Walking Unsettling Depremacy: A Preliminary Proposition for Questioning the Right to Go Anywhere. (February 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Decter, Leah
• Is Part Of: Qualitative inquiry. Volume 28:Number 2(2022)
• Page Start: 187
• Page End: 197
• Publication Date: 2022-02
• Subjects: unsettling -- walking -- research-creation -- settler responsibility -- critical positionality; Social sciences -- Methodology -- Periodicals; Social sciences -- Research -- Periodicals; 300.72
• DOI: 10.1177/10778004211042359
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1077-8004

Abstract

As an expression of the "right to go anywhere, " walking or hiking in settler states, particularly on recreational infrastructures such as the Trans Canada Trail, can be understood to support a form of white settler emplacement that is contingent on Indigenous dis placement. These infrastructures and activities also contribute to assumptions of settler-state sovereignty over Indigenous lands common to the contemporary settler colonial project. In this article, I consider these conditions alongside arts-based methodologies I have developed from a critical white settler perspective to reveal, challenge, and subvert them. A discussion of my video, l i s t e n, demonstrates how one such methodology, unsettling depremacy, critically contends with specific interactions with place. I conclude by proposing walking unsettling depremacy as methodology in development that can be deployed to interfere with the ways white settler walking and its recreational infrastructures assert colonial claim.