LOCUS, Journal of Culture Studies

Guest editors: Marieke Borren and Susan Hogervorst

As an everyday act of embodied locomotion, walking rarely becomes an explicit object of reflection, let alone an entry point into questions of history and memory. Yet as we move through streets, landscapes, ruins, and memorial sites, alone or collectively, walking can reactivate personal memories, disclose hidden histories, and inscribe new narratives into shared spaces. Examples range from commemorative marches and heritage walking tours to psychogeographical drifts that excavate urban and peri-urban spaces as palimpsests, as well as the prominent role of walking in first-person biographical accounts of displacement. In addition, in fictional (literary and cinematic) representations, walking functions as a practice that mediates between personal memories and the meaningful environments in which they unfold.

This dossier of Locus brings together articles that explore walking as an embodied mnemonic, narrative and pedagogical practice that produces, discloses, organizes, and reconfigures both cultural and (auto)biographical memories in particular places.It asks how walking mediates between bodily memory, environments, and historical narratives. We therefore seek contributions on walking that depart from one of three thematic entry points: (1) embodiment and bodily memory (individual or collective), (2) environment and place, or (3) narrative and representation, always in relation to the other two.

In this way, the dossier seeks to open a dialogue between phenomenology (and 4E approaches to cognition), cultural memory studies, (oral) history, heritage and heritage education studies, psychogeography, narrative studies (including literature, cinema, and religious studies), and the walking arts. By bringing these perspectives together, the dossier contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of walking studies.

William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Walking-with the past from phenomenological and cultural memory perspectives

From a phenomenological perspective, walking may have strong ties to memory because walking is never a purely present activity: as a sedimentation of histories and habits, shaped by past experiences, social norms, and built environments, the moving body itself can be understood as an archive. At the same time, the environments through which we move are not neutral backdrops or abstract spaces but structured and always already meaningful fields of affordances that enable and constrain particular forms of movement. Streets, paths, ruins, memorial sites, and infrastructures invite certain trajectories, rhythms, and styles of walking while discouraging others. Walking thus unfolds in a dynamic relation between historically sedimented bodily habits and environments that themselves bear traces of past events.

From a cultural memory perspective, walking has the capacity both to inscribe collective and personal histories into places and to reactivate past experiences in the present. Over the past few decades, walking has increasingly become a key component of collaborative, participatory and place-based practices in public history, commemoration and heritage education. Such initiatives are often explicitly designed to reconnect participants with historical events and experiences through embodied movement in the environments where these events unfolded. By moving through historically meaningful landscapes, participants may encounter traces of past lives and events embedded in or ascribed to particular places.

Across these contexts, walking can be understood as a form of embodied historical inquiry. By moving through environments that afford particular trajectories and encounters, walkers engage with landscapes as dynamic mobile archives in which historical layers become perceptible through bodily movement. Understanding walking as a relational, situated, and co-constitutive practice, ‘walking with the past’ suggests that the past can be encountered, activated, and co-experienced through walking, rather than merely interpreted or represented. We see walking as a form of performative remembrance, where histories are not simply recalled but partially re-enacted in the present (especially in commemorative walks, heritage trails, and protest walks).

Types of contributions

We invite proposals for contributions including (but not limited to):

• Empirical case studies examining (collaborative) walking practices in heritage education,  public history, or psychogeography.
• Theoretical papers exploring walking as a mnemonic, narrative, or embodied practice, including contributions from phenomenology, 4E cognition, as well as more reflective treatments of the use of walking in heritage education, commemoration and psychogeography
• Methodological reflections on walking as a research method in fields such as oral history, ethnography, or historical geography.
•  Narrative analyses (including religious studies perspectives) of literary, cinematic, or (auto-)biographical works in which walking functions as a structuring principle of memory and narrative.
• Artistic, practice-based, and visual contributions from walking artists, psychogeographers, or practitioners working with locative media and walking-based artistic research.

Research questions

We seek contributions engaging questions such as:

1. Walking as embodied memory

• What kinds of memories or narratives emerge specifically through embodied movement through environments?
• In what ways does embodied movement through landscapes activate or reorganize (auto)biographical memory?
• How might phenomenological approaches to walking deepen our understanding of the relationship between embodiment, memory, and historical experience?
• How does walking reveal the historicity of embodied practices and everyday forms of movement?
• How does walking function as a medium through which cultural memory is transmitted, appropriated, or re-enacted?

2. Walking as place-based engagement with the past

• How does the (collaborative) act of walking disclose, enact or reinvoke/reactivate histories embedded in landscapes and urban environments, and make these histories available for experiencing in the present?
• How do historical transformations in landscapes, infrastructures, and built environments shape the affordances of walking and become sedimented in bodily comportment and habit?
• How can walking work as a means to disclose (perhaps even produce) memoryscapes, particularly traumascapes: places marked by historical violence or trauma?
• How are temporal, particularly historical, dimensions of lived experience involved in ambulatory place-making?
• How does walking operate as a form of informal public historiography?
• What makes the dérive or other forms of walking productive as a way of excavating the palimpsest of urban and peri-urban places, hidden historical layers and narratives?
• How do experimental walking practices reveal “unofficial” or marginalized histories embedded in everyday urban space?

3. Walking, narrative time, and representation

• How does walking structure narrative or (auto-)biographical time in literary, cinematic, or autobiographical works?
• How do narrative representations of walking connect personal memory with broader historical or cultural contexts?
• How can phenomenological perspectives illuminate the role of walking in narrative biographical time?

Submission information

• Abstracts, draft and final articles are to be submitted through our website. Please check the author guidelines first. Submissions are accepted in English and Dutch. All submissions will undergo editorial review. For inquiries, please contact the guest editors through marieke.borren@ou.nl
• Timetable
• Abstracts (300–500 words): due 30 October
• Notification of acceptance: 15 November
• Full manuscripts (4,000 – 5,000 words, excluding notes and references): due 3 January 2027
• Editorial comments will be sent by 5 February, 2027
• Final versions: due 7 March, 2027
• Publication of the  dossier is scheduled for spring, 2027

About LOCUS

Locus is an online Open Access interdisciplinary journal for culture studies, published by the Department of Culture Studies at the Open University of the Netherlands. It is the continuation of the print journal of the same name that appeared from 1999 to 2017. Since then, Locus has developed a more international profile and has adopted a diamond Open Access model: articles are published under the Creative Commons CC BY License, meaning the journal charges no fees to either authors or readers.

Locus aspires to be a platform for the dissemination of scholarly research, balancing academic depth with accessibility while seeking to connect scholarship and society. To achieve those goals, we welcome contributions from various disciplines within the humanities and culture studies, such as media studies, (art) history, literary studies, philosophy, and cultural analysis. Locus also promotes collaboration between the culture sciences and the cultural field. As an interdisciplinary academic journal, it targets an audience of academics, professionals, and practitioners in the cultural sector, as well as a broader readership interested in cultural research.

In addition to stand-alone articles, the journal publishes biannual thematic ‘dossiers,’ special collections of articles on topical debates. These dossiers cover diverse themes such as the cultural imagination of human and non-human animals, game studies, the coloniality of natural history collections, performativity, and embodiment.

We recently completed the migration of Locus to the Open Journals ecosystem. While our current platform is new, all back issues and articles remain fully available through our former platform.