Walking as a Way of Knowing: Amy Starecheski in Conversation with Luis C. Sotelo

What and how do we learn about the past when we use our bodies as research instruments? Dr. Starecheski will open this conversation by sharing a paired soundwalk she created as a way of “walking other people’s memories into our bodies” and building enduring relationships grounded in history sharing in her South Bronx neighborhood.

In her current research about how people decide what is true about the past, Dr. Starecheski is doing participant observation and archival research in communities of history practitioners in the Bronx, from journalists and historians to genealogists and history buffs. While most say that they are carefully weighing textual evidence to find out what happened in the past, in practice many rely as much or more on affective and embodied ways of knowing – including walking – when trying to make sense of all the messy traces of the past they encounter. Dr. Starecheski will share some of these preliminary findings and invite you to think with her about walking, and embodied practice more broadly, as a way of knowing about the past. Dr. Sotelo Castro will respond remotely from the United College at the University of Waterloo, where he is currently acting as a visiting associate professor in the humanities.

About the speakers

Amy Starecheski consults and lectures widely on oral history education and methods, is co-author of the Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide, and co-founded the Pedagogy of Listening Lab. She was lead interviewer on Columbia’s September 11, 2011 Narrative and Memory Project, for which she interviewed Afghans, Muslims, Sikhs, activists, low-income people, and people who lost work. From 2020-2023 she was co-director of the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project.

Luis C. Sotelo Castro is an associate visiting professor in the Humanities at United College (University of Waterloo) and associate professor in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, Montreal (Québec, Canada). Between 2016 and 2021 he held the position of Canada Research Chair in Oral History Performance at Concordia. With funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, he established in 2018 the Acts of Listening Lab, a hub for research-creation on the transformative power of listening.