Walking is never neutral; its power in motion. Bloom-Christens 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
