Walking: A sociological field guide

What does it mean to walk sociologically?

Join editor, Emma Jackson (Visiting Senior research fellow, LSE), and a range of contributors for a special event to celebrate the publication of Walking: A sociological field guide, a new book published by Manchester University Press.

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.

This book launch brings together a range of the book's contributors in conversation with Suzi Hall.

Meet our speaker and chair

Emma Jackson is an urban sociologist and research consultant working on place and belonging in urban spaces, and creative and qualitative research methods. She is an Associate at Art of Regeneration, Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at the LSE, and Honorary Professor at Goldsmiths. Walking has long been a part of Emma's writing, teaching and research.

Laura Henneke is currently writing up her PhD thesis, in which she investigates the infrastructures that facilitate the trade of small commodities along the China-Europe corridor, including wholesale markets, freight yards and trains. She began her PhD project in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths and is now affiliated with the Institute of Architecture at the Technical University of Berlin.

Caroline Knowles is Honorary Professor of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London (2022) published by Penguin Random House and Uneasy Streets: How Chinese Money is Remaking Urban Britain (2026) published by Hurst.

Nirmal Puwar is a Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Walking has been a central feature of creative methods practised by Nirmal across sites and platforms. Building on her classic book Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place (2004) she has designed feminist and post-colonial tours of consecrated institutions, such as parliaments and a cathedral. She has also developed a method of walking along with different kinds of knowledge makers: artists, botanists, activists, soil scientists and ghosts. This is realised in her book One Mile Walk (Punctum Press)

Alex Rhys-Taylor is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Head of the School of Global Change, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is an ethnographer with a special interest in processes of change and how they are 'sensed' and experienced. His work spans a range of urban sites from snooker halls and jellied eel stands to street markets, fried chicken shops and dank alleyways. He lives in London and walks wherever he can.

Suzanne Hall is Professor of Sociology at LSE and Head of Department. Her work explores the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation. Suzi focuses on everyday claims to space and how political economies of displacement shape racial borders, migrant livelihoods, and urban multicultures. She is the author of The Migrant’s Paradox (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and City Street and Citizen (Routledge, 2012). In 2025 she received the LSE Student Union award for "Outstanding Teacher of the Year".

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