Revealing Place Mobility by Walking and Map Analysing

Abstract

AbstractThe chapter addresses how places are temporal and multilayered. They are obvious and hidden at the same time and always becoming through relational encounters of more-than-humans. In the chapter, the author makes use of two different methods, walking and map analysis, to explore how Western Barðastrandarsýsla county, a marginal place in southern part of the Westfjord peninsula, Iceland, can be and has been defined. Walking is an embodied experience, it relates to all the senses through the lived experience of the body as it moves with the environment. As a research method, walking reveals or produces a sense of understanding of the environment and emergent landscapes. Maps and place name archives produce another kind of knowledge about the landscape, gained and recorded through the ages. By analysing maps and crossing them with embodied experience of walking the old routes of Western Barðastrandarsýsla county, new knowledge can be created that provides understanding of the past and becoming of a place.