What is so good about walking interviews? Expanding the geo-indexical virtues of making meaning on the move

Abstract

Mobile methods allow unveiling or better grasping often “hidden” aspects of social processes and subjective dimensions of the human experience of place. Specifically, they demand nuanced attention to the geosemiotic, assembled, and intersubjective nature of the units at play when researching social and subjective worlds on the move. Based on the existing literature and empirical work conducted in different contexts by the co-authors of this article, we aim to provide new insights on the situated “kinetics” of meaning construction with three main contributions to qualitative place research in psychology. First, we briefly summarize the methodological strengths of “walking interviews” according to existing literature. Second, we advocate an interpretive approach to meaning-making in WI grounded on geo-indexicality and place-assemblage as their main onto-epistemological lenses. Finally, we provide a conceptual reorganization and integration of the methodological strengths of walking interviews according to five overarching geo-indexical dimensions: eductive, epistemic, ethical-political, performative, and metonymic.