Walking along in sticky places: post-humanist and affective insights from a reflective account of two young women in Manchester, UK

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a reflective account of a walk-along that brought together a researcher and a participant who visited the Curry Mile (Wilmslow Road) in Manchester, UK. It focuses on places, emotions and materiality in intercultural research in order to understand how ‘things make people happen’. Drawing on the interplay of ‘post-humanism’, emotions in ‘sticky’ places, and ‘cultural threads and blocks’, this paper explores how decentring intercultural research facilitates new ways of coming together, allows the construction of cultural threads, and enables creative and reflective engagement.

ملخص الدراسة

يتحدث هذا المقال عن دراسة مبنية على “المشي سويا” الذي جمع بين الباحثة ومشتركة قاما بزيارة منطقة الكاري مايل، شارع ويلمزلو في مانشستر، بريطانيا. يستند هذا البحث على أهمية التركيز على أثر الأماكن، المشاعر والمادة في نطاق البحوث بين الثقافات لفهم كيف تؤثر الأشياء على الأشخاص. من خلال عدسة “ما بعد الانسان”، “المشاعر في الأماكن اللزجة”، “الخيوط والكتل الثقافية” يكشف هذا المقال أن اللامركزية في البحوث الثقافية توفر طرق جديدة للجمع بين الأشخاص، لبناء خيوط من التفاهم الثقافي، والاندماج الإبداعي الناقد..

KEYWORDS:

• Posthumanism
• cultural blocks and threads
• emotions and affect
• walk along
• decentring intercultural research

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of Lou Harvey, Samantha Wilkinson, two anonymous reviewers and the editor in shaping the development of this paper and thank them with gratitude. Thanks are also due to Samiya for accepting to lead on this walk-along, which ultimately allowed this paper to happen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Khawla Badwan, senior lecturer in TESOL and Applied Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has interdisciplinary research interests in areas related to language and social justice, intercultural communication, sociolinguistics of globalisation, migration research, and higher education.

Elisha Hall, research assistant at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is interested in social class, visual ethnography, and intersectionality.

Notes

1 ‘intra-’ as a prefix is added to ‘interact’ to foreground ‘changes within’ (Online Oxford Dictionary, 2020). Section 3 explains how being in contact with objects and places can invoke emotions that move us and affect what the body can do.

2 Feminist researchers use the terms ‘emotions’ and ‘affect’ differently. Ahmed (2004, 2014) does not explicitly distinguish between the two terms. Some argue that emotion are ‘sociological expressions of feelings whereas affect is more firmly rooted in biology and in our physical response to feelings’ (Gorton, 2007, p. 334). When Ahmed (2014) discusses the ‘affective turn’ in social sciences, she draws on Hardt’s (2007) distinction, suggesting that affect refers to the body and mind, reason and passion (Ahmed, 2014, p. 206).

 

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by Manchester Metropolitan University, Research Accelerator Grant.