Going for a walk with twenty sociologists, this collection is a playful rendition of the social worlds that we move in and through. From city streets to coastlines, along riverbanks and through street markets, alone and together, each walk blurs descriptive, poetic and theoretical observations and insights to reveal the worlds we live in afresh. Attending to the politics and poetics of walking and place, the collection challenges the taken for granted privileges of mobility, highlights the ways in which walking is embodied and situated, and shows how social life unfolds in and through spaces. Learning on and from the streets, tracing footprints, and attending to rhythms, these walks map sociological thought, and carve new paths in the terrain of the sociological imagination.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: a sociological field guide – Emma Jackson and Charlotte Bates
Circulate
1 Pound shop: walking the intersections between Yiwu and Dalston – Laura Henneke and Caroline Knowles
2 Hiding in plain sight: walking through race and space on Brixton Station Road – Karis Campion
3 Walking routes, talking toilets: exploring pitstops of public toilet access in everyday life – Lauren White
4 Distribution landscapes: a walk through the trading estates of south London – Louise Rondel
5 Walking with nurdles: reflections on a plastic beach clean – Alice Mah
Trace
6 Breaking down the walls of Partick: tracing cycles of urban neoliberalism and resistance – Kirsteen Paton
7 Walls and bridges: or, what’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding – Daryl Martin
8 Traces of industrial York – Nicholas Gane
9 A walk along Chester’s canal: peeling back the past to rediscover colonial era Cheshire – Julia Bennett
10 Walking the line: search practices, environment and the practice of care in mountain rescue work – Robin James Smith
11 Walking through waves: technology, the Thames and urban development – Alex Rhys-Taylor
12 In the Big Yin’s footsteps: class, belonging and the long walk home – Les Back
13 Under a hawthorn tree or thoughts about nightingales and war – Vron Ware
Recompose
14 The rhythms of walking and doing sociology on The Street – Dawn Lyon
15 Territory and temporality on the university campus – Katherine Quinn
16 Your feet may change size: murder mystery, motherhood and the anti-carceral imagination – Phil Crockett Thomas
17 Black dog, brown disabled man, white world – Viji Kuppan
18 Listening to urban change on the River Ravensbourne – Emma Jackson
19 Walking into the current – Charlotte Bates
20 Walking away and returning: letting go of ashes in Blackpool and Stratford Upon Avon – Nirmal Puwar
Hidden track
Index