Walking the concepts: elaborating on the non-representational sensitivities of tourism experience

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to experience and reflect on the methodological and epistemological implications of a walking tour as a mode of presenting and disseminating marketing knowledge. We invite you to join us on a walking tour built around food, and shaped by the spatiotemporal dynamics of a Nordic city. By moving through the streets and green areas of the city, we show you how the walking tour opens up possibilities to elaborate and leverage the concept of experience through the non-representational sensitivities. During the tour, you will realise that despite the stories told, it is through embodiment, and entanglements with the materialities encountered in spaces that the tour narratives continuously evolve, co-creating knowledge and understanding of the city and the notion of experience. Finally, we will draw your attention to the walking tour as a way of presentation in relation to current academic epistemic cultures.

want to engage with 'the often unnoticed and unreflexive details of consumption events', we need to consider innovative and different ways of doing and (re)presenting knowledge (see also Dowling et al., 2017).
On this tour, we take you on a walk around Rovaniemi city centre. It indeed consists of urban spaces with a rich variety and diversity of sensory encounters. When moving around the city, we use our senses in interacting with people and materialities and in moving from one space to another (Darcy & Small, 2008;Wearing & Foley, 2017). As argued by tourism scholars Sharpley and Stone (2011), the tourist experience emerges through these interactions and encounters and the meanings given to them by each of you in relation to your own sociocultural existence. From this perspective, you, as a tourist, play an active role in constructing your personal tourism experience (e.g. Wearing & Wearing, 2001).
By presenting the walking tour to you in the textual format, we wish to also experiment on how we can write about the non-representational. So, this 'paper tour' you are about to take, our academic participants, is written in a style that would as much as possible evoke the sensualities and affectivities experienced on the actual tour. Our aim here is to think of a walking tour as a way to facilitate understanding of how the concept of experience, the different non-representational sensitivities of it, can be understood and contemplated. This approach lets us tap on the representational and nonrepresentational aspects of the place. We wish to demonstrate how the place unfolds in movement, through senses and as a place of gathering of different ideas and agencies that shape each other.
But now: welcome, once again and let's begin!

Walking as a way of experiencing
As we walk towards the old market square, the first stop on our tour, let us provide a few words about walking as a way of experiencing. As a concept, experience is a central construct in marketing that is used to understand consumers. Indeed, there is a vast amount of literature discussing the concept (e.g. Arnould & Price, 1993;Carù & Cova, 2003;Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982;Lanier & Rader, 2015;Murphy et al., 2019). Experience is also a focal concept in tourism studies, a multidisciplinary field in which we, your guides, mainly operate (e.g. Aho, 2001;Li, 2000;Quan & Wang, 2004;Ryan, 2010;Sharpley & Stone, 2011;Wang, 1999;Wearing & Foley, 2017). As Carù and Cova (2003) have claimed, the theorising of experience in marketing thought was for a substantial time period based on the extraordinariness of experiences. In the very same contribution, they called for a 'more humble' view on consumption experiences in order to break away from the ideology of happiness that prevails in the notion of extraordinary consumer experience. They argue for the flow of everyday as constructing the premises for experiences rather than the extraordinary spectacles in which we are obliged to be happy and to enjoy. They also go on to note, following the ideas of Le Breton (2000, pp. 11, 18-19, in Carù & Cova, 2003) that walking, for example, lets one quietly engage with the surroundings, leaving the initiative to experience to the individual (Carú & Cova, 2003, pp. 277-281). Yet we are not experiencing this walk alone. We are walking together not only as a group of people but also among or together with the material arrangement of the city (e.g. Rantala et al., 2020). Even though each of us experiences the walking tour from our personal phenomenological standpoint (see e.g. Kuuru & Närvänen, 2019), we as humans and our meaning-making are not the only agents constructing and affecting it; there are other agentic forces co-creating the experience as well (e.g. Coffin, 2019;Lund, 2015). The non-human agents, such as food, play a focal role in building this experience. This is something we want you to pay attention to as we go along: the non-representational sensitivities and agents of this experience (e.g. Hill et al., 2014;Vannini, 2015). A walking tour as a format gives access to place as the gatherer of ideas and things: even though the guiding is meant to choreograph the experience, the place might evoke different affectivities within each participant (e.g. Jóhannesson & Lund, 2017). According to Lefebvre (1996, p. 229), walking allows us access to 'listen' to 'a house, a street, a city'. And as de Certeau (1984, p. 97) argues 'pedestrian movements give "shape to spaces" and "weave places together" through "tactile apprehension and kinaesthetic appropriation"'. In this sense, walking can be understood as a form of storytelling, a poetic and a political practice (Lund, 2008; see also Aoki & Yoshimizu, 2015, p. 276). As we walk along together today, we will co-create our own story of this place with each other and the terrain we walk upon and through.
