Walking along in sticky places: post-humanist and affective insights from a reflective account of two young women in Manchester, UK

Badwan, Khawla ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1808-724X and Hall, Elisha (2020) Walking along in sticky places: post-humanist and affective insights from a reflective account of two young women in Manchester, UK. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20 (3). pp. 225-239. ISSN 1470-8477

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Abstract

This article reports on a reflective account of a walk-along that brought together a researcher and a participant who visited the Curry Mile (Wilmslow Road) in Manchester, UK. It focuses on places, emotions and materiality in intercultural research in order to understand how ‘things make people happen’ (Kell, 2015, p. 442). Drawing on the interplay of ‘post-humanism’ (Pennycook, 2018), emotions in ‘sticky’ places (Ahmed, 2004, 2014; Laketa, 2018), and ‘cultural threads and blocks’ (Holliday, 2016), this paper explores how decentring intercultural research facilitates new ways of coming together, allows the construction of cultural threads, and enables creative and reflective engagement.