Bodies of Walking: Trans-Materializing the Experiences of Racial Harassment

Abstract

Partaking in some of the material and affective moments and movements that emerged from my PhD research, I map the ontological, epistemological, and ethical possibilities/impossibilities that trans-corporeality and trans-materiality open in my research. Using walking and photo-diary as PhEmaterialist multisensory methodologies, I followed 15 Muslim schoolgirls in two London secondary schools (East Dulwich and Bethnal Green) mapping relational materialities between things that matter for them in their ordinary everyday practices and experiences. Employing Jane Bennett’s creative and absorbent I as a partaker rather than either actor or recipient, taking in and being taken up by virtues specific to the moment, this article materializes some partaker agencies and “more-thans” that Maha (my PhD participant) and I walked, made, challenged, and became with in different “spacetimematterings.” I argue that social injustice and inequalities, gendered and racial harassment as political, ethical, and material issues, are not always raised by those represented or able to name and speak up as part of social structures but emerge through complex webs of power relations and ordinary, everyday material moments and affective encounters. I consider bodies of walking as partakers of influx and efflux, many “I”s, moving and making the moments and experiences of racial harassment, affective entanglements, and the potentialities of the virtual, material, and affective that emerge in-between human and more-than-human walking bodies.