Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Patricia Ticineto Clough

Subject Categories

Adult and Continuing Education and Teaching | Alternative and Complementary Medicine | Applied Ethics | Art Practice | Biodiversity | Cognition and Perception | Community-Based Learning | Community-Based Research | Creative Writing | Demography, Population, and Ecology | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Educational Methods | Environmental Education | Environmental Health and Protection | Environmental Studies | Epistemology | Ethics and Political Philosophy | Health and Physical Education | Human Ecology | Human Geography | Integrative Biology | Metaphysics | Natural Resources and Conservation | Nature and Society Relations | Other Education | Other Forestry and Forest Sciences | Other Philosophy | Outdoor Education | Place and Environment | Politics and Social Change | Psychology of Movement | Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education | Sustainability | Teacher Education and Professional Development | Theory and Philosophy | Theory, Knowledge and Science | Urban Education | Women's Studies

Keywords

walking, onto-epistemology, post-phenomenology, temporal dimension, other-than-human, relationality

Abstract

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the self, allowing for difference to seep in from a field of alterity. This movement is the radical turn towards an experiential discernment of the subjective as a pulsing, never fully fixed, relational intensity that re-enters the ‘human’ after decentering it. Immersing the walker in ‘curated’ environments while making explicit a slowing down to a rate of coherence and synchronization allow internalization and integration of the above mentioned shifts. Walking becomes a medium for a new onto-epistemological organization where the non- linearity of space-time and affective forces with ontological capacities for transformation are held together. Because this medium encompasses the complex multiplicities that are time, movement, land and affective and cognitive processes, the results it yields are necessarily open and indeterminate. I look for these new entanglements to guide the materialities and immaterialities involved in this type of walking towards an acceptance of embodiment and temporality as diverse and open.

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