https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708619884975 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 2020, Vol. 20(1) 35–42 © 2019 SAGE Publications Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1532708619884975 journals.sagepub.com/home/csc Research through Movement of Body and Sound Refrain If You Were to Take Me on a Tour of Your Town, Where Would You Take Me, and Why? What Stories Would You Tell? The above refrain poses a methodological question under- girded by both an epistemological and an ontological orien- tation toward movement in and as qualitative inquiry. In this article, I describe my StoryWalks research and examine the entangled relation of storying and walking as it pertains to movement. I account for several community member’s storied walks, working with the concept of movement as a refrain (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004) and Donna Haraway’s (2016) storied concept of SF, a material-semiotic a mate- rial-semiotic signifier open for the production of multiple meanings of story (e.g., Science Fiction, Speculative Feminisms), in order to think about the various ways in which walking with stories is a matter of SF into an entan- glement of memories, place-based inquiry, history, future goals, and imaginings that matter for an ethnic and racial politics of place, identity, and belonging. I also highlight the ways in which our perception is informed through an affec- tive field of relations comprised of the immediate environ- ment as well as memories, past and future experiences, social histories, and cultural practices. Affect in this sense pertains to a felt force, what Kathleen Stewart (2007) refers to as “a drifting immersion that watches and waits for some- thing to pop up” (p. 95) that might produce and sustain political, social, and cultural formations. Orientations drawn from nonrepresentational, more-than- human theories examine and conceptualize walking’s rela- tion to race, culture and cultural practices, environmentalism, disability, indigeneity, and trans, queer, and feminist scholar- ship by means of critically disrupting assumed notions of place and privilege such as who walks, where one walks, who is allowed to walk, and the ways in which walking marks borders and space (Springgay & Truman, 2018). Pertaining to walking as art, walking has been explored through sensory, material, and speculative philosophies of movement as an event that is always constituted by more- than-human relations (Garoian, 2013; Manning, 2013; Powell, 2017). While taken up in a variety of more-than human-ways, ranging from the utilitarian to the experimen- tal to the performance-driven, walking can be conceived as a form of movement that continually constructs new relations and interactions with the world (e.g., Ingold, 2007). My walking research project has afforded me the opportu- nity to think about the entangled relationship between walk- ing and/in/as storying. While there are many ways in which to conceive of story and, indeed, significant research into the art and practice of storying and storied methodologies, I limit my discussion of story as it pertains to moving and 884975CSC XX X 10.1177/1532708619884975Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol">↔</span> Critical MethodologiesPowell research-article 2019 1 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA Corresponding Author: Kimberly Powell, The Pennsylvania State University, 168 Chambers Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. Email: kap17@psu.edu Walking Refrains for Storied Movement Kimberly Powell 1 Abstract In this article, I describe my narrative walking project, StoryWalks, as a methodology that underscores the concept of movement in relation to place-based narratives. I describe several community member’s walking narratives, theorizing movement through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the refrain and through Donna Haraway’s concept of storytelling as open signification and materialization in order to think about the various ways in which walking with stories is an entanglement of memories, place-based inquiry, history, future goals, and imaginings that matter for an ethnic and racial politics of place, identity, and belonging. I highlight storytelling through walking as an affective production of political, social, and cultural formations within communities. Keywords arts based inquiry, methods of inquiry, counter-narrative, Asian American studies, ethnicity and race, new methods & methodologies, methodologies