Roadscapes : a sociopoetics of the road,, 2020

2019

In urban culture, the medium of vision is obvious and prevailing, most influential in the perception of the technician from an objective perspective of remove. Meanwhile, the city of the other senses seems to lie just beyond the threshold of certain perception, the inaccessible fixation of abstract critical thought. Yet the spatiality and physicality of the urban experience beyond vision evidently yields special empirical insight for practitioners and thinkers who try to get close to it. They have repeatedly sensed, moved and remembered their way towards its qualities through the avatar of the child, their privileged medium of the more-than-visual. The child's sensitivity to thresholds and transitions allows them special access to the liminal memory and dream spaces which mediate experience to construct our relations with the urban world.

This article offers a textual “deep map” of a series of experimental commutes undertaken in the west of Scotland in 2014. Recent developments in the field of transport studies have reconceived travel time as a far richer cultural experience than in previously utilitarian and economic approaches to the “problem” of commuting. Understanding their own commutes in these terms—as spaces of creativity, productivity and transformation—the authors trace the development of a performative “counterpractice” for their daily journeys between home and work. Deep mapping—as a form of “theory-informed story-telling”—is employed as a productive strategy to document this reimagination of ostensibly quotidian and functional travel. Importantly, this particular stage of the project is not presented as an end-point. Striving to develop an ongoing creative engagement with landscape, the authors continue this exploratory mobile research by connecting to other commuters’ journeys, and proposing a series of “strategies” for reimagining the daily commute; a list of prompts for future action within the routines and spaces of commuting. A range of alternative approaches to commuting are offered here to anyone who regularly travels to and from work to employ or develop as they wish, extending the mapping process to other routes and contexts.

Sociological Theory, 2021

Familiarity is an elusive concept, capturing what we know intimately and what we only recognize from having seen before. This article aims to disambiguate these interpretations by proposing a sociological conceptualization of familiarity as a dynamic relationship to the world that develops over time and through experience, and that allows one to progressively disattend from what appears as “usual.” Focusing on how urban environments and their human entities become familiar and stop being familiar, I propose that familiarity be thought of as an ongoing relational and interactional achievement, allowing us to focus on our daily activities while relying on a practical knowledge of our surroundings. The conceptualization process unfolds via five questions: What is familiarity? Where does it come from? What threatens it? What does it produce? How can it be operationalized and studied empirically?

2018

Writing is like dancing, it's moving (or making marks) to a beat, a beat inside. The things that are written-novels, poems and plays-hold those rhythms in them, ready to be released when read or performed. That beat doesn't come out of nowhere, it's the echo of the writer's experiences, their loves and losses. It's easy enough to hear the music in any piece of writing, but to understand

2013

In this essay, I want to explore the way in which we relate to our environment and its often contested histories through the simple action of taking a meander through an Edgeland 2 urban site-a site local to me and the place where I work (Sunderland in the North East of England). It is my contention that the action of moving slowly (or meandering) through an environment affects our experience of that place in ways that are not immediately apparent. Meandering allows the walker to stop whenever and wherever they find something interesting to 'explore'; and it allows them time to respond to the weather patterns and soundscapes of an environment. This creates an embodied experience which, when meandering in a group, seems to encourage the body and mind to respond by meandering across a range of different areas of thought. In my projects, these have included discussions around natural history, social history, politics and philosophy explored together in non-hierarchical and unstructured ways; ways which create new patterns of interdisciplinary and interconnected thinking.

2021

Space and Culture, 2017

There is growing scholarship both on how light (and darkness) shapes our perception and experience of our surroundings and coalesces particular affective experiences. In this article, we build on this emerging field to address a fundamental but unexplored question for understanding urban experience: how is the experience of everyday movement through the city constituted in relation to automated urban lighting. We argue that the affective and sensory aspects of the “lit world” need to be accounted for, an aspect of quotidian urban experience that remains underexplored. In doing so, we discuss a mobile sensory ethnography of public urban “light routes” by drawing on the words and photographs of people moving through the city of Melbourne, Australia on their journeys home at the end of the day. Their stories about automated lighting reveal how particular affective intensities, responses to urban complexity and aesthetic experiences emerged on the move, and begin to account for the role...

Essentially a travelogue, but also a travelogue through life itself, containing what I hope are universal messages for all readers.The real life experiences of a doctor from life in medical school to practice of Medicine and healthy life style tips at the end