What is The Walk & Talk Series?
I was taking a walk,
(I thought)
but the walk
had second thoughts.1
The Walk & Talk Series is an interdisciplinary podcast launched in 2021, dedicated to rendering scholarly work in cultural studies tangible and audible. Our episodes feature researchers in different career stages, who embark on walking interviews that lead us into — and through — environments connected to their research.
Ecocriticism has famously been characterized as occupying scholars who “would rather be hiking”2. Perhaps conveniently, recent critical ideas formulated in new materialism(s) have highlighted the affective potentials which lie in our bodily embeddedness in the more-than-human world. Moreover, complex — and controversial — conceptions of ‘nature,’ ‘society,’ or ‘culture’ are enmeshed in a myriad of practical, discursive, and political processes of meaning-making. We believe that their careful unraveling or deconstruction can take place by talking and walking into, about, and through them.
Therefore, The Walk & Talk Series puts theory into practice: It complements intellectual discussions with the environmentally-conscious experience of material surroundings. The aim is to provide a novel and embodied approach to communicating academic output.
Each episode invites listeners to explore the intersections between theories, particular themes, research fields, or current projects by engaging in lively conversations. By recognizing ‘the world out there’ as a protagonist in our recordings, our project seeks to inspire an attentive interaction with our environment.
So, come along and start this journey with us!
Who is behind The Walk & Talk Series?
The project has been designed and is edited by an interdisciplinary group of doctoral researchers based at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Giessen University in Germany. These ‘walkers’ are:
Liza Bauer
a critical animal studies scholar with an activist spirit and a constant yearning for consolidating scholarly work with her passion for spending time outdoors – preferably side by side with other animals.
Portfolio
Twitter
Max Bergmann
film and media scholar, interested in digital and analog ecologies and networks, in their material and abstract forms.
Portfolio
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4361-5518
Lukas Helbich
A historian of knowledge taking journeys around the islands where economics is grounded and goes aground.
Twitter
Benjamin Roers
historian: mostly busy with people and animals in the circus. Aside: this and that. Furthermore: Another world is possible!
Portfolio
Twitter
ResearchGate
Stefano Rozzoni
an aspiring expert on Virginia Woolf, an incurable reader of pastoral poetry, he dreams of living in a parallel universe where mobile phones have not yet been invented.
Portfolio
Facebook
Florentine Schoog
a materialist with a penchant for the discursive. She investigates ‘the environment’ and its governmentality complex by watching one documentary after another.
Portfolio
Academia
Notes
1 Ian Dudley: “Please Take Care of the Valuable Livestock”, December 21, 2017. In: Zoomorphic, Issue 9, URL: http://zoomorphic.net/2017/12/please-take-care-of-the-valuable-livestock/.
2 P. Michael Cohen: “Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism under Critique”. In: Environmental History Vol. 9 (2004), No. 1, pp. 9-36, p. 12.