06 Mosavarzadeh+Et+Al

Canadian
Journal of Action Research

Volume 22, Issue 2, 2022, pages 91-108

WALKING WITH WATER: (RE)MAKING PEDAGOGICAL RELATIONS
THROUGH WALKING AND ARTMAKING

Marzieh Mosavarzadeh Sholeh Mahlouji
University of British Columbia University of British Columbia

Yasaman Moussavi Elmira Sarreshtehdari
University of British Columbia University of British Columbia

ABSTRACT
This paper unfolds the artful and pedagogical potentials of engaging in a simultaneous practice
of walking and artmaking in different locations, along bodies of water, and together-apart.
Through introducing the term co-living inquiry as a thread between action research and
a/r/tography, we suggest how the notion of walking with as both action and metaphor has
provided conditions for us to explore ways of (re)making relations among our walking bodies,
the places we walk in, and our works of art as a collective effort to create a learning community
of artists and art educators together apart.

KEY WORDS: Action research; Artmaking; A/r/tography; Co-living inquiry; Learning
community; Walking
WALKING AND ARTMAKING TOGETHER-APART

In this paper, we unfold a chain of creative explorations which have led us to ponder with
the artful and pedagogical potentials of engaging in the process of co-walking and co-
artmaking together but apart as a form of living inquiry. Our study began with our collective
agreement to simultaneously walk and make art together, but in different locations. The one
common aspect of these locations was they were all near a body of water. During this
process, we have felt connected to our co-walkers and the places we walk in through the
continuous sharing of works of art made during our walks, in an online group chat. These
works are either images (still and moving) or poetic narratives/poems. The act of walking,
making, and sharing something from our walks in the form of visual and textual fragments
makes us attentive to our personal relationships to the places we walk in. In addition, we
gradually began to notice that these relationships were continuously altered and
complicated as we kept sharing fragments of our works of art in our group chat. By sharing
Walking with Water 92
Mosavarzadeh, Mahlouji, Moussavi & Sarreshtehdari

traces of our walks, along with our engagement with the places we walk in, each of us invites
our co-walkers to see, feel, touch, listen, and engage with their surroundings through our
points of view. As such, in this process we are constantly and profoundly affected by each
other’s “conscious participation” (Greene, 2000, p. 125) and the enduring and vigilant acts
of “correspondence” (Ingold, 2013, p. 7).

Another layer of this study is our collective effort to add to the already existing conversations
on action research and the arts (Jokela, 2019; Jokela et al., 2015) through our co-living
inquiry, which is woven into our ongoing co-practice of walking and artmaking together but
apart. At its core, our work places emphasis on how “collaborative action research is an
important site for learning, not just for learning something, but learning about the complex
relations [emphasis added]” (Sumara & Davis, 1997, p. 405) between our bodies, the places
we walk in, and the kind of art we make while walking together but apart. In this sense,
walking and artmaking are intentional actions which highlight our attentiveness toward the
theoretical threads, imaginative potentials, and conceptual ways of (re)making these
complex and multifaceted relations. In addition to the conceptual and theoretical arguments
which we raise in this work, we would like to invite you to linger with the artful visual and
textual fragments that are woven throughout this article, as we believe they have the
potentiality to open up doors to comprehending emergent relations and themes from
distinctive and perhaps indirect vantage points. We have also created a website
(www.walkingwithwater.ca) as an alternative way to visualize the traces of our offerings in
our group chat so as to highlight the nuances of the processes of (re)making these multi-
layered relations from one person to another; nuances that may otherwise go unnoticed.

ACTION RESEARCH AND A/R/TOGRAPHY

[Sholeh Mahlouji]
First walk: May 3, 2021

It was like going on a group trip and I felt excited.

I packed an umbrella, a pair of arm warmers, a notebook, a 2B pencil (a pen may
not work on wet paper), a piece of rope (you never know), a paper bag for collecting
things, a mask, a mini sanitizer, an apple, a tea bottle, and a small fabric pouch with
seven almonds. I put on hand cream and a light perfume. I knew none of my co-
walkers will sense it, but it mattered!

We were going to move, see, hear, feel, think, share, and make meanings together. I
wondered how I could get prepared for this faraway companionship.

