Territory and temporality on the university campus

The walk between my desk and a research fieldwork site on the ‘other side’ of the university campus takes me about fifteen minutes. I take this route across campus regularly to conduct fieldwork at one of Cardiff University’s new campus buildings, while employed as a fixed-term lecturer. Moving among the rhythms of city and campus, I navigate various circulations of (im)permanency through writing-with a constrained creative-academic practice called ‘100s’ – brief moments described in one-hundred-word multiples. I describe how the dynamics of academia that I sought to examine at the walk’s destination site were internalized, how my subjectivity shaped the situation of the study. Tensions between ephemerality and permanency, rapidity and stasis, territory and transience, played out not only within the physical and political evolution of Higher Education, but were also refracted through my fledgling steps within it. The chapter highlights that both writing and walking have doubled function – both make thoughts move.