Walter Benjamin As Inspiration - How “Go Alongs” with Children Become Empirically Based Miniatures

While methods of data collection develop rapidly in spatial and mobile research with children, ways to analyze, write and present these research findings are less frequently discussed. Especially the diversity of data from “go alongs” (Kusenbach, 2016) like pictures, memos, audios, transcripts and the own experience of the researcher might be challenging to bring into a linear text. Facing these questions in her dissertation Time to walk alone- a comparative study of the transition to CIM in Berlin and New York, Tabea was moved and inspired by Walter Benjamins sensitive Miniatures and their specific literary form. Benjamin wrote his Miniatures following the idea to map his biography in 1932 he “...deliberately called to mind those images which, in exile, are most apt to waken homesickness: images of childhood” (Benjamin, 2006). But in order to limit the effects of this ‘inoculation’, he chose a way of distancing himself by giving an “insight into the irretrievability-not the contingent biographical but the necessary social irretrievability-of the past” (Benjamin, 2006). Tabea aims to show how well phenomenological roots and data collection on the move might fit together in order to create and analyze unique and at the same time context specific perspectives on space. Within her presentation she shows Empirically based miniatures, which, written in a step-by-step process as short and dense texts, enable readers to explore a broad range of experiences interplaying the everyday movement of children through in- and outdoor spaces of their neighborhoods.

Benjamin, Walter (2006): Berlin childhood around 1900. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Kusenbach, Margarethe (2016): The Go-Along Method. In: Schwanhäußer, Anja (Hrsg.): Sensing the city. A companion to urban anthropology. Basel: Birkhäuser. S. 154–158.