Guided tour as a practice has its roots in the teaching of ancient Greek philosophers. Walking as a method has been used as a way of teaching from the time of Aristotle (e.g. Wynn, 2005). Our aim on this tour is to create an interplay between the material and expressive components of the city space: to facilitate and narrate the experience based on selected (re)presentations and materialities (see Canniford et al., 2018). During the tour, the city space unfolds through movement and the senses in relationality between everything encountered. A walking tour is a traditional touristic practice to gain experiences (see, e.g. Ingold & Vergunst, 2008a;Österlund-Pötzsch, 2010). Walking as a way of experiencing taps into embodiment and the connectedness of bodies to spaces, places and their materialities (e.g. Jóhannesson & Lund, 2017;Thrift, 2008). The touristic practice of walking differs from our everyday walks. When we walk in a new place, we do it with heightened senses and more careful observation on the materialities we encounter (Österlund-Pötzsch, 2010). This sort of walking gives the possibility to attune towards the non-representational aspects of place. The way we experience spaces and places is greatly based on the sensual, the non-verbal and the embodied (e.g. Rakic & Chambers, 2012;Sims, 2009).
Even though sensual encounters in tourism and marketing have been previously studied, there have been calls to further understand sensory experiences in a more holistic manner attuned to the plural possibilities of experiencing places (see Agapito et al., 2012;Medway & Warnaby, 2017). Today, you, the tour participants, can become hobbyist (auto)ethnographers: we will guide you to relate to and recognise the sensualities, affectivities and materialities of the place through your first-person phenomenological, embodied experience. Thus, all of us have an active role in co-creating this tour (see, e.g. Lugosi, 2014).
The format of a guided tour as a way of presentation may confuse you, our academic participants: concepts and even arguments do not organise as neatly as they do in the article form you are used to. Rather, they come up in bundles, unfolding simultaneously with our experiencing of the experience. But that is exactly the point here: the world is not a neatly organised entity; rather things appear, disappear, gather, and unfold as we are moving among them. In this particular tour, tasting and making food also offers possibilities to experience place and culture. In tourism, food holds an important role as an attraction and carrier of meanings. This is evident when looking at the rise of food tourism in the last few decades (see Andersson et al., 2017;Lee & Scott, 2015).
Based on these premises, we invite you to walk with us and to experience and reflect on the methodological and epistemological particularities of a walking tour over other forms of academic presentation, as well as the limitations or challenges that this method poses in comparison to more traditional ways of presenting research. We argue that an 'eat and walk' tour as a form of presentation opens up possibilities to elaborate and leverage, i.e. experience, the conceptual formations of experience in marketing thought. It opens up the idea that places are not only physical spaces or servicescapes that we respond to but more multidimensional entities and entanglements with a multitude of co-creating agencies (see, e.g. Bertella, 2014).
But hey, we are approaching the old market square! Let's stop here for a moment.

