Caroline Knowles
Biographic Data
| ID | 3583945 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Caroline Knowles |
| GIVEN NAMES | Caroline |
| FAMILY NAME | Knowles |
| SIGNATURE | KNOWLES C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 219 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Using co-creation to explore important aspects of peer-mentoring for undergraduate students
The challenges facing students in Higher Education are increasing. Peer mentoring can be used to support students, promote integration, and reduce drop-out, yet any peer-mentoring programme should meet the needs of students without replacing other forms of support. This project used two co-creation workshops to explore undergraduate student (N = 9) and staff (N = 4) values of academic and pastoral support, to inform the design of future peer ment…
Alrick CAMBRIDGE and Stephan FEUCHT- Wang, Where You Belong, Avebury
The “Haves” and the “Have YACHTS
In the decade between 2007 and 2017 London changed fundamentally. This article is about how the actions of the transnational über- wealthy — the “have yachts” — impinged on the life- worlds of the “merely wealthy” — “the haves.” As the authors explore the conceptual utility of gentrification as a way of thinking about these seismic urban changes, they conclude that profound socio- spatial changes and new intensities in the financialization of hou…
Reflections on researching transnational migrants and the fieldwork challenges of studying co-nationals abroad
This article offers reflections on the process of researchingtransnational migration, and particularly the fieldworkchallenges and difficulties that can emerge when studyingco-nationals abroad. Based on two distinct research projectson transnational migration (one on Brazilians in Londonand the other on Britons in Beijing), which used similarmethodological tools and faced similar challenges, we arguethatcombining a mobile ethnographic methodologi…
Strangers at our door
Reimagining Chinese London
Untangling translocal urban textures of trash
The great anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that dirt is never an isolated event but belongs to a system. But rather than being the by‐product of a systematic ordering, I argue that dirt is one of the places where urban assemblages and lives, of an improvised and ad hoc kind, are rigged together. Not matter out of place then, but matter making place. This paper explores the analytic potential of trash as a lens onto city‐making and concludes that…
Walking plutocratic London
Exploring fragments of a spatially calibrated dialogic between wealthy lives and the landscapes of their production and enactment describes this paper’s central aim. The dynamic between plutocrats and their neighbourhood coproduces both, exposing social and built architectures simultaneously; revealing scraps of information about who plutocrats are and how they live, plugging a gap in the literature on elites with a mobile-micro-spatial-biographi…
Reframing sociologies of ethnicity and migration in encounters with Chinese London
In this paper I argue that the intersecting sociologies of ethnicity and migration work from a series of interconnected blind spots hindering effective analysis of the current UK situation. Both operate analytically within the limitations of an 'immigrant problem' framework; are overinvested in state agendas; privilege a nation state analysis; are narrowly focused on distributions of migrant bodies, and on receiving, at the expense of sending, co…
Improvising and Navigating Mobilities
This article aims to deepen and extend theoretical understanding of mobility by exploring some of the mechanisms by which it operates. It introduces the concept and practices of 'tacking' as a frame for examining the creative processes of navigation and improvisation through which people approach and reflect on the irregularities and uncertainties of their everyday rounds, enacted or otherwise narrated as spatial biography - lives conceived in mo…
Sites of race
H ong K ong, Migrants in
Hong Kong is a highly urbanized semiautonomous special administrative region (SAR) of China. A stylish high‐rise fractal city and a megacity in the making, Hong Kong is part of a cross‐border metropolitan matrix that is set to become the biggest urban area in the world. Migration grinds a particular lens onto Hong Kong, which has been shaped by successive waves of migrants and bears the architectural and cultural traces of the lives they led. Mos…
Narratives of urban life
On one level this is a delightful collection of urban stories. It lingers on the estates and streets of South London; it pauses on East London markets to smell the mangos; it chases down the Africa
The Flip-Flop Trail and Fragile Globalization