We believe that our positionalities in this research play an integral role in how we theorise
our practice. We position ourselves as artists and researchers and teachers and learners and
participants and companions. These roles are not perceived as already existing or of fixed
nature; rather, they are relationally constructed “within every single event” (Illeris &
Arvedsen, 2011, p. 57). Prior to embarking down the path of becoming art educators, we all
The Canadian Journal of Action Research, Volume 22, Issue 2 (2022), 91-108

studied visual arts in both Iran (our home country) and North America. Having a visual arts
background has made us more conscious and curious about the pedagogical potentials of
thinking, learning, and teaching through the process of artmaking. Within our
commonalities, we also strive to shed light on our differences in coming to know with
whom/what we share our world, with whom/what we learn about our world, and with
whom/what we make our world.

As such, our collective positionalities lead us to approach action research (see Clarke &
Bautista, 2017; Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014; Whitehead & McNiff, 2006) through valuing,
adopting, and embracing living inquiry, also known as living practice, (see Irwin, 2004; Leggo
et al., 2011; Luce-Kapler, 1997; Sumara & Carson, 1997) as our framework. We consider
living inquiry as an intersection between action research and a/r/tography (Irwin & de
Cosson, 2004, LeBlanc & Irwin, 2019; Springgay et al., 2008). In early literature on
a/r/tography, there is a tangible thread between a/r/tography and action research (see
Irwin, 2004). In these early works, action research is underlined as a way of creating
knowledge through the process of one’s inquiry, “one’s self and one’s relations to particular
communities” (Carson & Sumara, 1997, p. xvii; as cited in Irwin, 2004, p. 33). As such, we
take up action research as a deliberate act of “generating knowledge and taking actions based
on this knowledge” (Rowell et al., 2017, p. 85), along with “researching one’s own practice”
(Friedman, 2006, p. 27), and collective interpretations in our living inquiry.

Through this hermeneutic and postmodern disposition of action research and a/r/tography
(Irwin, 2004, p. 33), we propose that the concept of (re)making relations among our walking
bodies, the places we walk in, and our works of art in this study are continuously activated
through the entanglements of our collective living inquiry that are always in motion and far
from any predefinitions. In a way, the thread between action research and a/r/tography is
analogous to the interrelations amongst our co-living practices. Our work encourages
attending to co-emergent, co-experimental, and co-participatory ways of togetherness
through the intentional layering of our collective artistic practice, research, and teaching (see
Illeris, 2013). Through our walking and artmaking together but apart, we employ the theory
of togetherness from Jean Luc Nancy’s (1997) point of view which offers togetherness as a
“dynamic movement of being-in-common or being-with” through which being is theorised
as constantly renewed and relationally conceptualized (e.g., Nancy, 1997; 2000; as cited in
Illeris, 2013, p. 81). It is through this togetherness that we are able to embrace our co-living
inquiry as an ongoing effort toward activating the term “learning community” (Sullivan,
2017, p. 46).

Once in-relation to others, we do not seek to become one with one another; rather, we look
for ways of constructing “a network of relations” (La Jevic & Springgay, 2008, p. 70) with the
bodies and places around us to create new understandings in-relation to our multiplicity. It
is known that when a/r/tographers come together and form communities, they “engage in
shared inquiries, act as critical friends, articulate an evolution of research questions, and
present their collective evocative/provocative works to others” (Irwin, n.d.; as cited in
Sinner et al., 2002, p. E2). As such, methodologically, this paper advocates for


Figure 1. Screenshots of our group chat, walk #1

ways of coming up with our questions in each other’s company, as well as (re)living,
(re)envisioning, (re)imagining, (re)investigating, and (re)conceptualizing our questions
through our co-living inquiry.

WALKING WITH A PROPOSITION

[Marzieh Mosavarzadeh]
First walk: May 3, 2021

It was raining. I wrote a list of things I was planning to take with me on this walk.
Things that I want to ‘walk-with’.

In the middle of writing the list, I look through the living room window to get a sense
of the weather. The image of the rain drops on the window overlaid on the image of
the continuous grey cloud on the horizon lingers in my memory.

She texted me. Her words echoed excitement. She asked how she could get more
prepared for this walk. I replied that she probably is the most prepared among us.

On the train, I thought about how we agreed on walking alongside water and now
with the rain it was as if we were surrounded by water. Walking in water, walking
through water, walking with water, walking under water, walking alongside water.