Experiencing the onflow: the old market square and Hotel Pohjanhovi
The place where we are now used to be the market square of the town. When looking around, you can see that nowadays the place is a playground for children. Let's take a look at what has happened here before! This is the spring market in 1938: https://areena.yle.fi/ 1-50096987. Please pass the iPads around. While watching the video, please also have a taste of dried reindeer-meat chips! Air-dried reindeer meat is a local delicacy and these chips are a modernised version of it. They can be bought from most supermarkets. And if there are vegetarians here, we have root vegetable chips available for you! To keep you, our academic participants, 'on the map', a few words on experiencing the spatial assemblage (see, e.g. Canniford et al., 2018). By walking the city, we are able to explore the 'the ongoing movements of bodies, spaces and objects' (Hill et al., 2014, p. 385). This walking tour was designed around food and its role in the past, present and future in order to discuss local culture as a tourism experience. It is through these embodied experiences of walking and eating that the tour becomes a means to understand the temporalities, materialities and social relations connected to a place (see, e.g. Ingold & Vergunst, 2008b). By drawing attention to the materialities and the nonrepresentational aspects of spaces, streets, buildings, shops and green areas, the walking tour activates not only the past but also the present and a possible future (see Pink, 2008). Through this practice, the experience unfolds as a temporal, socio-spatial phenomenon that materialises within a multitude of places (see, e.g. Lugosi, 2014;Torres et al., 2018).
As you're having a bite and watching the silent movie, both of which act as agentic objects organising this experience (see Hill et al., 2014), let us tell you a little about the history of this place. In the mid-1800s, Rovaniemi was a place which consisted of many small villages. Because there were no shops here at all before that time, the market became a significant place of exchange and trade. The first market was held in the town in 1881. The Rovaniemi market gained a national reputation in Finland, and by the end of the 1800s, it was a remarkable event. It was held three times a year: the main market in February (as seen on the film) and then midsummer and fall markets. The event was big, with people coming from all over the country and also from neighbouring countries: Sweden, Russia and Norway. A manifold of items were sold, including horses, reindeer meat, birds, fish (especially salmon), leather, fur, jewellery and food such as butter and flour (Annanpalo, 1998).
As you can see from the film, this used to be a lively marketplace. You get the sense of a wintry spring day and a buzzing market. What amazes me in the film are the exotic animals. They are from a so different world compared to the contemporary experience of this place -the contrast between the market full of life in the film and what is now a children's playground. This highlights the temporal element of experience (see Lugosi, 2014; see also Woermann & Rokka, 2015). The history is present here with us through the film and stories, which Bruner and Gorfain (1984, p. 57) describe as dialogic processes of many historically situated particular tellings. As we stand in this very place of the old market, the space we inhabit is in the state of becoming mediated by our immediate sensory experiences of watching the film, listening to the stories and eating the food (e.g. Coffin, 2019;Massey, 2005). Our touristic consumption experience forms at the crossroads of the material and the expressive components which enact this space and affect our understanding not only through the cognitive dimension but also through the movements they create (Canniford et al., 2018, p. 235).
The iPads as inanimate intermediaries give us access to past events. Film or video as a vehicle has agentic powers to mediate this very space in different temporal dimensions, and in so doing, layers of meaning are activated by directing and organising our sensory experiences (Aoki & Yoshimitzu, 2015, p. 278;Hietanen & Rokka, 2017, p. 5;Seregina, 2018). This co-creates 'an abstract historical logic on the immediate present, and extraneous histories and lived community formations and activities are bracketed out to suit the narrative formation' (Aoki & Yoshimitzu, 2015, p. 278). The video material by its movement has the potential to intensify the affective qualities of lived events (see Rokka & Hietanen, 2018;Vannini, 2015). It affects us bodily, withdrawing us from plain cognitive observation (Hietanen & Rokka, 2017, p. 5). Has everybody seen the film now? Does somebody still want more reindeer chips? If not, let's continue our tour. Please follow us this way, towards the river! Let's stop here. Everybody, please gather around so you can hear! We are now standing by the Kemijoki River in front of Hotel Pohjanhovi, a legendary landmark in Finnish tourism. The building of Pohjanhovi is a powerful agent in the history and present day of tourism industry and practice. It unfolds in becoming through flows of humans and matter. The building has experienced death and has been reborn in the flow of time (see Coffin, 2019). This is the new Pohjanhovi, but please see the pictures of the former building and its services here on iPads. The history of the hotel dates back to 1936. Pohjanhovi, the Palace of the North translated into English, was designed by architects Märta and Pauli Blomstedt, who were renowned Finnish functionalists (see Figure 1). At the time, the hotel represented modernity and progress in the middle of the periphery: it had the first and only elevator in the whole province of Lapland. This particular hotel has hosted both legendary tales and legendary people with both local and international guests. Its service has become familiar to ordinary people as well as heads of state (Legendaarinen Hotelli Pohjanhovi, 2020).
