SOCIAL-SCAPES OF THE WALK

1. SOCIAL-SCAPES OF THE WALK Chris Platania-Phung Research Fellow Institute for Health and Social Science Research CQUniversity May 31, 2011

2. Overview Why ‘social-scapes’? Aspects of social-scapes (e.g. walking style) Walking, sociality & meaning Walking & risks Walking & play Implications for public health

3. Walking in the park Image from Erelanawanati Sawir

4. Social-scapes: varieties of walking

5. Social-scapes: walking collectives • 10,000 step communities • Other community walking groups • WalkEngland • Race Walking Australia

6. Walking language Expressions: • Walk the talk • Walking on water • A walk in the park

7. Social-scapes: politics, power “….walking has a significance beyond merely the functional. If it did not have, why would society punish non-walkers for not walking?” (Oliver, 1993)

8. A social look at walking “Walking is simultaneously experienced as both biological embodied reality, and as socially constructed discursive activity, part of the symbolic repertoire at our disposal to communicate complex, gendered, sexual, age, ethnic and sub-cultural identities.” (Green, 2009, p. 23).

9. Social-scapes Looking at: • STYLES • LOCALITIES • MEANINGS • SYMBOLS • IDENTITIES

10. Melbourne: The Tan

11. Melbourne: Botanical Gardens

12. Walking Spaces From Wang & Lee (2010, p. 1271)

13. Metaphorical/Transformative Walking (Hester, 2006, pp. 404-7): • Sacred destination • Wandering • Routine walking • “Walk without measure”

14. Walking, Life Journeys, Discovery

15. Walking together

16. Walking & Bodily Style “Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body…...the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste….first in the seemingly most natural features of the body, the dimensions (volume, height, weight) and shapes….at a more deeper level, the whole body schema, in particular the physical approach to the act of eating, governs the selection of certain foods…..”

17. Walking & bodily style “…for example, in the working classes, fish tends to be regarded as an unsuitable food for men, not only because it is a light food, insufficiently ‘filling’ which would only be cooked for health reasons…..but also because, like fruit (except bananas) it is one of the ‘fiddly’ things which a man’s hands cannot cope with and which make him childlike…but above all, it is because fish has to be eaten in a way which totally contradicts the musculine way of eating, that is, with restraint, in small mouthfuls, chewed gently, with the front of the mouth, on the tips of the teeth (because of the bones). The whole musculine identity – which is called virility – is involved in these two ways of eating, nibbling and picking, as befits a woman, or with whole-hearted male gulps and mouthfuls…..” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 191)

18. Walking around the room Manderson & Turner (2006, p. 658)

19. Walking & Risk Image from: rmcbooks.co.uk

20. Walking & Risk "Recent studies indicate that cognitively intact individuals experience frequent rightward collisions while walking through narrow doorways. Such a directional bias has been attributed to an attentional bias in spatial perception." (Jujikake et al., 2010, p.195)

21. Walking the dog “…the augmented parasympathetic pattern on successive dog walks shows that the magnitude of change in cardiac vagal tone can possibly be heightened by frequent exposure to a friendly dog” (Motooka et al. 2006, p. 63)

22. Walking & risk

23. Walking & Play Image by KJ Vogelius

24. Zombie-Walk Image by Jackman Chiu

25. Walking in the mall “Mall walking highlights the constraining and enabling capacities of consumption, for consumption is implicated in the causative factors of obesity, but simultaneously positioned as a strategy to promote healthy lifestyles. It is the blurring of consuming bodies, health and spaces that provides a window to critically engage with the dialectical tensions of consumption.” (Warin et al., 2008, p. 188).

26. Implications • Walking is political • Walking as way to play with the social • Prospects of walking for social change (e.g. reducing inequalities in health)

27. Implications

28. References Bourdieu, P. (1979). Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. New York: Routledge. Fujikake, H., Higuchi, T., Imanaka, K., & Maloney, L.T. (2011). Directional bias in the body while walking through a doorway: its association with attentional and motor factors. Experimental Brain Research, 210(2), 195-206. Green, J. (2009). ‘Walk this way’: public health and the social organization of walking, Social Theory and Health, 7(1), 20-38. Hester, R.T. (2006). Design for ecological democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Manderson, D., & Turner, S. (2006). Coffee House: habitus and performance among law students. Law and Social Inquiry, 31(3), 649-676. Miaux, S., Drouin, L., Morency, P., Paquin, S., Gauvin, L., & Jacquelim, C. (2010). Making the narrative walk-in-real-time methodology relevant for public health internvetion: towards an integrative approach. Health and Place, 16, 1166-73. Motooka, M. Koike, H., Yokoyama, T., & Kennedy, N.L. (2006). Effect of dog-walking on autonomic nervous activity in senior citizens. Medical Journal of Australia, 184(2), 60-3. Oliver, M.J. (1993). What’s so wonderful about walking? Inaugural Professorial Lecture, 9 February, University of Greenwich, London. Peake, B. (2010). He is dead, and He is continuing to die: a feminist psycho-semiotic reflection on men’s embodiment of metaphor in a Toronto Zombie Walk, Journal of Contemporary Anthropology, 1(1), 50-69. Warin, M., Moore, V., Davies, M., Turner, K. (2007). Consuming bodies: mall walking and the possibilities of consumption. Health Sociology Review, 17(2), 187-98.