Phil Smith

Mark Powers

Filip Sablik

Shawn McManus

Marco Castiello

Rest

Claire Hind

Helen Billinghurst

A curated collection of papers, provocations, and actions from the 'Walking's New Movements' conference held at the University of Plymouth in November 2019. The experience and variety of walking practices have never been so broad, relevant, or unpredictable. Walking Bodies charts some of their very latest developments. Editors Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind, and Phil Smith put out a call for artists, activists, academics, radical walkers, and psychogeographers to discuss, perform, and share their experiences of current walking cultures. In these essays, provocations, artworks, and documentations, new terrains emerge and diverse energies and thinkings reflect the huge response to the initial call and the demand for tickets to the conference. Walking Bodies evidences anxieties, exclusions, and gradual but major changes of direction for walking arts, towards more considered and embodied practices that re-navigate their terrains and challenge assumptions about trajectories through the unhuman world. Here are the beginnings of differently negotiated, shared, provoked, and provocative ambulations.

Papers, Provocations, Actions from Walking's New Movements, the Conference

Walking Bodies

An email conversation between a noted poet.walker and a noted performance.walker about being temporarily prevented from walking "e;normally"e; by illness/surgery. Their reflections cover cultural perceptions and personal values associated with walking, personal anecdotes, philosophical reflection, practices for daily-life and an alphabet of falling.

A Conversation

Walking Stumbling Limping Falling

"The world is on the move; seas rise, villages are emptied, coastlines are redrawn, deserts spread to the suburbs, snowfall increases and lost battlefields re-emerge. Only soap operas give any impression of permanence. Traditional fortresses like home, dwelling and nation are increasingly exposed as porous, fabricated and expensive things. The ways are opening for a pervasive and benevolent nomadism, a new art of living, on both grand and individuated scales." In this lovely photo-essay, Phil Smith - playwright, walk-performance artist (Wrights & Sites and Crabman) and author (Mis-Guides, Mythogeography, On Walking and Counter-Tourism) draws our attention to a "chorus of surprises" "yelling from the sides of the road like particularly unruly spectators at a parade". Focusing on signs, simulacra, objects and places that prove to be more, less or other than what they seem (all illustrated throughout the book) the author encourages us to look afresh at our quotidian urban and rural surroundings to see what lies just beneath the surface. Once identified, these absurd, empty, recalcitrant enchantments can transform the way we live and think and occupy our inner and outer landscapes. Urging us to "hypersensitize ourselves to the full blast of contemporary landscape's intensity", Phil Smith explains how to "let our tentacles unfurl" in order to explore and see the world around us in all its glory.

Signposts to a New Nomadism

Enchanted Things

Law, policy, and practice in the United States has long held that students with disabilities - including those with intellectual disabilities - have the right to a free and appropriate public education, in a non-restrictive environment. Yet very few of these students are fully included in general education classrooms. Educational systems use loopholes to segregate students; universities regularly fail to train teachers to include students; and state regulators fail to provide the necessary leadership and funding to implement policies of inclusion. Whatever Happened to Inclusion? reports on the inclusion of students with intellectual disabilities from national and state perspectives, outlining the abject failure of schools to provide basic educational rights to students with significant disabilities in America. The book then describes the changes that must be made in teacher preparation programs, policy, funding, and local schools to make the inclusion of students with intellectual disabilities a reality.

The Place of Students with Intellectual Disabilities in Education

Whatever Happened to Inclusion?

Phil Smith's walking tour of East Anglia matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe.

A guide to going beyond wandering around looking at stuff 

On Walking... and Stalking Sebald

Every place has it stories. Sometimes those stories get tarmacked and concreted over. This is nowhere more true than in Milton Keynes. Writer and walker Phil Smith has walked Milton Keynes to find its missing stories. Here he gives Milton Keynes a new myth of itself. Readers can take the book onto the streets and walk or cycle K's journey.

A Walkable Novel

The Mk Myth

This is not the first walk in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald, whose The Rings of Saturn was an account of his walk round Suffolk 20 years ago. But Phil Smith's own walk soon becomes quite as extraordinary as Sebald's and he matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe. On one level On Walking describes an actual, lumbering walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in Dunwich, Lowestoft, Southwold, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo, Bungay and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs, white deer and alien trails. On a second level it sets out a unique kind of walking that the author has been practising for many years and for which he is quietly famous. It's a kind of walking that burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and disgruntlement of the everyday. Those who try it report that their walking [and their whole way of seeing the world] is never quite the same again. And the Suffolk walk described in this book is an exemplary walk, a case study - this is exactly how to do it. And on a third level, On Walking is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, jouissance, dancing, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, performance, architecture, the nature of grief, pilgrimage, World War II, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, synchronicity, somatics and the Underchalk.

