Walking-with/worlding-with in a global pandemic: a story of mothering in motion

Platt, Louise ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9063-1110 (2024) Walking-with/worlding-with in a global pandemic: a story of mothering in motion. Area. ISSN 0004-0894

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Abstract

In this paper I demonstrate the relationship between (sub)urban walking and worlding by employing creative analytical practice (Richardson and St Pierre, 2005). Auto-ethnographic accounts and qualitative data are woven into a single story to represent ‘personal and social meanings rather than simplifying and reducing to generalise’ (Parry and Johnson, 2007, p. 120). Walking, is often associated with storying (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008; Solnit, 2001) and specifically, I employ ‘worlding’ to illustrate how walking-with contributes to the emergent, embodied and relational nature of mothering as a more-than-human story in motion. I address how mothering worlds are made legible (Stewart, 2015) through walking-with a baby and other mothers. Even during the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, our everyday affective and embodied encounters shape the worlds we inhabit. Haraway (2016) suggests worlding is not an individual experience but is relational, always collective. Indeed, Ingold and Vergunst (2008, p. 2) argue that walking is social, and ‘lives are paced out in their mutual relations.’ Fundamentally, walking-with a baby (in a pram or wearing in a sling or wrap) is an entanglement of bodies, a negotiated practice where bodies intra-act. Walking-with is always a multiplicity of ‘withs’ – mother-child-pram/sling-othermothers-landscapes-covid-rules-restrictions and so forth. Springgay and Truman (2022) states, the with is merely not additive, it is a milieu of relations. Middleton (2022), highlights that urban walking has been characterized as a positive and romantic experience which limits the possibility of critically understanding everyday walking practices of diverse users. The walking in this paper is far from romanticised, it is women’s everyday walkingwith their babies. It takes place in and through (sub)urban landscapes, and how we negotiate our maternal bodies through these spaces, at a very particular moment in time (Covid-19 lockdowns), is imbricated in our worldings. Weaving autoethnographic diaries written during my maternity leave with 12 semi-structured interviews with, and 16 emailed reflections from new mothers (with babies under one or born during the UK lockdowns March 2020-July 2021) it addresses walking-with during Covid-19 through creative analytical practice to create a hopeful collective story of walking-with to render a world, which, as a researcher I am embedded in, visible (Denzin, 2000). Whilst walking has been much written about in geography, the following will briefly outline the relationship between walking and worlding through two specific, yet related, notions: corporeality and relations. I proceed this way as mothers worldings are shaped in response to not only their own postpartum bodies but the bodies of their child; and the relations with others they walk with (babies and other mothers) but also the wider relations with the material and natural world through which they walk.