For my capstone project at Brown University in 2016, I organized a series of 9 walks in which small groups gathered together, taking a route of their own devising in the area on and around Brown’s campus, and discussed space and our experiences of it along the way.

​

In my Independent Concentration, Spatial Studies, I considered how people experience physical space, and how it affects them. Place is a rich text that we must read and navigate in order to live our lives. For many of us, space is reduced to little more than a backdrop for the rest of life. However, every single place contains many stories and power dynamics. Places are the containers for memories and personal geographies that make us who we are. We all have different relationships to the places we occupy, but rarely do we have avenues in our daily lives through which to critically examine those relationships.

For my capstone, I wanted to take advantage of a special circumstance of college; peers inhabiting the same physical space. What did these spaces mean to us, and how could we share those meanings with each other? I chose group walking, instead of interviews or mapping activities, as the medium for these conversations. Walking is something we do every day, and can be used intentionally as a tool to examine our own experiences.

​

Below is a zine documenting the first walk in this series.