The Humidity of Living: Walking, Permeability, and Care as Embodied Research Practice

This visual-textual essay traces walking as an embodied research methodology situated at the intersection of autoethnography, material feminist theory, and practices of care. Drawing on nursing-informed sensorial attunement and site-responsive observation, the work follows a pedestrian route through urban and coastal landscapes to examine how bodies, infrastructures, atmospheres, and more-than-human matter co-produce perception. Through photographic documentation and poetic narrative, the project foregrounds permeability as a methodological stance—one that resists detached observation in favor of affective, relational, and trans-corporeal engagement. Concepts from Ingold’s correspondence, Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, Mol’s logic of care, and Benner’s embodied expertise are woven into lived encounters with decay, weather, informal domestic arrangements, and architectural collapse. Rather than positioning place as a static backdrop, the essay situates the city as an active participant in knowledge production, shaping and reshaping the researcher through ongoing contact. Ultimately, this work argues for walking as a care-based inquiry practice that attends to vulnerability, material entanglement, and the ethical implications of sensing-with place. By embracing slowness, saturation, and bodily receptivity, the project proposes an expanded understanding of community art education as an ecological, relational, and responsive practice of staying with what unfolds.