Walking Histories, Un/making Places

This article is a methodological examination situated within a larger multisited project on the formation and regulation of communities of sex workers in Yokohama, Japan, and Vancouver, Canada, in historical and social discourse. Tracing the fragmented and elliptical histories of these communities, we are attentive to the potential for walking, and specifically walking tours, as an ethnographic method, a mode of historical engagement, and a means to reflect on our unfolding and shifting space-body relationships as we move across spaces of inquiry with varying levels of ease/tension. We seek to understand walking tours as a means and method to critically engage the histories that we seek to uncover and the absences we face in our attempts to uncover them--not only the social relations that constitute and are constituted by the space but also our own relationship to current communities that exist in the space--and the ways our lifeworld entanglements interfere with and give shape to our research endeavors. We problematize academic tendecies to situate lifeworld entanglements as secondary or superfluous to the research process. By tactically spatializing our personal experiences in a series of endnoted digressions, we make strange academic writing conventions of appropriate form and content.