Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
Let’s go outdoors, take a walk, and think some new thoughts. Our research and teaching commitments mobilize walking as an outward-facing pedagogy, reaching beyond the academy to engage not only university students but also City employees, community members, and retired seniors, in interdisciplinary, intergenerational, cross-cultural knowledge co-creation. Walking the Talk: Climate Moves, a nationally endowed project, centers the imperative of renewing relationships—both human and more-than-human—in responding to the climate justice imperatives outlined in the Paris Agreement, the legally binding international treaty that 196 nations signed on to in 2016. Walking the Talk activates ambulatory research and teaching as methods and modes of situated listening, layering knowledges on the land, across disciplines and communities, embodying learning and facilitating relational connections. Our ambulatory pedagogy relies on duration and repetition. Working with mirror lab populations in Newton, Kansas, USA and Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, we offer iterative, experiential opportunities for intergenerational participant groups to walk repeatedly with different knowledge keepers. The co-construction of knowledge and the relationships to place and others that flow from these activities also strengthen community resilience. Our conference presentation will particularly highlight learnings so far from walking with City of Edmonton employees as they aspire to make every decision a climate decision. We will discuss not only the outward turn of this pedagogy, its successes and challenges, but also the necessity of moving outside of expected parameters of learning as we move outdoors to make climate moves, together.
Dr. Sheena Wilson is co-founder of the International Petrocultures Research Group, which gave rise to the field of Energy Humanities. She is Principal Investigator for Just Powers, an interdisciplinary, multimedia, and university-community research project focused on climate justice and just transition. Her forthcoming monograph is entitled New Logics for the Climate Crisis. She is Professor of Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Campus Saint-Jean.
Dr. Rachel Epp Buller is an artist and art historian who researches listening as artistic practice, as embodied through walking, drawing, stitching, and other slow modes of bodily attunement. As a 2022 Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Alberta, she embarked on a project of listening through 120 days of winter walking in the North Saskatchewan River Valley, whose outcomes took shape in prints, laser engravings, artist books, creative texts, and an 8-channel sound piece. She is Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College (KS/US).
9:30 pm - 11:00 pm
Wednesday 19th November, 2025