The place that I planned to walk in was noticeably less crowded than usual. I
thought about how we cancel plans, dates, or picnics if it is raining. But for this walk
the rain made me even more curious, excited, and spontaneous, as if it was a wash
of paint on the habitual way of walking in this place; rain was a playful intervention
in my walk.

I got notifications on my cell phone. My co-walkers were in their chosen places to
start their walks. I shared with them that I have arrived. I intentionally stopped
walking. In the moments of stillness, I stared at the digital clock figures on my phone
getting closer to 2 pm; the time that we decided to start our walk together-apart.

It was 2 pm. I started walking.

We met online, since we lived in two different countries, Canada (Greater Vancouver), and
the United States (Chicago), to discuss the details of this invitation and potential ways of
walking together-apart. Eventually, the notion of together-apart became our core idea, a way
of utilizing the constraints and conditions of our learning community to empower our
curiosities. Living in different countries as an apparent limitation enabled us to come up with
a “proposition” (Cutcher & Irwin, 2018; Lee et al., 2019; Rousell et al., 2020; Truman &
Springgay, 2016) to walk and pause simultaneously and synchronously in different places
together yet apart.

We refined our walking proposition after two virtual meetings in which we discussed several
possible methods and ideas. Through this process of coming up with the proposition
together, we followed Cutcher and Irwin’s (2018) account on how walking propositions
evoke openness and offer various sensorial and perceptual entries that encourage one “to
explore again, to think again, to read again, as [one] linger[s], and respond[s]” (p. xix). In
their view, both visual and textual propositions can be perceived as “artistic spaces to pause,
to feel, to think differently, to engage with visual and textual ideas in new ways” (italic in
original, p. xix), while recognizing that there are no right or wrong answers. Instead, there
are multiple entries to defamiliarizing the familiar and familiarizing the unfamiliar through
having active engagements with propositions.

Propositions can become actualized through taking them up, following them, and attending
to them. For Manning (2013), “a proposition is immanent to the event, not external or
separate from the event, but co-constitutive” (Truman & Springgay, 2016, p. 260).
Propositions can reveal how events occur. However, the act of following and attending to
propositions is not carried out in a pre-planned, predefined, or predetermined manner. In
fact, it is deeply speculative, emergent, and inherent to the event (Truman & Springgay,
2016). Hence, propositions, as conceptual and creative forces, promote “thinking-in-action”
while considering and upholding their open-ended nature (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p.
89).

Our intention in following a proposition was to establish common ground to discover our
questions in movement together while apart. Here, we intentionally avoid sharing the exact
proposition, as we do not want it to be perceived as a recipe that we followed for our walks.
Instead, our aim is to highlight what walking with a shared proposition enabled us to explore.
As we reviewed the commonalities and differences among the places where we could
possibly walk in/with, we realized that all of us could potentially choose a place to walk that
is close to a body of water. Consequently, walking with water became another integral aspect
of our shared proposition. The notion of walking with bodies of water not only put forth a
description for the places we chose to walk in, it also provided us with an artistic and
conceptual framework to weave together our ways of co-walking, co-making, co-thinking,
and co-writing in relation to water. Through attending to our shared proposition, all of us
started walking at the exact same time, and a while later we momentarily stopped walking
to share something from our walks in the form of text, images (still or moving), or both in
our group chat.

Attending to a shared proposition invited us to ponder with each other’s shared images and
text as offerings, and to consider ways of taking these offerings to our walks literally and/or
conceptually and seeking ways of responding to each other. In other words, the proposition
encouraged us to become receptive and responsive to what happens when our offerings
come together in our group chat and to investigate ways of corresponding to each other’s
offerings through things and ideas that showed up as we kept walking and


artmaking. Our shared proposition enabled us to move and become moved in the company
of others; to become oriented, disoriented, and reoriented, together-apart. It made us aware
and awake to the relations that were continuously appearing and disappearing in-between
us, the places we walked in/with, and the traces that we documented through the process of
making art.
ACTIONS AND METAPHORS