We can see this very building in front of us at the moment (see Figure 2). But this current manifestation is just one epitome of the legendary hotel. The cityscape unravels as 'an arena of performances in which present-day scenes intertwine with historic layers and personal projections' (Österlund-Pötzsch, 2010, p. 22). In the tragic events associated with the Lapland War, Pohjanhovi was burnt to the ground. 2 After the war, the former basement of the hotel, which had been saved from destruction, was opened as  a restaurant'. It was called Hovinpohja, which means the basement of Pohjanhovi. You can see pictures of it here again. Hovinpohja represents a colourful stage in the history of the city's reconstruction period. Having a 'basement restaurant' posed several challenges for the staff. For example, in spring time, there could be so much water on the floor that the waiters had to wear rubber boots when serving the customers. Over the decades, the hotel has become the flagship of the city's tourism, and it is a nationally renowned tourism landmark and cultural icon. The story of the hotel highlights the onflow, relationality of places: how people, knowledge, ideas, and capital travel in the global tourism industry (see Massey, 1995) and how the very building before us operates as an active agent to gather them. The social, political and economic relations between places result in power arrangements and contestations (Massey, 1995), as has been the case with Pohjanhovi. Actually, a few years ago, the then-owner, hotel chain Cumulus, tried to rename the hotel without the word Pohjanhovi. The locals organised a civic movement to preserve the old name (Talvensaari, 2017). And you can see the result: the name remained.

Sensing the city in movement: urban garden and grill culture
Let's continue here by the river. We have now experienced and discussed the onflow of every day through two different spaces, the old market square and Hotel Pohjanhovi. Let us now pay attention to our senses (see Valtonen et al., 2010). Tourism experiences are always multisensory (e.g. Agapito et al., 2012). While we walk here on the sandy pavement, you can hear and feel the sand crumbs under your feet. We hear the water flowing in the river and there is also an ambulance passing by on the nearby bridge with the sirens whistling. Our tourist agency is embodied and phenomenological and our senses and tactile knowledge give access to the everydayness of this place (Vergunst, 2008, p. 120;see Valtonen & Veijola, 2011, p. 176). We are moving by foot, walking. Even though often thought of as a mundane body part in everyday life, feet can become carriers of intensified memories in certain surroundings (see Ravn, 2017, pp. 58-59). They are a primary point of contact when walking within the surrounding environment, and their role in tackling the surroundings is unconscious and more mechanical than, for example, the use of hands (Eslambolchilar et al., 2016, p. 10). We are sensing the space through our moving bodies, not only in the present but also through body memory (Risner, 2000;Valtonen & Haanpää, 2018). For all of us this is different, since body memories build when we engage with different spaces. They reside quietly in us and can actualise when we again encounter new spaces (Valtonen & Haanpää, 2018). For example, the sound of the river might remind you of home and make you feel comfortable and at ease. Or it can bring you a memory of a rafting accident that makes you to want to leave this place.
