Walking As Method: Smell-Walks, Sensory Ethnography, and the Reimagining of Method In Visual Sociology

This session takes the walk as a site for reimagining method in visual sociology and beyond. When walking, smelling, and listening become ways of doing research rather than its objects, the moving body becomes an instrument that registers the olfactory, sonic, haptic, and atmospheric dimensions of urban life that a sight-led method leaves out. We take the smell-walk as a concrete opening onto this multisensory, synaesthetic ethnography (Pink 2015; Springgay & Truman 2018).

We are especially interested in what walking can do for historical-sociological questions. As a quotidian mobility, walking opens spatial semiotics, interaction, and place-making to inquiry (Krase & Shortell 2021), while its multisensory texture gives historical sociologists of urban landscapes and ethnic places the situated, embodied context that documents cannot supply—material for the constructive argumentation that historical sociology and ethnography share (Pacewicz 2022).

Reimagining method means denaturalising walking rather than romanticising it. The flâneur's leisured anonymity was a privilege; walking is always differentiated by gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability—from stigmatised wandering to walking as labour or migration under duress. We therefore treat method as something to be remade reflexively, and ask what it means to rework it from the standpoint of Korean and other non-Western visual scholarship rather than importing an Anglophone canon wholesale.

We welcome empirical, theoretical, and practice-based papers that experiment with walking and sensory methods, reorder the sensory hierarchy beyond the visual, and translate movement into visual and audiovisual form.