Walking Together: Challenging Philosophical and Ethnographic Paradigms from the Ground Up (Routledge Advances in Research Methods)

This book examines walking together as a research method, a social practice, and a paradigmatic social phenomenon.Anchored in long-term fieldwork in post-apartheid South Africa, it explores how walking together exposes the dissonance between lived racialized power asymmetries and methodological ideals that assume universal accessibility of public space.In doing so, the book turns a critical eye toward recent developments in social ontology and phenomenology that underpin walking methodology, interrogating their own theoretical commitments, their claims to universality, as well as their attempts to account for power inequality.The book further shows how the history of walking is deeply intertwined with the history of participant observation, revealing how methodological ideals have been shaped by the embodied, uneven conditions of research on the ground.Combining peripatetic ethnography with theoretical reflections on pace bias, hidden particulars, and agency, the book builds a case for