This way please, and mind your step. Be careful not to step on the plants! This is a communal urban garden that was established here by local urban activists in 2014 (see Figure 3). You can stroll around and have a look at what is grown here: potatoes, carrots, turnips, parsnip, radish, peas, spinach, and so on. Quite a lot of things, though it mostly just looks like an abandoned place. Moving around this seemingly empty place as a way of exploring opens the essence of everyday in walking (Vergunst, 2008, p. 109). 'In walking this sensuousness allows the environment to be known through a textural relationship between the walker and the ground' (Vergunst, 2008, p. 120). We sense our own body movements through different senses, but kinaesthesia, sensing and understanding movement, connects to the viewpoint of understanding patterns of movement in wider cultural contexts (Foster, 2011, pp. 6-9). Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl has argued that kinaesthesia is the interface between the inner and the outer of the body and as a way of sensing, particularly compared to other senses (Husserl, 1973, in Parviainen, 2011. It also connects the body to places and spaces through movement. As this place is unfamiliar to us and the ground is a little bit bumpy -rather suitable for rubber boots in some places -we are a bit more careful in our movements and have to concentrate on them. This probably does not seem to be the most typical tourist attraction or even a garden but rather an empty lot. And that is what it is. This urban garden is run by Rovaniemi urban gardeners and its caretaking is based on voluntary measures. Anyone who participates in the communal activities is allowed to collect produce here. Mainly useful plants are being grown since the aim of the association is to promote people's possibility of producing their own food, even in urban circumstances. This space has not been designed to catch our attention or affect our senses, yet as a 'more humble' space it leaves us with more possibilities to sensually explore and evoke the experience (see Carú & Cova, 2003). Within experiencescapes, we as tourists have even begun to look for 'mundanescapes', such as this garden, to experience tourism. These are the ones that are unknown and in the everyday of others, the local people. The unknown is something unique but not dichotomous to known. It is rather something '"unexperienced", "unrealized", "surprising" or in some way, "unexpected"' (see Jensen, 2005, p. 149). As has been recently claimed by marketing scholars Skandalis et al. (2019, p. 50), extraordinary experiences can arise from 'non-extraordinary' experiencescapes. Just to remind you: please don't take anything from here since we are only visitors in the everyday of the locals. By the way, different root vegetables are quite typically used in Finnish home cooking in casseroles and such dishes. See also those beautiful sunflowers! But now, let's continue our walk along the river. As we walk, this practice lets us 'pay close and careful attention to one's surroundings while thinking with the multiple of stories one has heard. Following footprints is about gaining knowledge through action and the ability to use that knowledge' (Legat, 2008, p. 47). Let's go this way, and be careful when crossing the road! Please, gather around so you can hear, the drive-in lane is just on the right side of this kiosk. We are standing now in front of one of the oldest grill kiosks in Rovaniemi, the Alakunnas Grill (see Figure 4). Grill kiosks and takeaway food bought from them are a traditional part of Finnish food culture and folklore. The true golden age for the grills was from the '60s to the '80s when the baby boomers were young and the urbanisation of Finland started. In the golden years of grills, the restaurant scene in Finland was very different and eating outside was a rarity. Yet every town and village had several grill kiosks.
These little kiosks with an open desk served lunch for hungry workers, dinner for the locals and snacks for travellers and people coming home from a night out. For example, almost every party in our student life ended up in a grill kiosk. Queueing for a grill kiosk is a concept that every Finn born before the '90s recognises. It's a place where the multimillionaire NHL players and commoners are equal. But it's also a place for fights at the end of a night out. I can still very vividly recall body memories from standing in line at a grill kiosk on a winter night, my toes and nose freezing, constantly taking note of how many people are still ahead of me, and suddenly the local celebrity arriving and trying to jump the queue by yelling 'don't you know who I am?!' And from there, the atmosphere of the queue taking a sudden turn towards aggression. These local interpretations and narratives construct multiple meanings of the lifestyle and experiences of everyday life in a place (Lichrou et al., 2014).
Nowadays, there are only a few grill kiosks left, one or two per town. Some local grill kiosks have earned their reputation as almost cult places. This place, the Alakunnas Grill, is one of them. The parents of the current owner established their first grill in 1976 and it was located in one of the suburbs of Rovaniemi. The grill moved to this place in 1982. The reputation of these kiosks is based, of course, on their signature dishes, local specialities, but also on the social activities surrounding them (Haraldsdóttir & Gunnarsdóttir, 2014; see also Goodman, 2016, p. 1). Typical meals are sausages, frankfurters, meat pies, hamburgers and french fries. The main condiments have been, and still are, mustard, ketchup, onion and pickled relish. The scent and taste of the grill food also marks certain times and space for many Finns. Smelling the frying oil and the French fries with all the condiments takes you back to youth, eating outside the grill kiosk on a Friday evening (see Canniford et al., 2018). Every grill makes the portions with their own style and they differ a lot from highly standardised branded burgers, like McDonald's. This resonates with experiencing places: every one of us experiences them through our own embodied presence which makes the sensual encounter always unique and different (see Medway & Warnaby, 2017). But now let's have a taste of Alakunnas' signature dish: French fries with sausages. And here there is also a vegetarian option.
