Dr Amelia Walker, University of South Australia / Adelaide University
This series presents creative-critical pieces begun in workshops on walking/writing to interrogate power, privilege, and inequity. I first developed a workshop for Storytelling for Justice, an online symposium hosted by the Meanjin-based Creative Arts Research Institute at Griffith University in February 2025. Focused on storying and listening to promote justice and repair, the symposium gathered creative practitioners and researchers across fields of the humanities, creative arts, healthcare, sociology, social justice, socio-legal, gender, media, communication studies, education, and more. It was a supportive, connective space of reciprocal and relational knowledge sharing. I felt deeply grateful to take part, and for the generous thinkers who attended my workshop.
The participants’ moving, insightful responses to the first session encouraged me to present another extended online workshop with Writers SA, followed by a live one on Kaurna Country with the Critically Creative Reading and Writing Collective (CCRWC), a group for researchers interested in creative methods and methodologies. On both occasions, participants again shared wonderfully emotive writings, leading me to recognise a possibility that we might form a publication of works from the three sessions. This series realises that possibility. I extend deep thanks to Space and Culture for providing a platform, to Justine Lloyd for inspiration and encouragement, and to the teams from Storytelling for Justice, Writers SA, and the CCRWC for sharing my submission call with workshop attendees.
I define walking/writing as any iterative practice of moving through and writing about a chosen space. Walking is here understood in a broad sense that, alongside literal walking, may involve using wheelchairs or other aids, riding public transport, remaining physically still while moving and being moved in other ways, or using online maps and satellite images – to name but some possibilities. Writing similarly extends far beyond printed words and sentences. For instance, speech, movement, music, photography, and art all bear their own rich possibilities.
Walking/writing bears longstanding traditions across many cultures globally. Since time immemorial, First Nations peoples of the lands and waters colonially known as Australia have storied and traversed Songlines reflecting deep and enduring relationships with and care for Country (Neale & Kelly, 2020). In the far younger, broadly ‘western’ colonial culture in which I as a person of Scottish-Irish descent was born and shaped, walking-writing connections are likewise well recognised, though differently. Elina Mikkilä’s (2024) account of ‘creatical writing’ thoroughly describes key traditions, some of which include Jean-Jacques Rosseau’s ‘walking as a philosophical-literary practice’; literary flâneurs such as Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, and Walter Benjamin; and dérive as explored by Guy Debord and the Situationists.
My own walking/writing approach is also influenced by longstanding practices of cultural geography (Dunn, 1997) and more recent creative writing research (Black, Manathunga & Davidow, 2023) that seeks to raise and question issues of privilege and inequity across intersecting axes of social experience. The queer-feminist WalkingLab co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman presents an illustrative array of examples that inform and inspire my practices. As Springgay and Truman explain, in our era of global social and political challenges including the climate crisis, war, neoliberal economics, homelessness, and displacement, walking/writing can offer productively disruptive ways to ‘transform and decolonize social and political space and institutions’, thus becoming ‘an ethical and political call to collective action’ (2019, 2).
The workshops involved walking/writing exercises foregrounding self-reflexive critique of how social inequities manifest through space and place. We began with privilege mapping based on Peggy McIntosh’s account of privilege as an ‘invisible knapsack’ of benefits based on identity factors including race, colonisation, gender, sexuality, disability, neurodiversity, social class, fatness, age, language, and more. This helped us all reflect on the different taken-for-granted privileges we bear, the modes of oppression on which these privileges are based, and the need to challenge and change these inequitable modes of social relation. We then discussed key points from a study by Bronwyn Fredericks (2009) into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s perceptions of healthcare spaces and places. Many women in the study felt alienated and hesitant to seek health treatment because of racism and colonisation embedded in space and place – for instance, through opening foyer paintings by white settler artists whose empty bushscapes reiterate the legal myth of terra nullius, and in another case because the Aboriginal health care service was located at the back of the building, reminding people of times when they were forced to go to the back in shops, cinemas, and other public spaces.
The privilege mapping and discussion of Fredericks (2009) provided examples of things to observe and critique as we began walking/writing. Based on points from Fredericks, I encouraged workshop participants to notice small details, particularly human-made alterations to spaces, and consider how these might promote feelings of belonging for people bearing certain privileges while producing exclusion and marginalisation for people oppressed across those same axes of privilege. We took a series of walks interspersed with group dialogues where we shared words and insights then returned to walk again and observe more based on what we learned by listening to each other, thus forming an iterative, collectively nurturing process. Following the workshop, I shared the materials with participants so they could continue and/or repeat their walking/writing exploring other spaces.
The writings produced through these activities explore diverse spaces, places, and modes of power. To summarise things to come, in ‘These Lands, This Language’, Shefali Matthews observes houses through a bus window and reflects on colonisation and language from the perspective of an Indian-born Australian-based writer. In ‘Kilburn and I’, a mosaic mural in the currently gentrifying suburb of Kilburn prompts Chloe Cannell to consider omissions of Aboriginal history and contemporary migrant communities from the mural’s visual storying of local community and identity. Then are two poems on youth poverty by Jazz Fechner-Lane, followed by ‘Three Erasures’, in which Kendrea Rhodes uses online map and satellite images to confront sanism as she traces her long-lost great-grandfather’s stay in the Ballarat Asylum.
Next, Victoria Knight interrogates intersections between fatphobia and ableism in the architecture of public bathrooms, and Prue Hemming examines the impact of sexual violence on a survivor navigating the streets of a city where incidents of violence against women and children have historically gone unreported. Finally, Yuwei Gou raises complexities of cross-cultural identity from the perspective of a Chinese writer and academic who completed her PhD in Australia. To further contextualise these pieces, my own ‘Walking/Writing as Talking/Listening’ provides a more detailed account of how I came to walking/writing as a means of navigating problems of privilege in my evolving practices as a writer and educator passionate about social justice and the need for change.
We perceive this series as one set of interjections into broader dialogues that must necessarily be ever open, collaborative, and ongoing. We are keen to continue this work and to connect with practitioners working in similar or related areas. I welcome correspondence about this project and/or future ones at the email below.
Dr Amelia Walker, 16th July 2025
[email protected]
About the Author
Amelia Walker lives and writes on Kaurna Country, where she lectures in creative writing at the University of South Australia (soon to be Adelaide University). She has published five poetry collections, most recently Alogopoiesis (Gazebo Books). Amelia is also co-editor of Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education (Routledge) and author of Reading and Writing for Change (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in October 2025).
Works cited
Black, A.L., Manathunga, C., Davidow, S. (2023). Walking/Writing, Sensing Side-By-Side: A Decolonial Inquiry. In Lasczik, A., Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Rousell, D. (Eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry. Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research, vol 7 (pp. 231-253). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_14
Dunn, K. (1997). Cultural Geography and Cultural Policy. Australian Geographical Studies, 35(1), 1-11.
Fredericks, B. (2009). There is Nothing that Identifies me to that Place’: Indigenous Women’s Perceptions of Health Spaces and Places. Cultural Studies Review, 15(2), 29-44. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v15i2.2036
Neale, M., & Kelly, L. (2020). First Knowledges Songlines: The power and promise. Thames & Hudson.
Mikkilä, E. (2024). The Art of ‘Creatical Writing’: Unlocking Insights Through Creative-Critical Fusion. Life Writing, 21(3), 535–548. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2024.2332601
Springgay , S., & Truman , S. E. (2019). Walking in/as Publics: Editors Introduction. Journal of Public Pedagogies, 4(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.15209/jpp.1170
