhabited understanding of organizing. The social, physical and emotional experiences of walking encourage researchers to identify more closely with participants and obtain a greater understanding of the phenomena studied. Second, the authors identify that methodological choice can have a greater impact on side-taking than either the conflict setting or organization researched.

This paper demonstrates the promise and consequences of using embodied walking ethnography to study a mobile organization. It further illustrates the nuances and challenges of conducting ethnography in a temporary protest organization.

The paper makes two contributions. The novel use of embodied walking ethnography to study temporary protest organizations can lead the research to become intertwined with the temporary organization during its process of organizational becoming. With the researcher's body acting as a research tool, their sensations and emotions impact data collection, interpretation and findings.

Religious and secular pilgrimages present rich opportunities for investigating information activities in an original and intriguing context. While the Information Science community has previously shown interest in digital expressions of religion and spirituality, discussion on pilgrimage is at a nascent stage. The purpose of this study is to conduct an in situ investigation of how pilgrims record, curate, and share their experiences.

A field ethnography was conducted while walking with, observing and interviewing pilgrims along the Camino de Santiago, a popular European pilgrimage and UNESCO World Heritage route. Data collected from 25 semi-structured interviews and participant observations were thematically analysed within a theoretical framework combining Stebbins' contemplation and Nature Challenge Activity in serious leisure and Hektor's model of information behaviour.

This study expands the interpretation of pilgrimage by introducing new insights into pilgrims, different types of mobilities, spaces and objects, and social interactions. By using field ethnography and close-up observations of praxis, pilgrimage is analysed as a socio-technical process and discussed literature within and beyond Information Science. The work presents new understandings of the interplay between spirituality, embodied information practices, physical and online social interactions, analogue and digital media before, during and after these journeys and legacy aspirations.

The study is original in its combination of theoretical models and their ethnographic in situ application. It contributes to a more in-depth, in-the-field understanding of how pilgrims document their experiences via a rich palette of old and new media, the dynamics of using digital technologies during such physical and inner journeys and pilgrims' sharing practices. Implications for serious leisure and information practices are discussed, from theoretical to practical challenges and opportunities offered by pilgrimage experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to explore peace protest as a form of institutional work aimed at supporting one institution and disrupting another.

The authors utilized walking ethnography (28 miles in 18 h while conducting 25 walking interviews) and digital media analysis (news reports, social media and electronic communication).

Walking participants engaged in multiple types of institutional work aimed at maintaining the Good Friday Agreement and disrupting partisan violence. The institutional work left no lasting impact on either institution.

The paper conceptualizes two competing institutions and situates the dual institutional work of Lyra's Walk in the post-conflict context of Northern Ireland. The study contributes to understanding formality and multiplicity in institutional work research.

In public health and sustainable transport campaigns, walking is positioned as an important way families can become more active, fit and spend quality time together. However, few studies specifically examine how family members move together on-foot and how this is constitutive of individual and collective familial identities. Combining the notion of a feminist ethics of care with assemblage thinking, the chapter offers the notion of the familial walking assemblage as a way to consider the careful doing of motherhood, childhood and family on-foot. Looking at the walking experiences of mothers and children living in the regional city of Wollongong, Australia, the chapter explores how the provisioning and enactment of care is deeply embedded in the becoming of family on-the-move. The chapter considers interrelated moments of care – becoming prepared, together, watchful, playful, ‘grown up’ and frustrated – where mothers and children make sense of and enact their familial subjectivities. It is through these moments that the family as a performative becoming, that is always in motion, becomes visible. The chapter aims to provide further insights into the embodied experience of walking for families in order to better inform campaigns which encourage walking.

Consumer studies drawing on interpretative approaches have tended to rely on sedentary interviews, which the authors argue are ill-equipped to capture the embodied, tacit and pre-reflexive knowledge that conditions routinized practices. This paper aims to provide practical and theoretical framing of the walking-with technique, in particular, with reference to practice theories. Specifically, this paper draws on Bourdieu’s concept of the “habitus” to illustrate the “workings” of the habituated body in performing routine consumption.

This paper used the walking-with technique to elicit “mobile stories” with senior executives in Hong Kong. This paper explored how walking to and from work/lunch/dinner can open up culturally and historically embodied narratives that reflect evolving consumption practices throughout participants’ professional trajectories.

