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Walking Together: Challenging Philosophical and Ethnographic Paradigms from the Ground Up (Routledge Advances in Research Methods)
Author(s): Anna Bloom-Christen (Author)
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: February 2, 2026
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 188 pages
- ISBN-10: 1041071124
- ISBN-13: 9781041071129
Book Description
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 a more accountable walking methodology and offers conceptual tools for working with, rather than smoothing over, difference. By unsettling idealized accounts of walking together, this book offers a fresh approach to movement- based methods that centers lived complexity. It will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, philosophy, sociology, urban studies, mobility, and methodology – as well as anyone curious about the politics of bodies in public.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Walking is never neutral; it’s power in motion. Bloom-Christen’s book accessibly demonstrates walking as an embodied and relational method shaped by inequality, race, and history. Resisting idealized universals, she embraces friction and difference to reveal walking as a means to navigate contested public space and build global forms of social theory.
– Sophie Oldfield, Professor, City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Professor Emeritus, Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town
Anthropology and philosophy rarely walk together as intimately or with as much mutual awareness as they do in this beautifully crafted and exceptionally clear trajectory of fieldwork in philosophy and reciprocally, philosophy of ethnographic fieldwork.
– Michael Lambek, University of Toronto, author of The Ethical Condition and of Concepts and Persons
In this moving book, Anna Bloom-Christen invites us to walk alongside her to perceive the complexity unfolding through the deceptively simple act of walking together, particularly in spaces of inequality. She forges a dialogue between an anthropology attuned to relational proximity and a philosophy grounded in movement.
– Pedro Tabensky, Rhodes University, author of Camus and Fanon on the Algerian Question: An Ethics of Rebellion
Anna Bloom-Christen seduces us into the magic of walking together as a research method in anthropology and core paradigm in phenomenology in this lucid, expert, and accessible tour through the history, theory and practice of walking. Her embodied immersion in hypersegregated post-apartheid urban South Africa illuminates walking together as a means to a critical engagement with difference and power and brings a much-needed grounded critique to abstract models of shared action and collaborative ethnography. Delightfully and generously written, Walking Together is a gift to teaching theory and method in anthropology, philosophy, and urban studies.
– Laurie Kain Hart, Professor of Anthropology, UCLA
Moving across both disciplinary and geographical terrain, Bloom-Christen shows how walking together is not an innocent matter of strolling through places but one loaded with differences. She presents a work of rare intellectual force covering both movement and walking as a topic of inquiry and a method for critical discussion.
– Susanne Ravn, Professor of Movement, Culture and Society, University of Southern Denmark
About the Author
Anna Bloom-Christen is an anthropologist with a focus on research methodology. Her work explores how individuals articulate togetherness, how attention evolves through shared action, and how knowledge is transmitted through embodied participation. She studied Philosophy and Anthropology in Basel and St Andrews and earned her PhD with a dissertation on racialized embodied experience of South African public space. Her postdoctoral project Divided Attention investigates attentional habits in divided societies. She also works with first-generation university students, engaging both with their understandings of philosophy and with how they experience its teaching and institutional culture.
