Troubling places: Walking the "troubling remnants" of post-conflict space

This paper explores the productive potential of walking methods in post-conflict space, with particular emphasis on Northern Ireland. We argue that walking methods are especially well suited to studying post-conflict spatial arrangements, yet remain underutilised for a variety of reasons. Specifically, we argue that walking methods can "trouble" dominant productions of post-conflict space, revealing its storied depth, multi-temporality, and the alternative narratives of the past that frequently remain hidden in places touched by violence. Critically, employing such place-sensitive approaches challenges "bad scripts" that reify polarised narratives of conflicted places, thereby enabling the writing of new spatial stories that are potentially generative of new research questions and scholarly insights rooted in overlooked, marginalised, or taken-for-granted people, places, and landscapes. Informed by both authors' ongoing research journeys, we argue that walking in troubled places can help scholars dig into the reservoirs of emotion, affect, vitality, and multi-temporality people experience in post-conflict landscapes, thus opening up new research vistas in places scholars might not have sought to look using only sedentary methods.