Concept-ing with the gift: Walking method/ologies in posthumanist research

This article takes off from a project entitled Get Up and Move! which used walking as a methodology to envisage research in higher education beyond the human and outside individual, instrumental and competitive codings. The Get Up and Move! project activated new research possibilities for walking as an attentive, situated, emplaced and embodied practice of posthuman thinking, doing and becoming; it experimented with walking’s posthuman generativity as a relational and processual methodology; and it aimed to be inventive, experimental, less elitist, and more inclusive. The project’s posthuman orientation was inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of sympoiesis as a human-nonhuman doing-making-thinking-creating together, which is outlined in the first two parts of the article. This remainder of the article conceptually entangles this initial framing with/in a further process of concept-ing, which designates a theoretical-creative-speculative doing with the concept to unfold its ongoing potentialities and push its inventive mobilities. The concept we do our concept-ing with is the concept of the gift. Working from Mauss’s theorisation of the gift, we practice concept-ing as a means to trace new movements, possibilities and imaginaries for walking sympoietically. Our concept-ings pursue van der Tuin and Verhoeff’s (2022, 3) suggestion that concepts are “productive and experimental ‘doings,’ enmeshed in practice rather than fixed, retrospective labels for things.”