[Yasaman Moussavi]
Second Walk: May 10, 2021

Walking in Chicago, Illinois, close to Lake Michigan, the body of water that was the
boundary between the United States and Canada, made me think about borders, in-
betweenness, and the distance between us. With that in mind, I started exploring
the connections between the three notions of distance, ground, and movement.
I decided to walk along Lake Michigan. It was a windy, sunny day in Chicago. As I
was waiting for my friends at the pier, I noticed animated shadows of trees, plants,
and blades of grass on the ground. When a cloud passed over the sun, suddenly, the
shadows disappeared. The ground looked very blank and empty. Everything froze
for a second. I looked at the sky. My eyes searched for the sun. A weak, narrow light
broke through a grey cloud; I followed the traveling light across the sky. Suddenly,
my phone buzzed, and I looked down. I was disrupted and mesmerized by a moving
shadow on the ground dancing and constantly moving with the rhythm of the wind
beside my shadow. I looked at my still cast shadow that was disrupted by the mobile
form that was moving and passing through the solid shadow. It constantly
transformed the form of my shadow. It moved here and there. I looked up to see
what was casting the shadow. It was a flag. The flag of Chicago moving against the
backdrop of the sky; right to left, with a continuous movement...
The blowing wind awakened me and alerted me to walk. This second collective
journey began with the accompaniment of wind, light, shadows, earth, grass…… and
my colleagues in Vancouver, Canada.
Our work considers the practice of walking with as an artistic and pedagogical action that
consists of metaphorical qualities, through which we attend to the dynamic
“correspondences” (Ingold, 2021) between the literal and poetical qualities of our relational
togetherness as a learning community. The notion of correspondence differs from the idea
of interaction. As Ingold puts it, correspondence is about “go[ing] together in a current of
time” (p. 9); it is about how lives “go along together” in the path of “unfolding and becoming,
simultaneously join[ing] together and differentiate[ing] themselves, one from another” (p.
9). Walking with, as both a physical and conceptual movement, is framed and understood as
an emergent and ongoing series of actions in our co-living inquiry which enabled us to come
up with metaphorical ways of lingering in our collaborative pedagogical correspondence
before, during, and after our walks in our group chat. In this sense, each step was both action
and metaphor. This twofold consideration generates a dynamic correspondence between the

actual and the poetic pedagogical potentialities which reside within the visual and textual
traces of our walking and artmaking process.

Following the above argument, in our co-living inquiry, we suggest that actions and
metaphors stem from the same roots; metaphors can be taken up as actions, and actions can
be perceived through metaphorical vantage points. This view encourages engaging in “a
dialogical thinking, relating, and perceiving” (Irwin, 2004, p. 30), which goes hand in hand
with Ingold’s notion of correspondence. In a way, we linger in the artistic and educational
space between actions and metaphors; to see the themes that emerged from our co-living
inquiry not just as one-dimensional learnings that have risen out of this study, but as multi-
faceted learning premises that inspired ways of becoming receptive, attentive, and
responsive at the intersection of action research and a/r/tography. In the following sections,
we look at four of the actions and metaphors that came to existence through following our
shared proposition and elaborate on how they guided us in the cultivation of knowledge
through our collective interpretations and the expanding of the transformative potential of
our learning community.

Walking with Hamm ‫ھﻢ‬
In Farsi “hamm1” as a prefix means with, together, coexisting, mutual, and shared.

We speak a mutual language (we are hamm-zabaan2), we are studying at the same university
(we are hamm-daaneshgaahi3), we are in the same graduate program (we are hamm-
reshteh4), we have been taking courses together at the university (we are hamm-kelaasi5),
we are working on this project together (we are hamm-kaar6), and we are going to take steps
alongside each other in this journey (we are hamm-ghadam7).

In our first walk, Sholeh suggested we name our group Hamm-raah8, which can literally be
translated as being on the same path or sharing the same path together. She intentionally
suggested a Farsi term, as there is a poetic component to the word hamm in the Farsi
language and literature that is lost when we move to Latin prefixes such as “co” or “com”,
which are the literal translations. Hamm-raahi (co-pathing or co-ambulating) as both action
and metaphor sets forth inclusivity and reciprocity within this communally valuable
educational research, where we learn and co-construct knowledge together, for changing
and being changed.

