Pedestrian Provocations: Manifesting an Accessible Future
Channel: walk listen create
Date: 2024-02-25

In 2018, Blake Morris and Morag Rose embarked on a distance walking exchange to explore disability, intersectionality and interdependence in relation to walking. Using Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor’s walk in Examined Life (2009) as a starting point, they exchanged a series of walking instructions through digital tools such as e-mail, Twitter and WhatsApp. The resulting article, “Pedestrian Provocations: Manifesting an Accessible Future“, offered a series of provocations encouraging readers to walk with someone who ‘walks differently than you’, both together and at a distance.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent global lockdown has increased the number of artists working through digital exchange. In this walk · listen · café, Morris and Rose will discuss this digital turn in distance walking and its implications for improving accessibility. 
The pandemic has encouraged people to embrace walking together at a distance and allowed us to walk with a more global group of people than would be possible if we were meeting on the ground. How can we build on the positive aspects of connecting through technology, whilst also acknowledging its limitations?

The discussion will consider the complex relationship between diverse bodies, cyberspace, and movement, whilst addressing the challenges and opportunities of digital access. 
As we move towards walking together in person again, how can we integrate into our practice the contradictions and differences this moment has highlighted?