Walking with a/r/tography: An orientation

This chapter brings together visual arts educators working on an international research project titled Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational Storytelling Across Historical and Cultural Routes of Signifcance. Emphasizing a collaboratory model that fuses concepts of collaboration and laboratory, the chapter underscores how a/r/tography facilitates participatory, collaborative, and cooperative knowledge creation and mobilization. The original partnership included seven sites with three sites reaching across Canada (Vancouver, Regina, and Montreal) and one in each of Australia, China, Japan, and Spain. Since then, many other international sites have joined the Mapping A/r/tography network. Each collaboratory location has spent the past three years designing artistic and pedagogical actions, alongside place-based philosophical perspectives, artistic traditions, contemporary artistic and educational initiatives, and distinctive engagements with their local communities of practice (Irwin, 2008). This has meant that the participatory, dialogue-oriented structure of collaboratories has fostered cultural and transcultural idea exchanges within and among our international network. Ultimately, this has led to many complicated conversations (Pinar, 2012). This chapter shares one of those conversations that discusses how walking is an important method for thinking through how we might engage with a/r/tography across all sites and among all those involved in the project.