On Walking

Practical Cryptography in Java

Binary and Hexadecimal Calculations

A dark novel set in the 'Lovecraft Villages' of Devon, spanning several thousand years, from the time it was occupied by the Dumnonii, through the 19th century to its more contemporary occupation by holiday park dwellers, marketing professionals, doggers and other romantics.

Bonelines

Peter Greer

A compelling call to carry Christ's love and mercy to families in poverty around the world This eminently practical book by two leading experts on poverty alleviation offers a clear plan to help ordinary Christ-followers translate their compassion into thoughtful action. Authors Peter Greer and Phil Smith draw on their personal experiences to discuss proven solutions for effectively alleviating poverty. Created to Flourish examines the pitfalls of traditional approaches and outlines a new model of economic development aimed at breaking the cycle of dependency. Through discipleship-based savings groups and small loans, families in poverty are employing their God-given talents to provide for their families and serve their communities. With photographs showcasing the dignity of clients from around the HOPE International network, this book provides straightforward guidance for individuals and groups eager to carry God's justice, mercy, and compassion throughout our world.

How Employment-Based Solutions Help Eradicate Poverty

Created to Flourish

"To dive into Phil Smith's writing - a dazzling blend of poetry, ethnography, social critique, and gleefully mad wordplay - can feel more like taking a psychedelic drug than like reading the work of a distinguished scholar. And yet, a distinguished scholar he is. For two decades, he has been a bold trailblazer and innovator in the realms of education, disability studies, mad studies, neurodiversity, and poetry, and in exploring how these realms can interconnect and inform one another Each chapter of this book is a poetic thought experiment that shreds cultural norms and assumptions, points the way toward new creative directions in scholarship, and might make your brain explode." - Nick Walker Author, educator, and neurodiversity scholar

Moving Towards a Mad Poetics

Writhing Writing

This is the gloriously funny and endlessly fascinating account of the author's recent journey on foot across the north of England in the footsteps of a man who made the same journey 100 years ago with a dog trouve called Pontiflunk.

Mythogeography

Alyson, Hallett

An email conversation between a noted poet.walker and a noted performance.walker about being temporarily prevented from walking 'normally' by illness/surgery. Their reflections cover cultural perceptions and personal values associated with walking, personal anecdotes, philosophical reflection, practices for daily-life and an alphabet of falling.

This is the definitive guide to Counter-Tourism, except that Counter-Tourism has a low opinion of definitive guides. So it's more like an equivocal misguide. It includes dozens of detailed Counter-Tourism 'tactics' plus the thinking behind Counter-Tourism, its academic and philosophical background, and its roots in film, music and literature.It also features more than 200 colour photographs, gathered by the author in the course of his counter-tourist driftings.In addition, Part 2 of the Handbook has ideas on how to extend the tactics into interventions that can be planned and performed in heritage sites. And Part 3 goes on to suggest open 'infiltrations' that can be used by heritage site managers themselves to reinvent their own sites. Alongside this there's a photo-essay on using the tactics, and a full bibliography.

A handbook for those who want more from heritage sites than a tea shoppe and an old thing in a glass case

Counter-Tourism: The Handbook

the world’s first walkable novel - set in Milton Keynes

A walkable novel

Phil Smith embodies in a modern fairy tale his preoccupations with the inner and outer worlds of psychogeography - bringing them together to describe the possibilities that offer themselves up to us when we live and walk and dream without our usual blinkers.

Alice's Dérives in Devonshire

World of Fact: The novel draws on the author's longtime exploration of psychogeography, Situationism, drift and derive, and fleshes out his practice of mythogeography through the curious mind of a young girl exploring the gaps between her parents' respective worlds and her own; between the city that she sees and the one that she finds when she walks out into it; between the layers of possible experience. It's a quite remarkable journey for anyone interested in those subjects, in what it's like to upgrade (whether as an adolescent or as an adult), or in the tears in the fabric of things that we mostly manage to ignore. World of Dream: &quote;Can a city fall to bits one day and put itself back together the next? I think so, but I am crazy. So why should you believe me? Dad says it's OK to be mad. Bad is the problem. And the city is bad. I saw its badness. For one day its glass was everywhere like broken teeth after a fight between lions and sharks. Big buildings leaning on each other like drunk dinosaurs. The new shopping centre was a cave full of smoke. And everyone was frightened of each other. But I wasn't frightened. I could see that between the pieces of glass were shining gaps. And in the biggest building were passageways and tunnels and I could see that that was the good city. The city of holes and caves. Between the bad was the good, but only if you knew that before you looked. A little while later - I'm not sure how long because that was when I was ill again - the bigger cities burned for real; life had a really bad dream. By then, though, I knew that the cities were always ruins, no matter what they looked like. And that you had to know how to see fire to find warmth.&quote;

Phil Smith

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