This paper demonstrates the uses of the walking-with technique by illustrating how embodied narratives foreground the pre-reflexive practices of mundane consumption. This paper illustrates how walking as a “mobile mundane practice” can expand a researcher’s horizon of understanding, enabling them to “fall into the routines of participants’ life”, “get into grips with participant’s temporal (time travel portal) and cultural conditioning” and “co-experience and empathise with participants through bodily knowing”. The authors argue that walking-with necessarily implies an inter-subjective sharing of intermundane space between the researchers and the participants. Such a method is therefore conducive to engendering co-created embodied understanding-in-practice, which the authors argue is accomplished when there is a fusion-of-habituses. Future applications in other consumer contexts are also discussed.

The walking-with technique embeds data collection in the day-to-day routes taken by participants. This does not only ease the accessibility issue but also render real-life settings relevant to participants’ daily life.

Despite receiving growing attention in social science studies, the walking-with technique is under-used in consumer research. This paper calls for the need to mobilise walking-with as a method to uncover practical and theoretical consumer insights in a way that allows for embodied and performative knowledge (know-how) to emerge.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how being led by a young child to unknown destinations without shared language offers an experience of indeterminacy that opens up (re)thinking of political co-existence.

The relational arts project The Walking Neighbourhood hosted by children challenges the social practice of adults chaperoning children through public streets by inviting children to curate and lead unknown adults on walks of local neighbourhoods. This paper focusses on sensory ethnographic research of one encounter of a child-curated walk when this project took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The experience is relayed through multilayered sensorial storytelling inter-woven with diffractive analysis informed from a post-humanist agential realist position (Barad, 2007, 2012).

Perceptions, knowings, imaginings, memories and connections are read as explanations of intra-actions in the child-led walk to produce new meaning in the phenomena of political co-existence. Emergent, embodied, sensorial listening produces new awareness and understandings of intra-acting beings in an urban space regardless of age or form.

Application of ethical ontological epistemological practice through emergent, embodied, sensorial listening to others opens affectual ethical ways of being and knowing for justice-to-come in political co-existence.

The concept of child-led walks is innovative as a political act by shifting from vertical adult-child relations to horizontal relations. Post-humanist agential realism is a new and emerging theory that offers possibilities to reconceptualise co-existence with others in public spaces.

Walking is considered as a particular relationship for rhythmic moving in cityscapes and as method for understanding. The purpose of this paper is to explore the significance of an embodied way of sensing and making sense, of knowing and learning that is relevant for tourism education and studies and other forms of experiential learning.

The paper uses a conceptual, discursive and research-based approach based on a phenomenological understanding of embodied learning. Empirical “data” from two educational tours (Edutour) in Lisbon and Shanghai are presented, contextualized and interpreted.

Walking through cityscape related to projects is an “effective” embodied practice of learning in which senses “make sense.” The empirical material and experiences that emerged during Edutour demonstrated the significance of walking as form of embodied knowing, learning and interrelating to place and paces of a tourist city.

The idea of walking as method within tourist cities is hardly explored. Hence, this constitutes a unique, innovative and interpretative event in which new approaches, such as “fielding” and “reflactions” “in the feeld”, defy more traditional concepts. It emphasizes the role of the city as a medium and remains a valuable contribution for tourism and education research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the combination of a qualitative shadowing method called “Commentated Walk” and an ethnographic approach, can be used to analyze the spatial dimension of practices, when space is considered as a co-construction and as an active dimension of individual and collective practices.

The approach is ethnographic and the empirical field work concerns the coordination in ephemeral organizations intended to manage emergent phenomena: the social “problems” often named “urban incivilities,” which occur in public and semi-public spaces in some suburban areas in France and are recurrent.

In these organizations, space appears to be part of individual and collective practices, and a key resource for coordination. Shared “spaces of action” between inhabitants and local institutions contribute to coordination. As a method of data collection, Commentated Walks offer relevant insight into how actors “deal with space” in their day-to-day life or their professional practices. Walking with while talking with – the method's principals – make it possible to capture the materiality of problematic spaces as well as the feelings that the space inspires.

The use of this method is still exploratory. In further research, it would be interesting to consider such Commentated Walks in other organizational contexts, in order to explore different ways of “dealing with” space and different types of spatial competencies that people develop in using space as a resource.

This paper proposes an original combination of methodological approaches which allows us to grasp the formation of spatial practices.