Walking, well-being and community: racialized mothers building cultural citizenship using participatory arts and participatory action research

Committed to exploring democratic ways of doing research with racialized migrant women and taking up the theme of “what citizenship studies can learn from taking seriously migrant mothers’ experiences” for theory and practice this paper explores walking as a method for doing participatory arts-based research with women seeking asylum, drawing upon research undertaken in the North East of England with ten women seeking asylum. Together we developed a participatory arts and participatory action research project that focused upon walking, well-being and community. This paper shares some of the images and narratives created by women participants along the walk, which offer multi-sensory, dialogic and visual routes to understanding, and suggests that arts-based methodologies, using walking biographies, might counter exclusionary processes and practices, generate greater knowledge and understanding of women’s resources in building and performing cultural citizenship across racialized boundaries; and deliver on social justice by facilitating a radical democratic imaginary.