Throughout the week of the Fire Starter Festival, participants will be offered a range of embodied, artistic and sensory walking practices to experiment with, as well as the opportunity to be linked with a walking partner – potentially someone you don’t know.

The Event

This is a slow-event … it will bubble away in different spaces over the week before a final reflective gathering at the end of the week. We will invite you to various spaces over the week of the festival to find a partner to go for a walk with virtually. These spaces include the Curiosity Café, the Beehive Café, or the Candlelight Club, as well as the Legislative Theatre Launch where we will be exploring power and activism. At the end of the week on Friday, we will come together as an experimental walking community, to reflect on our walking practices, our learning and consider what potential walking can play in our lives.

Before the event:

Once you have registered we will send you information about the practices and information about how to find a potential partner. Information will be given about some practicalities for your walk, some key questions to reflect on and some guidance for practices that can engaged with at home.

Hosted by:

Jerry O’Neill is an adult educator, at Maynooth University and is interested in the surprising and disorientating stuff which can emerge when we think with, and listen to, others and ourselves as we walk.

Karen Lawson, is producer of the Fire Starter Festival and part of the Collective Leadership for Scotland team in Scottish Government. In this work the team have been exploring the potential for Dialogue Walks as a powerful tool for making deeper connections across public services and communities.

Maggie O’Neill is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cork, and has a long history conducting participatory, walking research with communities and artists as well as marginalised groups on topics such as sex work and migration.

Cover image by : Casey Horner

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Until then, stay connected:

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Check out our Fire Starter website: https://firestarterfestival.com/

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Personalising your event experience:

Fire Starter Festival (part of Collective Leadership for Scotland) and the event’s speakers try to personalise the content of the event for those attending. For this reason, we will ask you two questions about yourself upon registering. We hope that this will improve your event experience.

This data will only be used by the Collective Leadership for Scotland team and partners hosting the session. This information will not be shared with any Third parties. The Collective Leadership for Scotland team might further use this data to learn about who is attending their events.

You can read our full privacy notice here: https://collectiveleadershipscotland.com/privacy-notice/