Ethical Matters: Women Walking

Walking helps you think (as anyone knows who has tried to resolve a problem sitting down).

Offering a whole array of sparks, experiments, projects, catapults, prompts, drifts and exercises, Sonia Overall invites us to see walking as a creative writing method. She sets out a particular form which she calls walking-writing and suggests ways to gather materials, submit to the sensory, explore your home like a tourist, and scour the streets like a metal-detector in search of the hidden, the forgotten and the overlooked. The allure of the city is powerful, but not universally accessible. For many women, it can be exclusionary, exploitative and dangerous. Author of The Feminist Art of Walking, Morag Rose explores how women can and do claim their place in the public space. She traces local histories and personal stories and attunes herself to the wider resonances of women’s rights amidst alienating capitalist cityscapes. Craving connection and comradeship, she discovers a unique and inclusive approach to walking, celebrating diverse women who transform walking into an art form and act of resistance. Join Morag and Sonia in conversation that explores the benefits, beauties and barriers to women and walking.

Dr Sonia Overall is a writer, psychogeographer and educator living in Kent. She is an avid psychogeographer, walking artist and founder of Women Who Walk, a network for creatives and academics. Sonia leads playful, performative and interactive walks and carries out creative interventions and responses to these. She is also co-founder of Folk Lore Kent, leading seasonal ‘folkwalks’ and other folklore-related activities and events. Morag Rose is a walking artist activist and academic. She is founder of the Loiterers Resistance Movement and a senior lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Liverpool. Her work focuses on public space, regeneration, access, equality, psychogeographies and the power of creative, communal walking.