Walking towards embodied understanding

This chapter discusses how the psychogeographical practice of attentive walking can be used to promote embodied experiences of place, within and beyond Higher Education settings. It defines and outlines attentive walking methods as immersive, submitting to sensory details and seeking entanglements with the nonhuman in everyday settings. The chapter argues for the need to take time away from the constraints of ‘workliving’ to facilitate this practice as an act of care, and presents the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of large-scale disruption to working patterns. The restraints of lockdown and resultant hyperlocalised experience of place are identified as situations through which attentive practices develop. The chapter proposes hyperlocalised attentive walking as a means to re-vision and re-enchant place, and concludes that by attending to and caring for a fragment of the world, we might better attend to and care for the whole.