Katrina M. Brown

Sharing public space across difference: attunement and the contested burdens of choreographing encounter

This paper concerns how claims to public space are negotiated between differently embodied subjects, and how forms of bodily articulation shape capacities for sharing space. Drawing on a study of outdoor access practices, entailing mobile video ethnographies with walkers and cyclists, it explores the corporeal mechanisms through which the entitlements of differently mobile subjects are asserted, resisted, circumscribed or accepted in the time-spaces of bodily encounter. How the signalling of ‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ conduct influences how bodies are allowed to move in relation to other bodies is the focus. Mobilisations of speed, affective and sensory attunement, and techniques of bodily articulation, were found to be a key in the disciplining of cycling and walking bodies. This paper highlights the central role of attunement to, and concession of, hybrid subjectivity in the choreography of encounters, and, moreover, how related burdens of orchestrating coexistence are shared and struggled over amongst different publics. It demonstrates that whilst greater attunement can enable differently mobile subjects to develop a reciprocal choreography, expectations of such attunement can also undermine the ability to share space if not met. This paper thus raises the dilemma of when to accept or extend the limits of attunement in facilitating coexistence in public space.

Catching a Glimpse: The Value of Video in Evoking, Understanding and Representing the Practice of Cycling

Researchers seeking to understand how places, spaces and subjectivities are constituted in and through motion increasingly acknowledge the value of harnessing the material, social and affective context of motion itself; actively engaging movement in the creation of research knowledges. For certain highly mobile and physical practices such as cycling, attempting to research through ‘being there’ is crucial if we are to move beyond rationalised and decontextualised understandings of everyday mobility and explore decisions and meanings which arise in the context of movement itself. However eliciting such accounts poses particular epistemological and methodological challenges. The aim of this chapter is to share insights from recent research that has used headcam video ethnography to understand the mobile practices of others.

The haptic pleasures of ground-feel: The role of textured terrain in motivating regular exercise

This paper explores the role that somatic or bodily touch-based experience of ground surface textures plays in securing a commitment to health-giving exercise practices, and argues that ground-feel is a neglected and underrated dimension of how environments co-constitute health. Past work has largely either overlooked ground-feel or positioned rough ground solely as a barrier to bodily movement. This research, however, informed by mobile and video ethnographies of walking and mountain biking in Scotland, elaborates a number of ways in which the experience of textured terrain can produce sensory and emotional experiences that motivate regular exercise. The possibility of positive tactile as well as visual experiences of landscapes, including uneven as well as smooth surfaces, ought then to be taken more seriously in designing everyday outdoor environments that encourage the energetic movement of bodies. A key challenge is to identify the optimal mix of textured and smooth ground surfaces to encourage increased energetic engagement for the widest range of users.

The Role of Landscape in Regulating (Ir)responsible Conduct: Moral Geographies of the ‘Proper Control’ of Dogs

Abstract Practices of outdoor access involve the regulation of people and animals as together they constitute particular landscapes. Conduct is ordered through law and moral norms to avert or minimise harm to people, livestock, wildlife and wider ecologies. This paper examines dogwalking in the Cairngorms National Park, illustrating how conceptions and experiences of landscapes and animals combine to shape the ability to co-exist across species boundaries. Drawing on a study using video methods, it investigates how ‘wildness’ and allied notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘escape’ are mobilised in practice to produce particular (ir)responsible cross-species encounters, and how joint human–animal conduct—specifically the ‘control’ of dogs—is geographically constituted. A tension emerges between well-being and countryside regulation: the well-being associated with experiencing ‘freedom’ and the ‘control’ required by law for multispecies flourishing. The findings contribute to broader debate on how landscapes matter in the achievement of ethical animal–human relations.

Leave only footprints? How traces of movement shape the appropriation of space

The tracks people leave behind in the landscape are more than mere imprints on the ground. They are traces that can work to shape peoples’ claims to particular spaces, both materially and semiotically. This article examines the ways in which such mark-making is caught up in contestations over the legitimate use of spaces deemed ‘wild’ and ‘natural’. It draws upon a mobile and video ethnographic study of walkers and mountain bikers in the Cairngorms National Park, Scotland, to explore how the marks made on the ground through outdoor recreation become caught up in struggles over appropriate ways to move one’s body in nature. Here, a process of informal zoning is identified whereby walkers belong in mountains but mountain bikers do not. Emerging from the analysis are the ways in which footprints and tyre-tracks are constituted and contested as ‘damage’ in relation to mountain spaces, and thus used to ascribe or distance culpability from different modes of mobility: walking versus cycling. Particular attention is paid to how such configurations serve as the grounds for excluding certain recreational users from particular outdoor spaces. This article thus identifies traces of movement, and the ways in which they are rendered ‘visible’ or ‘natural’ in talk, action and terrain, as key territorialising devices. In particular, a social and cultural treatment of the environmental impacts of outdoor recreation highlights how absence, as well as presence, of traces can be a powerful device for staking claims to space. The analysis also prompts a greater appreciation of the role of surfaces in constituting particular natures (such as mountains) as natural and wild, and how particular subjects, ways of moving and technologies are implicated, (de)naturalised and disciplined therein.