‘The journeys between us’
Caroline Knowles: ‘The journeys between us: Sociology as encounters with navigation’
Tuesday 12 May 2009
An inaugural lecture given by Professor Caroline Knowles, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre of Urban and Community research. She presented a journey through her past research projects, located in different parts of the world, finishing with her most recent collaboration with artist Michael Tan of Nanying Technological Universtiy in Singapore on ‘Footwear and Social Fabrics’, an ‘object biography’ of the life-worlds and journeys of a pair of flip flop sandals from their production in China to their consumption in Ethiopia.
The talk is accompanied by an exhibition of a selection of photographs by Michael Tan in the Kingsway Corridor at Goldsmiths University.
A brief summary of her speech:
Caroline Knowles argues that the world in which we live is created in the journeys people make around it. Travel is no trivial pursuit: it matters and makes matter. Understanding how people travel is the key to understanding how the world works. How the world walks is how the world works! In this lecture she will argue that journeys and the skill with which people navigate constitute and expose the operation of the world on a global scale. So journeys provide powerful intersections at which to observe, ask questions and act. We are where we go, how we go and why. Drawing on examples of journeys in her recent research Knowles explores the world of homeless psychiatric patients on the streets of Montreal; British migrant ‘ladies who lunch’ living in Hong Kong; and the intersecting journeys of a Chinese migrant worker, a smuggler and an elderly woman living in Addis Ababa; all connected by the journey of a pair of flip-flop sandals. Caroline Knowles argues that viewing the social world from the standpoint of the journeys traversing it provides a simple and effective thinking tool in understanding the world in which we live. The lecture is powerfully enlivened by images made by photographers Ludovic Dabert, Douglas Harper and Michael Tan in the context of research collaboration between sociologist and artist.
more info: www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/sociology/staff/knowles.php
Tags: Caroline Knowles, CUCR, object, social fabric