Walking with Soldiers: How I learned to stop worrying and love cadets

Susanna Hast

“Walking with Soldiers” examines an auto-ethnographic moment of marching across the city of Helsinki with first-year cadets of the Finnish National Defence University. In a reparative reading, the walk dismantles boundaries of bodies, critiques, and affects. Through a walking methodology and autoethnography, the present exposition demonstrates how the author began orienteering within military structures through an affective investment. The exposition is a researcher’s journey across subjectivities and difference in a female civilian body. Epistemologically, it brings theory closer to the skin; and empirically, it offers insight into the affective world of belonging. “Walking with Soldiers” is multimodal and polyphonic: it consists of a text for reading, three audio tracks for listening and co-walking, as well as illustrations created by Julia Järvelä based on photographs taken by the author. The provided materials can be selectively attended to. The artistic technique used in the exposition is seduction: the reader/listener is invited into an experience. The exposition is a conversation between critical military studies and artistic research: it gives artistic attention to a military march and places importance on the acoustic and vibrating qualities of academic research. The writing itself subverts the practice of authoritative scholarly writing by presenting descriptive work as theoretical work, and by using citations as companions from the outside.

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, and Adam Frank. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press
Macmillan, Lorraine. 2011. ‘Militarized Children and Sovereign Power’. In The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South, edited by J. Marshall Beier, 61–76. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.
McSorley, Kevin. 2016. ‘Doing Military Fitness: Physical Culture, Civilian Leisure, and Militarism’. Critical Military Studies 2 (1–2) Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 103–119.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge.
Öberg, Dan. 2016. ‘Enduring War: Heroes’ Acre, “the Empty Throne”, and the Politics of Disappearance’. Critical Military Studies 2 (3) Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 155–72.
Paper Boat Collective. 2017. ‘Archipelagos, A Voyage in Writing’. In Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, edited by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, 11–27. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Schrader, Benjamin. 2014. ‘Auto-Archaeology and the Political Affect of War’. Journal of Narrative Politics 1 (1), Toronto: York University, 4-23.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2001. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books.
———. 2014. Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Penguin Books.

Springgay, Stephanie, and Sarah E. Truman. 2017. ‘A Transmaterial Approach to Walking Methodologies: Embodiment, Affect, and a Sonic Art Performance’. Body & Society, 23(4), Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 27–58.
Spry, Tami. 2001. ‘Performing Autoethnography: An Embodied Methodological Praxis’. Qualitative Inquiry 7 (6) Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 706–732.
Wright, Sarah. 2014. ‘More-than-Human, Emergent Belongings: A Weak Theory Approach’. Progress in Human Geography 39 (4) Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 391–411.

Tip

Tip