1
‫ ھﻢ‬
2
‫ ھﻢ زﺑﺎن‬
3
‫ ھﻢ داﻧﺸﮕﺎھﯽ‬
4
‫ ھﻢ رﺷﺘﮫ‬
5
‫ ھﻢ ﮐﻼﺳﯽ‬
6
‫ ھﻢ ﮐﺎر‬
7
‫ ھﻢ ﻗﺪم‬
8
‫ ھﻢ راه‬

In Farsi literature, co-pathing9, is a way of coming to know your companion through sharing
an actual or metaphorical path together. It is known that through sharing a path, one comes
to know their company deeply and authentically. In other words, hamm-raahi, is about being
an active, attentive, authentic, responsive, flexible, risk-taking, dialogic, and co-respondent
companion. Hamm-raahi as both action and metaphor puts forward our willingness to
become vulnerable through borrowing, lending, and letting go of our unfinished thoughts
and ideas in process. In some respects, this co-pathing led us to live in/with/through a
“constant attention and effort to resist the closures and unravel the certainties” (Kind, 2008,
p. 172) in our scholarship as co-inquirers.

Walking with Water

[Elmira Sarreshtehdari]
Second walk: May 10, 2021

I was running.
-Will I make it in time?

I had a destination in mind, but I was not sure if destination was the proper word
for the beginning of an experience. It could take away from the unexpectedness of
my journey.

Multiple notifications:
-I’m here.
-Same
-me too.

-Am I there yet? Should I also say I am here? But where is the “there or here” that I
need to be in right now?

-I’m getting there!

I asked myself: where does my walk start and where does it finish? Hasn’t it started
already?!

-Count me as arrived.

Mesmerized by the rapid invasion of the lights in motion, I stopped by the dark
stream of water traveling under the bridge. An abstract monochromatic black and
white entanglement.

Record. 17 seconds. Pause. Send.

9
‫ ھﻢ راھﯽ‬

Between the two countries, we chose to walk with bodies of water. In our hamm-raahi, water
has become our co-walker, co-maker, and hamm-raah. Moving with (through/along) water
provoked us to think through ways of making art in co-respondence to it. The blue of water
resonates with Solnit’s (2005) notion of “the blue of distance” (p. 29), and how the blue of
distance is a reminder of “the complexity of the terrain we traverse'' (p. 39). Here, water
becomes a common fluid path that connects our bodies, the places we walk in, and our
artmaking processes together. As such, we consider walking with water together-apart as
both an action and a metaphor for our closeness in distance. Water is an in-betweenness that
is infused with possibilities, intentionalities, uncertainties, reflexivity, and constant
movement (Irwin, 2003). It both melts and creates the distance between us.

Water is a boundless traveler. It flows between the air and the land. It shifts its shape
throughout its journey and is in constant movement and change. According to Rebecca Solnit
(2005) “there’s something fearful and mysterious about every body of water, murky water
that promises unseen things in unseen depths, clear water that shows you the bottom far
below as if you could fall into it, though the water would buoy you up in that strange space
neither air nor ground” (p. 106). As Pamela J. Mittlefehldt (2003) puts it, “the lexicon of
water itself invites clear connections between water and creativity: fluidity, reflectivity,
mutability” (p. 137). As we walk, we make intentional encounters with water through
lending our imagination to it, as well as borrowing inspiration from it. Through walking and
co-making with bodies of water, we are able to metaphorically make connections with our
co-walkers’ ways of thinking, learning, and existing in the world.

Each time we share the textual and visual traces of our walks in the group chat, we notice
ways in which walking with water can potentially create a common fluid ground amongst
our experiences as walkers and makers. In this view, water is a source of co-responding in
the middle; a slowed down process of sending and receiving and being with one another. The
rain alongside the waves helped us to proliferate our connections. We are becoming the
bodies of water, in relentless transformation and movement.

Walking with Group Chat
The group chat (visit www.walkingwithwater.ca), in Aoki’s words, is “our place of dwelling”
(Pinar, 2004, p. 49) which teaches us ways of “dwelling with others on earth under the sky”
(Pinar, 2004, p. 49). In our group chat, places and relations are weaved together conceptually
and metaphorically to further investigate ways of becoming better learners, and by
extension better teachers, in each other’s company.