When you have finished eating, let's continue our tour. Please follow me . . .

Affective atmospheres: baking with Martat
Let's go in here. This is the local office and meeting space of the Finnish home economics organisation, Martat (Marthas in English). The association was founded in 1899 to promote wellbeing and quality of life in Finnish homes 3 . It carries out cultural and civic education and does advocacy work in Finland. And today we are going to have a baking class here with our hosts, Leena and Riitta-Liisa. Food consumption, the making and eating of it, is an embodied consumption practice which provides a sense of place (Bardhi et al., 2010). Eating together with the tour participants is not only a sensory experience focused on the quality of the food, but also a social experience that brings the group and the place closer together (Andersson et al., 2017). Our shared experience will be the baking and tasting of rieska, Lappish flat bread (see Figure 5). The very act of baking highlights the agency of food, not only as 'a passive nutritional substance' but rather an active agent 'connecting bodies, activities, and places' (Lund, 2015, p. 21). Let's experience this first hand: check the recipe first and then we will start baking. Wash your hands, please and put on the gloves. There are four different baking spots, so please divide into groups at each corner of this table. Ok, Riitta-Liisa will first show you how to bake. The first step is to mix the salt and baking powder with the flour. Then add cold water while rapidly whisking the mix. In judging the state of the dough, it should be runny rather than too thick. Let Riitta-Liisa come and judge the situation. Remember to use enough flour! Press the bread with your knuckles and press some holes into it with a fork afterwards. Seems easy, yes? Let's try! The rieska dough as a living material, not just matter, engages us multisensorially, makes us feel and do things (Lund, 2015, p. 21). Food, in the form of dough at this point, holds relational qualities towards us. Through them it entangles us, human and non-human entities, and we 'improvise a sense of place' (Lund, 2015, p. 21).
At the moment, we are divided into groups by the material arrangement of this place as well as the size of dough to work on. The dough as an agent creates affective atmospheres as we relate to it and, through this relation, to each other. We sense affects through our embodiment, and they can be psychological and social at the same time (Barbour & Hitchmough, 2014, p. 65). Affects move us, make us do things, but they also can attach us to people and places (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 10-11). The dough's agentic forces make us negotiate on how to go about the process; the feeling of the dough might make us grin in surprise or pull our hand away in disgust. And yet again, we react to these reactions of each other. Affects as processes define bodies by their capacities to affect and be affected (Blackman & Venn, 2010, p. 9). These embodied forces are sensed bodily back and forth between us and they create the atmosphere of this space (e.g. Edensor, 2015;Hill et al., 2014).
Even though you have Riitta-Liisa and Leena here as your guides, dealing with dough can be a bit challenging and chaotic, and sometimes you might have to improvise (see Jóhannesson & Lund, 2017, p. 189). Baking as an act requires skill that you learn by doing: you acquire a kinaesthetic awareness of how to go about working with the dough (see, e.g. Sheets-Johnstone, 2018). And once you're done with the dough, we bake the flatbreads in a 275°C heated oven. Leena will help you. The cooking takes five to eight minutes. Again, the delicious aroma coming from the oven tells us that it is time to act upon our breads, to take them out of the oven (Canniford et al., 2018). But with all this baking, it starts to be quite hot in here! The agency of dough manifests: it needs a hot oven that heats this place and makes us feel hot, we make fans out of paper found on tables, giving significant looks to each other, seeing our reddish faces and popping in and out to the street to get some fresh air.
