Mindful Walking: Transforming Distant Web of Social Connections into Active Qualitative Empirical Materials from a Postmodern Flâneuse’s Perspective

Abstract

Mindful walking is an effective way to make what is unfamiliar familiar and what is familiar unfamiliar, allowing the researcher to critically examine moments of research environment. This method was used to conduct an ethnographic case study of an art museum in the Midwestern United States in 2011, and further developed when returning to the same museum and community to conduct a follow-up study in 2015. The method will be further theorized using the concept of curious spectator or flâneur. By negotiating and renegotiating a researcher’s position in a real research setting, this chapter also demonstrates the nuanced, vulnerable, and subjective contemporary flâneuse, who strives to make an entangled research web a bit clearer and more visible to those who are not present in the research setting.