From walking arts and guided tours to sacred pilgrimage, how and in what ways do walking practices speak to heritage?

This is an invitation to contribute to an edited collection of critical writings and reflective documentation from practices at the intersection of embodiment, site and heritage. The collection attends to walking as a situated practice, in which contributors write from within the grounds they move through, not from a distance.
Heritage has often been produced from a detached and authorizing gaze, one that extracts meaning from place while remaining outside it. Embodied practices, such as walking, keep knowledge located in the body that moves and in the relational experience that movement makes, inherits and evokes.

We invite contributions from practitioners: activists, guides, custodians, educators, artists, scholars and researchers.The book will offer an inter-disciplinary engagement in the field through case studies, blueprints, contextualisation and analysis from contemporary practitioners.

We welcome contributions attending to the following thematic clusters, which may form sections of the book:

Embodiment, re-embodiment and being in place

Writing that begins with the body, in motion, in time, in place.

We invite writing attending to questions of the body, the significance of the physical activity of walking/movement and being in place with regard to learning and heritage. This can include reflective commentary on movement practices, or on strategies that engage with the past through affect and embodiment.

Possible reference points:

• Walking tours/tourism/education/
• Place and site
• Engaging the past in the present
• Eco-somatics & artistic practice
• dis-embodiment/ constructed amnesia
• Re-enchantment and re-embodiment
• Body archaeology
• More-than human

Walking, memory and agency

Writing that critically reflects on the intent of the practice with regard to memory and heritage.

This theme seeks to develop an exploration of the construction and mobilisation of ‘heritage’ through embodied practices. Where, why and how is memory activated through walking? We invite practitioners and researchers to articulate and discuss their intention with regard to participation and the agency of heritage and memory.  

Possible reference points:

• Memory, memoryscapes and memorialisation
• Inheritance, ancestors, tradition
• Participation, inclusion, exclusion
• Wounded landscapes/acts of care 
• Obscured/uncomfortable/marginalised heritage 
• Ghosts, spectres and hauntings 
• Archive and repertoire 
• Legacies of empire, colonial extraction
• Decolonial practices

Walking as productive of heritage

Reflections on contemporary embodied practice that resonates with its own ‘heritage’ and activates complex ways of knowing.

How can walking practices function as interventions that interfere with, or renew, ‘heritage’ interpretation and designation? We invite critical reflection on walking/movement as productive of ‘heritage’, however defined. Productive with regard to embodied and complex modes of knowledge beyond the production of artefacts, performance, and spectators. 

Possible reference points:

• Mnemonic landscapes/cityscapes
• Pilgrimage and ritual
• Indigenous peoples’ walking practices eg ‘Songlines’
• Intangible cultural heritage and its designation
• Walking as heritage practice
• Performance/performativity
• Walking-with
• Affective and cognitive connections

How to Contribute

Reflecting on our own perspectives and privileges, the colonial extraction of knowledge and ways heritage has been used, the editorial/advisory team welcome contributions grounded in practice. We invite each contributor to speak from and name their own relationship to the ground they walk. We take this not as a preliminary disclosure but as a method, one that shapes both the walking and the writing.

We encourage contributions from Global South perspectives and marginalised communities. We welcome interdisciplinary writing collaborations and from practices that merge creative arts and academic study.  

Contributions are invited in three formats:

• Grounded theoretical/philosophical reflections on practice and context
• Critical evaluation of specific interventions/engagement/projects
• Artistic contributions eg. blueprints, scripts, short poems, scores, possibly pics/graphics 

Abstract

• 300 word abstract for the formal proposal and publishers editorial team
• Key words
• CV:  300 word max CV/biog, plus link to relevant website/s and/or list of relevant publications

We welcome a more extended chapter summary of 1000 -1500 words. An indication of proposed engagement with one of the three core clusters would be helpful. Abstracts will be curated for inclusion by the editors, guided by the advisory team and publisher’s readers. Each chapter can include up to two relevant black and white images/graphics but are not essential at this stage.

Deadline

Abstract and cv to r.white@bathspa.ac.uk by 31 October 2026.

Anticipated deadline for completed chapters end of July 2027 (tbc).

Context of this call 

Following an editor’s invitation to submit a proposal on Walking and Heritage to the Museum and Heritage Studies list at Routledge (an imprint of Taylor & Francis) Richard White reached out to colleagues and fellow practitioners.  A draft outline was developed in conversations with a number of practitioners including Babak Fakhamzadeh of WLC, Roxana Pérez-Méndez of Campo Research Studio,Thomas Kampe and Richard Keating. With an informal go-ahead on that outline, this call for chapter abstracts is for potential inclusion in the formal proposal.
Thomas Kampe has agreed to co-edit the volume whilst Babak Fakhamzadeh, Richard Keating and Roxana Pérez-Méndez have agreed to contribute and advise. We continue to welcome expressions of interest in developing our editorial and advisory team.