But now the rieskas are ready to be eaten with butter while still warm. Have a taste: delicious! Eating as an activity which also engages all the senses, and thus destinations are embodied by this very act (Lund, 2015, p. 21, 30; see also Probyn, 1999). The rieskas have led us directly to experience Lund and Jóhannesson's (2014, p. 444) argument that 'places emerge through relational ordering of mobile practices. They are alive, in the sense that they emerge through creative currents of the world where everything is entangled'. The very act of making and eating food can also through its affectivity and through body memory, take you back to your childhood or another journey previously taken, and those affectivities also rise to the surface in this situation. Now it is time to thank Riitta-Liisa and Leena. Let's move outside where it is cooler.

Thank you for participating, and take-aways
We are coming to the end of our Eat and Walk Rovaniemi Tour. We hope that you enjoyed walking with us through the streets of our city! Now you know more about Rovaniemi and the notion of experience and its non-representational sensitivities. We hope that the walking tour we have taken together has presented these ideas of onflow, sensing movement and affective atmospheres through our embodied presence in the city space. As we were walking through the city and tasting and making food, we were breaking the rules of more conventional modes of academic presentation. Instead of simply relying upon oral and textual narratives to transfer cognitive knowledge about experience, we invited you to feel the narratives and actively engage in a reflexive process of knowledge co-creation through sensual and embodied experience. Indeed, throughout the walking tour, we opened up the different dimensions of experience for sensation, interpretation, exploration and discussion within a context created by specific spaces and temporal settings available within the city of Rovaniemi. Like other forms of nonrepresentational research approaches (see, e.g. Belk & Kozinets, 2005;Seregina, 2018), the walking tour also stimulated our enthusiasm and interest, allowing us (both guides and participants) to empathise with the concepts and the researched phenomena that were presented. The walking tour not only went beyond the idea of simply telling interesting facts about the physical spaces we walked through but was also a way to present past and present places in Rovaniemi as multidimensional entities and entanglements with a multitude of co-creating agencies (see, e.g. Bertella, 2014). By seeking out spatialised, lived, sensually experienced deviations from abstract historical narratives (Aoki & Yoshimitzu, 2015, p. 274), the walking tour pushed us, guides and participants alike, to actively engage in meaning and knowledge co-creation through experience held together by fragile social and cultural logics of the city (see Denzin, 1997, p. 267). When considered in this way, it is also important to be more reflexive on our role as tour guides in enacting spaces through our bodies, the socio-material entanglements and power relations, and how this enactment may influence reflection, agency and meaning-making in the walking tour (see Cutcher et al., 2016). In line with Hansen et al. (2014), we need to acknowledge and reflect on how we, as both guides and researchers, become entangled in the improvisation that shapes the phenomenon under scrutiny and presentation. Indeed, as we move on with the telling, the walking tour allows us to share our findings and research experiences with you and thus turn the narratives of the tour into a part of your experience (see Lund, 2008). Nonetheless, as Lund (2008, p. 101) indicates, the dynamics of the stories told during the tour were determined by your willingness to participate as well as the extent to which you brought forward your own biographies and fused them with the authorised narratives of the tour.
While the tour contains accurate facts and established stories about Rovaniemi, it was through our body and its ability to move from one position in space to another that the tour narratives were continuously evolving, co-creating new knowledge and understanding about the place and the concept of experience (Aoki & Yoshimitzu, 2015;Hancock, 2008;Pink et al., 2010). By walking the spaces and experiencing them unfolding as we went along, we were not always able to organise and focus our arguments as we can in the written form; nor could we keep the conceptual frameworks neatly separated to make 'a clear academic contribution'. Walking meant that experiences unfolded in the life-world messiness, allowing us access to engage with the multitudinous of non-representational sensitivities (see Law & Urry, 2004).
