.top-header{ transform: scale(0.5); transform-origin: top left; width: 200%; } Unstable Installation Series: Truman, S.E. and Springgay, S. (2016) ‘Propositions for walking research’, in Powell, K., Bernard, P. and Mackinlay, L. (eds.) International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research. New York: Routledge, pp. 259–267.

Truman, S.E. and Springgay, S. (2016) ‘Propositions for walking research’, in Powell, K., Bernard, P. and Mackinlay, L. (eds.) International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research. New York: Routledge, pp. 259–267.


Truman and Springgay recast walking from an embodied technique into a propositional mode of research. Their central move is Whiteheadian: a proposition occupies the interval between actuality and potentiality and therefore does not prescribe an outcome but generates conditions in which novelty can emerge. Walking becomes research when it exceeds transit, observation or data collection and begins to reorganise the relations among bodies, space, sensation and thought. The chapter operationalises this through defamiliarisation, sensory mixing, enabling constraints and the Artist Placement Group’s open brief, where context becomes part of the work and not-knowing becomes an active condition. Its conceptual force lies in replacing the researcher who moves through a stable environment with an event in which bodies and environments are mutually constituted. This provides a precise bridge to new materialism, relational ontology, psychogeography and experimental pedagogy: walking is not a neutral carrier of inquiry but a device that changes the field through which knowledge becomes possible.