We have embedded some snapshots of our group chat in this paper. The snapshots of our
visual and textual (Springgay et al., 2005) co-respondences do not aim to represent all the
actions done in this study. Instead, they serve as active openings to our critical and artistic
actions which potentially invite one to consider non-linear and no-representational ways of
articulating our shared scholarship (Thrift, 2007). In a/r/tographical works, openings are
known as holes, “cuts, cracks, slits, and tears, refusing comfort, predictability, and safety”
that seek to emphasize how knowledge resides not in uniformity but in the “holes of
existence” (Springgay et al., 2005, p. 905).

As part of our simultaneous walks, we have established a periodic rhythm of walking
together-apart, then pausing to share (an) artistic engagement(s) from the experience of our
walks in our online group chat, then taking one (or more) of the textual and/or visual
offerings literally and/or conceptually, and continuing to walk with it while seeking to
discover ways of co-responding to it through our continued artistic engagement(s). In each
walking study, we repeated these actions in three rounds. The group chat could also be
considered and analyzed as a “jointly lived event” (Kallo-Tavin, 2013, p. 342), and a living
artwork that constantly shifts and evolves throughout our shared hamm-raahi.

In the group chat, as our place of dwelling and contemplating, we are constantly inspired by
each other’s offerings while looking for mapping ways of connection that are perhaps
complementary to the offerings. The data gathered in this study brings about pedagogical
openings that are ephemeral, personal, fragmented, and slippery; openings that may be
easily missed, overlooked, or taken for granted. We pause and linger with these openings as
“a tangle of potential connections” (Stewart, 2007, p. 4) to explore reciprocal ways of
(re)making relations through weaving our ongoing path of becoming a community of art
educators, together-apart.

Walking with Relational Artmaking
Artmaking is an integral component to this study. We ask: What does artmaking while
walking do to us? How does artmaking bring us together? What does artmaking in co-
respondence to each other’s artmaking processes enable us to learn? What does artmaking
together-apart do to our process of collaborative living inquiry? Jon Anderson (2004b)
discusses the collaborative knowledge-making that emerges from dialogues during walking,
and explains that dialogical actions while walking in place carry the potential to construct
shared non-linear meanings and generate an educative space for learning. Resonant with
this argument, our collective co-responding dialogues took place through sharing traces of
our artmaking in the group chat, and in a way, impacted our way of perceiving our
surroundings, and unsettled our habitual ways of coming to know the places we inhabit. The
dialogic process between our co-living inquiry keeps becoming manifested through our
artmaking practices in our walks.

We also attend to Ingold’s notion of “the art of inquiry” (2013), which highlights how “one
makes through thinking and […] thinks through making” (p. 6). There is a form of knowledge
that grows through one’s willingness and openness “to try things out and see what happens''
(Ingold, 2013, p. 7). Ingold (2013) argues that the art of inquiry is unfolded along with the
lives of those who are involved in it and “are touched by it” (p. 9), while intentionally refusing
any form of representing or describing the world. Instead, the art of inquiry invites one to
“set up a relation with the world” (Ingold, 2013, p. 7). It is an invitation to find artful ways of
co-responding with the world through being in-relation with it; “to follow the movements of
beings and things” (Italic in original, Ingold, 2013, p. 7). In our co-living inquiry, artmaking
became an indirect and non-linear way of making


dialogues with our co-walkers. We made art with the intention of sharing it with our co-
walkers, while not knowing what kind of connections our artmaking would make with our
co-walkers’ artmaking processes. As we knew we would eventually share traces of
artmaking with our co-walkers, the art we made naturally took the form of offerings that
would invite our co-walkers to see, feel, and listen to the world around them through our
perception: come and perceive the world through my eyes, my ears, my mind, my heart, my
touch, my steps.

