1,720,982 research outputs found
Sensing the Inner City: A Conversation with Alex Rhys-Taylor
Full text linkAlex Rhys-Taylor is an urban sociologist at the Goldsmiths University of London. His works are based on the relationship between experiences of the city (e.g., multisensory experiences) and histories of change. Given the importance of sensory methodologies in social sciences, the following conversation addresses their role in the comprehension of contemporary urban changes (e.g., touristification and housing crisis), social processes of discrimination (e.g., cultural disgust), and social history of urban areas (e.g., inner city and culinary experiences). These issues are addressed during the conversation by discussing the methodological and empirical implications of concepts like intersensoriality, sensescapes, inner city, and between the digital and the physical city
Walking through social research
No full textAs an ethnographic method walking has a long history, but it has only recently begun to attract focused attention. By walking alongside participants, researchers have been able to observe, experience, and make sense of a broad range of everyday practices. At the same time, the idea of talking and walking with participants has enabled research to be informed by the landscapes in which it takes place. By sharing conversations in place, and at the participants’ pace, sociologists are beginning to develop both a feel for, and a theoretical understanding of, the transient, embodied and multisensual aspects of walking. The result, as this collection demonstrates, is an understanding of the social world evermore congruent with people’s lived experiences of it.
This interdisciplinary collection comprises a unique journey through a variety of walking methodologies. The collection highlights a range of possibilities for enfolding sound, smell, emotion, movement and memory into our accounts, illustrating the sensuousness, skill, pitfalls and rewards of walking as a research practice. Each chapter draws on original empirical research to present ways of walking and to discuss the conceptual, practical and technical issues that walking entails. Alongside feet on the ground, the devices and technologies that make up hybrid research mobilities are brought to attention. The collection is bookended by two short pedestrian essays that take the reader on illustrative urban walks, suggesting routes through the city, as well as ways in which the reader might make their own path through walking methods
Seeing the need: urban outreach as sensory walking
Full text linkIn ‘Seeing the Need: Urban Outreach as Sensory Walking’, Tom Hall and Robin Smith team up to lead us on an urban patrol in Cardiff. Their chapter reports on the work of outreach and street care in the city, showing how a small team of council workers, whose job it is to make repeated tours through the centre of the city, day and night, locate and assist ‘vulnerable’ adults who may otherwise struggle to access mainstream health and social services. The work of outreach is performed as a repeated patrolling of public, commercial and neglected space in and around the city centre, with eyes and ears open for signs of need and difficulty. The aim is always to discern and uncover, but clients are often hard to find, riddled in among the busy, commonplace cityscape. Outreach, as a mode of urban, pedestrian exploration requires a particular attuning of the senses, in which motion and attention combine to glean clues from the urban environment
Air Walk: Monitoring Pollution and Experimenting with Speculative Forms of Participation
Full text linkThe rise of low-cost environmental monitoring technologies has shifted the subjects, sites and practices involved in detecting and experiencing air pollution. How might these new arrangements and detections of air pollution be further developed through practice-based research? This chapter discusses an ‘Air Walk’ held in the South London neighborhoods of New Cross Gate and Deptford in July 2013. The walk was a pilot event held as part of the Citizen Sense research project, which focuses on different citizen-based practices and technologies of environmental monitoring. The walk experiments with forms of participation, as an entry point for developing distinct approaches to working with monitoring technologies. In this way, the walk set out to investigate the various ways in which air pollution might be monitored, assessed and experienced, whether through digital, bodily or institutional means. Moving from descriptive approaches of participation to generative experiments with participation, the walk is a process for asking and testing how it might be possible to experiment with the experiences of air and air pollution by setting in motion the sites, participant encounters, monitoring kit, infrastructures, urban situations, and speculative practices as they come together in this context
Walking W8 in Manalos
Full text linkIn mediating the sensory footwork of dwelling, in connecting us with the ground on which our lives are lived-in-motion, appropriate shoes are needed. Few would countenance leaving home without shoes when embarking on the mundane journeys of everyday life: and this underscores their central, if rarely explored, function in mobility. Shoes need to fit the walker and the territory. Flip-flops, the world’s cheapest shoes, are for the beach, and for the poor in the global south who can’t afford other shoes. Manolos are London W8. If postcodes could be shoes, W8 would be a fabulous pair of high-heeled Manolos, suitably elegant, appropriately expensive. Plutocratic shoes: suitable for navigating one of London’s uber wealthy neighbourhoods, shoes for delicately stepping around the tensions between the concealment and exposure of wealth and erring on the side of exposure in an expensive pair of shoes. Shoes both express and co-compose urban social morphology and social distinction
Listening walks: a method of multiplicity
Full text linkA listening walk is a mode of walking in which listening to the sounds of spaces is the
focus. In this chapter, we look at the potential of listening walks to act as a research
method and pedagogic tool. We emphasise its flexibility and adaptability for different
purposes and research topics. To make this argument, we consider a listening walk led
by one of the authors in Edinburgh, Scotland. We demonstrate that, while listening
walks have been posited as a means of producing research data about perceived
soundscape quality, they also provide us with an endlessly repeatable and adaptable
method that can address a much broader range of research questions, and can be
embedded within a variety of teaching settings
Walking Through Social Research
No full textThis interdisciplinary collection comprises a unique journey through a variety of walking methodologies. The collection highlights a range of possibilities for enfolding sound, smell, emotion, movement, and memory into geographical and sociological accounts, illustrating the sensuousness, skill, pitfalls and rewards of walking as a research practice
Desire lines: walking in Woolwich
No full textReturning to south London, Charlotte Bates’ chapter ‘Desire Lines: Walking in Woolwich’, walks us through the redevelopment of a small urban square. Pausing at critical points in the history of the square’s redevelopment, the chapter discusses the ways in which walking – and desire – inform and reform practices of urban design, mobility, and dwelling. Weaving together observations and insights from site walks and interviews with the lead landscape architect, interviews with the access consultant and access panel group, interviews with local residents, ethnographic observations of social life in the square, and documentary analysis, this chapter shows how the practice of walking underlies the ways in which place is desired, imagined, made, and lived
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