ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the canonized history of walking, tracing its symbolic significance across intellectual traditions while uncovering its deep entanglement with dominant perspectives on bodies in public. The first section explores how walking has been historically embedded in the spatial imaginaries of the Global North, structured by a dichotomy between nature and culture, a masculinist ideal of freedom and genius, and assumptions about who moves freely through the world. The second section turns to the phenomenological foundations of walking research, revealing how its core concepts – particularly Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “I can” – originate in an unmarked, privileged experience of public space. By critically tracing these legacies, this chapter lays the groundwork for a more inclusive and contextually attuned engagement with walking as a research method.
