ARST 4915/6915 Thematic Inquiry: Geographies of Walking: Interdisciplinary Mapping, Storytelling, and Drawing

This advanced thematic inquiry explores walking as a critical, aesthetic, and spatial practice for traversing disciplinary boundaries across art, design, environmental geography, and urbanism. Anchored in the expanded fields of ambulatory art and design studies, this course invites students to engage with the terrain of the everyday through walking, drawing, and notational systems— treating the act of moving through space as a form of inquiry, performance, and mapping.

Taking inspiration from the practices of Richard Long, the dérives of Guy Debord and the Situationists, the embodied mappings of Garnette Cadogan, the cultural-geographical narratives of Rebecca Solnit, and the participatory tools of the Stalker Collective / Osservatorio Nomade, this course proposes walking not merely as transport but as a method of engagement with place, time, and perception. Through critical readings, fieldwork, and studio-based investigations, students will explore walking as a method to enter spatial politics, where one’s subjectivity is open to being changed, where making sense is a precarious and embodied encounter activated only through dialogue and unsettling contact.

Under this paradigmatic openness, we will together build new forms of spatial storytelling, critical cartography, and environmental awareness. Key investigations include alternative visualization strategies that emphasize subjectivity, affect, and temporality, approaching space not as a fixed container but as a lived, contested, and continually rewritten field of experiences—shaped by tensions between ephemerality and fixity across vast social and conceptual distances.

*w/Visiting Artist Garnette Cadogan and MFA Alumnus Annie Simpson