Lingering with each other’s artworks brings about a collective means of becoming
pedagogical (Leggo & Irwin, 2013) through which meaning emerges in the process of
exchanging our unfinished ideas by sharing traces of our knowledge in the group chat as our
place of dwelling. This ontological way of knowing challenges the normative ways of
understanding and creates new potential for valuing learning in each other’s company. The
images and text that we created in this collaborative walking study, and recorded in our chat,
act as the remnants of our transient collective experiences. Here, our emphasis is not just on
the production of the data we shared; rather we value the process of thinking and learning
that emerges in our relational artmaking, which “transforms the self and others in the
process of becoming” (LeBlanc & Irwin, 2019, p. 14). This provocative way of thinking during
individual and collective artmaking demonstrates how the movement of material and digital
creations generates a movement in our thoughts. In this sense, our artmaking goes beyond
the representation of the objects, events, and relations surrounding us; it reveals the unseen
communications and relations between us, our materials, and the places we walk in/with.
Our relational artmaking enhances invitations, considerations, directions, and meaning-
making in-between our shared correspondences.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Through our arts-based co-living-inquiry, as a thread between action research and
a/r/tography, we embarked on a walking study, shoulder to shoulder, yet miles apart from
one another. We felt a strong collective connection through becoming engaged in the
relational and reciprocal practice of co-walking, pausing, and co-responding by means of
making art. Our connection extended in distance, from Vancouver to Chicago, and Chicago to
Vancouver. Despite not being physically together, “our capacity to imagine allow[ed] us to
give shape and direction to how we, as species, learn from one another and transform our
experience” (Neilsen, 2008, p. xv) in this pedagogical and artful Hamm-raahi (Farsi word that
roughly translates to co-pathing/co-ambulating). We experienced our bonding and ways of
becoming a learning community through attending to each other’s art making processes in
our shared group chat as a place of dwelling that encouraged us to linger with our co-
walkers’ ways of making encounters with their surroundings while walking. In this sense,
we felt as if our moving bodies were indirectly paralleled, attuned, and linked in a learning
community, similar to the bodies of water we walked along. Our collective living practice of
walking and artmaking generated shared meanings and knowing. It created conditions for
us to move with a shared rhythm and pace together-apart, and it let us embrace the unknown
possibilities, “where meanings reside in the simultaneous use of language, images, materials,
[and] situations” (Irwin & Springgay, 2008, p. xix-xxvi).


The emergent themes of walking with hamm, walking with water, walking with relational
artmaking, and walking with a group chat, simultaneously and synchronously in four
different locations, reminded us that knowledge cannot exist in isolation; rather, knowledge
emerges through the co-respondences and interconnections of our actions in relation to each
other. Within this relationality, there is an awareness toward a mode of “sense-making that
brings us [as the bodies involved in this study] together in community” (Greene, 2000, p. 3)
through our critical and artistic actions. It is through the weaving of the textual and visual
traces of our walks (also known as the generated data in this study), that we underline the
potential ways of (re)making relations as a “transformative potential of a learning
community” (Sullivan, 2017, p. 46). In this sense, our work advocates for staying and moving
with and through our questions as an everyday commitment together in community, through
which we refuse to settle with predictability and predeterminism in our scholarship (Greene,
2000). Further, our co-living inquiry enables us “to stop and think'' about what we are doing
(Arendt, 1978, p. 4) as we weave our co-walking, co-making, and co-responding actions, “to
become different, to find [our artistic and intellectual] voices, and to play participatory and
articulate parts in a community of making” (Greene, 2000).

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:
_______________________________

Marzieh Mosavarzadeh is a PhD candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
at The University of British Columbia, specializing in art education. Her a/r/tographic
research explores artful, pedagogical, and speculative ways of Making-Place through the
artistic practice of walking. Marzieh holds both her MFA and BFA in visual arts (studio).

Sholeh Mahlouji received her M.Ed degree in art education from The University of British
Columbia. Her research focuses on living an aesthetic life, the practice of making, and the
experience of being a maker. She holds a bachelor's degree in graphic design as well as a
master’s degree in illustration from University of Tehran.

Yasaman Moussavi is a second year PhD student in the Department of Curriculum and
Pedagogy studying art education. As an artist, researcher, and teacher, her research explores
socio-cultural in-betweenness as a capacity and disposition to participate in the process
of meaning-making across cultures and languages. Yasaman holds an MFA and a BFA in
visual arts.

Elmira Sarreshtehdari is an Iranian artist, art researcher, and instructor based in
Vancouver, Canada. As a second year PhD student in art education at The University of
British Columbia, Elmira is interested in the ways in which the performative and embodied
act of participating in art making activates liminal spaces of one’s encounters with the world
and how these encounters provide a fertile space for probing, finding, making, and learning.

_______________________________

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Journal of Action Research

WALKING AND ARTMAKING TOGETHER-APART

ACTIONS AND METAPHORS

Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press.

Thrift, N. (2007). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. Routledge.

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