Wanderlust or Wanderbust? Rediscovering the Lost Art of Wandering in Precarious Times

Wanderlust or Wanderbust? Rediscovering the Lost Art of Wandering in Precarious Times

At present, the most important challenges in the humanities and arts are amplified by the fact that we are caught in an epistemological gulf between research rigour on one hand, and research relevance on the other. Closing this gap – whether it be through cross-disciplinary collaboration and engagement or a stronger focus on end user experience – is absolutely essential for a more visible and more vibrant arts sector.

Wandering, as wayward travel, as a form of displacement, and as non-linear movement that is simultaneously purposed and directionless, is an apt metaphor for the precarious nature of both contemporary art practice and academic work. Wandering, like any regime of precarity, is marked by what Michael Ignatieff calls “a metaphysics of restlessness” (1989). Yet wandering, as Jane Robinson reminds us, allows us to stray from “well-ordered paths of scholarship towards a much more promising and colourful vista of adventure, unorthodoxy and general misrule” (1994, xi).

This paper asks: what can artists-academics gain from writing and theorising precariously? What does it mean to be a reluctant wanderer at this moment in time? How can the lived experience of wandering, and its culturally-mediated associations and ideas, help us make measurable progress towards re-defining, or at least re-narrativising, the value of the arts?