Walking Together Challenging Philosophical and Ethnographic Paradigms from the Ground Up

Part 1: Paradigms of Walking 1. Peripatetic Traditions: A History of a History of Walking 2. Walking Together in Philosophy of Action  Part 2: Grounded Encounters: Walking Together in Anthropology 3. Walking Together as a Research Method 4. Walking Together in Racialized Public Space  Part 3: Critical Turns: Walking Together as a Paradigmatic Social Experience 5. Walking Together in Difference: Critical Phenomenology and Nonideal Social Ontology  6. Conclusion 

Biography

Anna Bloom-Christen is an anthropologist with a focus on research methodology. Her work explores how individuals articulate togetherness, how attention evolves through shared action, and how knowledge is transmitted through embodied participation. She studied Philosophy and Anthropology in Basel and St Andrews and earned her PhD with a dissertation on racialized embodied experience of South African public space. Her postdoctoral project Divided Attention investigates attentional habits in divided societies. She also works with first-generation university students, engaging both with their understandings of philosophy and with how they experience its teaching and institutional culture.

Walking is never neutral; it’s power in motion. Bloom-Christen’s book accessibly demonstrates walking as an embodied and relational method shaped by inequality, race, and history. Resisting idealized universals, she embraces friction and difference to reveal walking as a means to navigate contested public space and build global forms of social theory.

– Sophie Oldfield, Professor, City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Professor Emeritus, Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town

Anthropology and philosophy rarely walk together as intimately or with as much mutual awareness as they do in this beautifully crafted and exceptionally clear trajectory of fieldwork in philosophy and reciprocally, philosophy of ethnographic fieldwork.

– Michael Lambek, University of Toronto, author of The Ethical Condition and of Concepts and Persons

In this moving book, Anna Bloom-Christen invites us to walk alongside her to perceive the complexity unfolding through the deceptively simple act of walking together, particularly in spaces of inequality. She forges a dialogue between an anthropology attuned to relational proximity and a philosophy grounded in movement.

– Pedro Tabensky, Rhodes University, author of Camus and Fanon on the Algerian Question: An Ethics of Rebellion

Anna Bloom-Christen seduces us into the magic of walking together as a research method in anthropology and core paradigm in phenomenology in this lucid, expert, and accessible tour through the history, theory and practice of walking. Her embodied immersion in hypersegregated post-apartheid urban South Africa illuminates walking together as a means to a critical engagement with difference and power and brings a much-needed grounded critique to abstract models of shared action and collaborative ethnography.  Delightfully and generously written, Walking Together is a gift to teaching theory and method in anthropology, philosophy, and urban studies.

– Laurie Kain Hart, Professor of Anthropology, UCLA

Moving across both disciplinary and geographical terrain, Bloom-Christen shows how walking together is not an innocent matter of strolling through places but one loaded with differences. She presents a work of rare intellectual force covering both movement and walking as a topic of inquiry and a method for critical discussion.

– Susanne Ravn, Professor of Movement, Culture and Society, University of Southern Denmark