In the walking tour, we followed the conceptualisation of the mind and the body as a single totality in that all experience and thought is embodied and entwined with how we relate to others (Hancock, 2008;Nancy, 1992Nancy, /1996Veijola, 2014;Watkin, 2009). This ontological stance points out that the basic and fundamental way of understanding the world is through embodiment and in relation to others in a given time and space. Indeed, our bodies are us and we are expressed through our bodies (Veijola & Jokinen, 1994;Hancock, 2008Hancock, , p. 1366). Yet to bring the bodily sensations and feelings under conscious reflection and scrutiny demands body-reflexivity. This means giving attention to the 'various, perhaps seemingly insignificant, physical and social bodily issues' encountered (Valtonen & Haanpää, 2018, p. 138). A walking tour as a method of presentation might help you, our academic participants, to pay attention and consciously turn towards the non-representational sensitivities in your own research endeavours. It provides insight on how consumption experiences become alive and are co-created in different spaces through and in the midst of various moving human and non-human agents. Here we have gained insight on touristic practice, but similarly, we could walk and engage with non-representational sensitivities in, for example, retail spaces. A walking tour as a way of presentation also allows us to investigate the ways of gaining knowledge, how we can tackle and unpack spaces, and places unfolding in movement (see Vannini, 2015).
Even though we have been advocating for the sensuous and affective, nonrepresentational account of an experience, here we are again relying on a textual presentation to put these ideas forward. The final point we want to make before departing our separate ways is this: What would it mean for our academic epistemic cultures to truly appreciate and engage with the non-representational forms of knowledge and their production? There have been suggestions on presenting the results in unconventional forms, but often times, they are still accompanied by the more traditional textual piece (Hill et al., 2014; see also Dowling et al., 2017). We can write that we should do differently but we haven't yet been too creative in this effort. Through the walking tour, we tried to investigate how we can tap into the nonrepresentational sensitivities of our surroundings, and sense, experience, recognise, and relate to them as a collective effort. However, the question still remains as to whether or not this has anything to do with changing the ways we do knowledge in academia. In the competitive and metrics-based culture of publish or perish, are we doomed to continue reflecting all of our different ways of presenting in the form of a journal article? Or could we truly be able to rethink the ways of communication, presentation and impact of the knowledge we produce (see Dowling et al., 2017, p. 829)? Maybe you'll join us in reflecting upon this question on a walking tour here in the cityscape of Rovaniemi once the virus has lost its agentic forces.
But now, we want to thank you for joining us in these interesting, yet not so safe, travels along the new presentational pathways! We hope our roads cross again at some point in time. And please, don't forget to give us feedback! Notes 1. This 'textual tour' builds on a walking tour designed and executed by the authors as part of an international summer school that focused on tourism experiences. The text does not describe the tour in its entirety; rather the most evocative examples from the itinerary were selected in order to keep the publication within its limits. 2. In World War II, almost all of Lapland's buildings were burnt by retreating German soldiers. In Rovaniemi, over 90% of buildings were destroyed (https://www.warhistoryonline.com/worldwar-ii/lapland-war-fight-finland-leave-war.html?chrome=1). 3. http://www.marttaperinne.fi/aikajana/1890/jarjeston-perustaminen/.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors
Minni Haanpää (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in tourism studies at the Multidimensional Tourism Institute (MTI), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland. Her research interests are in the areas of tourism and event experiences, affect, co-creation and ethnographic methodologies, especially videography and autoethnography. Haanpää's current research projects explore the possibilities of tourism as social change in the Nordic urban context and technology-mediated tourism experiences. Her work has been published in Journal of Business Ethics, Tourism Geographies, Tourism Recreation Research, Society and Leisure and in edited, peer-reviewed books. Haanpää is a certified tourist guide. Maria Hakkarainen (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in tourism studies at the Multidimensional Tourism Institute (MTI), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland. She is an expert in participatory economies of tourism: tourism mobility ecosystems, sharing economy in tourism, participatory research methods and project development. She does research, teaches and trains within her areas of interest and has also authored and co-authored publications in tourism journals and books. Hakkarainen has been involved in several national and regional level tourism development processes and projects in Finland. Currently she works as a Principal Investigator in the Travelers Hospitality and Mobility Ecosystem, FIT ME! -project. Hakkarainen is also a certified tourist guide.