Walking as Knowing: Plurilingualism and Intercultural Research Through Embodied, Relational, and Aesthetic Inquiry

For Dr. Moore, plurilingualism and interculturalities are not topics to be analyzed from a distance but as ways of being in the world. She resists the notion of culture as fixed or bounded, seeing it instead as an unfolding origami of encounter and transformation, emerging through relationships among people, languages, (hi)stories, and the lands. Walking our landscape, she contends, is both literal and metaphorical: an act of movement through place and meaning, of listening and of noticing the stories embedded in spaces often overlooked or silenced.

Language moves at the centre of Dr. Moore’s work. Having lived across linguistic and cultural thresholds—from the French Alps to the unceded Coast Salish territories—she writes of language(s) as both inheritance and loss. For her, language is not something to be held or owned, but something that exists as a resonance, a vibration between speakers and worlds. In her plurilingual poetical writing, French, Arpitan (the language of her mother), Italian (the language of her father), Japanese, Chinese, English and Indigenous languages meet, dance and mingle, weaving and shaping one another’s rhythms and silences. This relational understanding reframes plurilingualism as a practice of care and listening rather than a skill to be acquired.

Dr. Moore’s research practice is grounded in relational accountability. Drawing from Indigenous scholar Shawn Wilson’s insight that “research is ceremony,” she sees inquiry as a practice of care—toward participants, communities, and the lands that sustain research. Her collaborative projects in Canada, Europe, Japan, and Latin America begin with the question—whose stories are heard and whose remain unspoken? She designs research as a shared process of sense-making, where authorship, translation, and interpretation are continuously negotiated. This ethic of relation also shapes her writing, which intertwines theoretical reflection with poetry, imagery, and autobiographical fragments.

Dr. Moore’s methodological orientation emerges from arts-based research traditions, particularly Ca/r/tography, blending the roles of artist, researcher, and teacher and in which walking and mapping become modes of aesthetic inquiry, creative practice, and teaching. In collaboration with students and community partners, she explores how sensory experience, artmaking, and dialogue can reimagine identity, language, and belonging. Participants use apps and online platforms, such as Whose Land, Ímesh, and Padlets, to document murals, Indigenous place names, and sounds from their local environments. These collections of photographs, reflections, and maps become pathways for shared learning—evolving records of collaboration that link personal experience with the cultural and historical dimensions of place.

Drawing guidance from Indigenous knowledge principles such as Ímesh (“to walk” in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh snichim) and Etuaptmumk (“Two-Eyed Seeing,” Mi’kmaw), which emphasize learning together across knowledge systems, Dr. Moore explores walking as a way of learning with others—human and more-than-human—through shared presence and mutual responsibility. Intercultural understanding becomes a living practice of attunement, relation, and shared responsibility.

Dr. Moore also introduces the idea of suspension, inspired by the Chinese term xuanfu—“hanging and floating.” Inspired by sociologist Biao Xiang, the concept captures the delicate pause between knowing and not knowing. That is, suspension is a research disposition: a readiness to linger in uncertainty, to resist premature closure, and to let questions breathe. In a scholarly climate that often rewards speed and certainty, this orientation becomes an act of methodological patience—a reminder that reflection, doubt, and humble hesitation are integral to ethical inquiry.

Dr. Moore’s work offers us a compelling re-examination of what inquiry can be. Her integration of sensory mapping, digital storytelling, and plurilingual expression expands the boundaries of qualitative research. She suggests that data can take the form of sound, movement, and resonance—that evidence can emerge through walking, weaving, and witnessing. Her approach carries significant implications for teacher education and community-based research, where curiosity, empathy, and reciprocity are as important as analysis or measurement.

Research, Dr. Moore asserts, should be collaborative and multimodal. Knowledge does not reside solely in text or transcript but also in movement, sound, and image. Through walking and mapping, participants engage with the world as both researchers and co-authors of meaning. Inquiry becomes an unfolding conversation that privileges reciprocity and imagination over extraction or representation. As Dr. Moore reminds us, research is not only about finding answers but about cultivating awareness of the landscapes we inhabit, the histories we inherit, and the responsibilities we carry. To “walk our landscape as interculturality” is, in her view, to recognize that knowing is never solitary. It is a practice of learning to move in relation with others, to listen for resonance, and to be transformed in the process.

References

Moore, D. (2024). Walking our landscape as interculturality: A visual essay in resonances. In F. Dervin (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Interculturality in Communication and Education (pp. 308–328). Routledge.

Other recent works include:

Araújo e Sa, H.; Dantas, L., Moore, D., & Carinhas, R. (In press). C.art.ography, freedom and democratic citizenship. In P. Kalaja, S. Meló-Pfeifer, & V. Tavares (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Arts-Based Approaches in Applied Language Studies. Routledge.

Moore, D.; Arias, S. & Beddouche, L. (In press, Nov. 2025). Paysages linguistiques, cartographisations et transformations en éducation plurilingue. Revue Multimodalités, 22. https://revuemultimodalites.com/volumes