SYLVIA H JANICKI

Reflexive Data Walks

Cultivating Feminist Ethics through Place-Based Inquiry

Can walking serve as a method to foster reflexivity by enabling designers to go beyond the material dimensions of the built environment to account for its relational qualities inclusive of its social, political, and cultural specificities? Walking has been used as a method to study different aspects of place. At the same time, feminist and postcolonial philosophies of knowledge have emphasized embodiment and reflexivity as central maxims of knowing that is key to advancing social justice. In this project, we put forward a method for cultivating reflexivity through three integrated strategies centered on walking: 1) starting with the home through a guided exercise based on the principle that the personal is political; 2) engaging boundaries as the organizing theme of individual data walks in the city foregrounding relationality and positionality; 3) using data creation and visualization as a culminating activity to express and synthesize experiences of walking and use them as a starting point for conversational and collaborative understanding. Through participatory workshops, we examine how this method works toward facilitating collective reflexivity.