The flip-flop trail is an object biography. It follows the translocal journeys of a pair of plastic sandals, unpacking the lives and landscapes hidden in the plastic. An important shoe-infrastructure enabling human mobility, flip-flops work as an offbeat proxy for globalization too. They proffer empirical footings in translocally-connected worlds in which people and the social textures and terrains of their everyday lives come to the fore, in pla…
Race, multiculture and social policy
This book offers a detailed empirical analysis of ethnicity, race and racism in multicultural Britain over key areas of social policy - migration, housing, policing, health, education and employmen
The impact of impact
This paper explores ways in which the new preoccupation with “impact” – understood as “influence” beyond the academy – formalised in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) in UK universities reshapes the working conditions and practices in which contemporary anthropology and sociology are produced and, ultimately, what these disciplines are able to be. It suggests that impact, in concert with broader changes in, what we might think of as, t…
Dancing with bulldozers
This paper details two research encounters with Beijing. It explores the connections migrants make with the city in navigating it, and offers this as a way of thinking about cities. The first encounter is with poor internal, sometimes called ‘floating’, migrants in Xiao Jiahe on the NW edge of the city. The second is with UK migrants in the gated community ‘Capital Retreat’ on the NE edge of the city near the airport. Both locations are city arri…
The Urban Problematic
In dialogue with Bishop and Phillips’ (2013) concern to establish what the category of the urban might mean in the context of megacities, this piece offers four provocations in the spirit of developing their analysis. The first is the need to attend to the specifics of megacities; the second insists on the importance of including those who navigate them in the analysis; the third is a concern to unwind different forms of urban traction, and the f…
Nigerian London
This paper explores the idea of 'superdiversity' at the city level through two churches with different approaches to architectural visibility: the hypervisible Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the invisible Igbo Catholic Church, both in North London, guide our exploration of invisible Nigerian London. Although Nigerians have lived in London for over 200 years, they live beneath the radar of policy and public recognition rather than as a…
Global Child Poverty and Well-Being
This book brings together theoretical, methodological and policy-relevant contributions by leading researchers on international child poverty.
Seeing the Olympics
Collection of articles and photo-essays from international researchers and photographers (inc. Chris Dorley-Brown, Paul Seawright) commissioned and edited/curated to mark the Olympics
Nigerian London and British Hong Kong
The city remains a crucial arena in condensing the challenges we face in migration and transnational research. Our understanding of cities and their connections with migration and ethnicity lies at the centre of these challenges and raises two problems demanding urgent attention. These relationships are under-theorised and poorly demonstrated. Secondly, older, more settled notions of the relationship between ethnicity, migration and space persist…
Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organizations
Pauline Leonard, Farnham, Ashgate (Studies in Migration and Diaspora), 2010, 174 pp, ISBN: 978 0 7546 7365 1,, £50.00 (cloth) This book fills important gaps in the literature on professional migran
Cities on the move
This paper explores the imaginative and analytical potential of ‘journeys’ in understanding the fabric and fabrication of cities and urban lives. Journeys foreground navigational skill offering a grounded way of thinking about contemporary mobilities and the interpenetration of distant worlds. This paper suggests some of the ways in which journeys matter and make matter, in flesh and stone, co‐creating social interactions, social relationships an…
Mobile sociology
John Urry's (2010 [2000]) Mobile Sociology remains as relevant as when it was first published. His 'manifesto for sociology' reveals the kind of grand plans that only theoreticians of Urry's standing have the courage to advance. His eloquent argument for a sociology that attends to 'the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information, and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, such diverse mo…
Nigerian London
This paper explores the idea of 'superdiversity' at the city level through two churches with different approaches to architectural visibility: the hypervisible Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the invisible Igbo Catholic Church, both in North London, guide our exploration of invisible Nigerian London. Although Nigerians have lived in London for over 200 years, they live beneath the radar of policy and public recognition rather than as a…
The landscape of post-imperial whiteness in rural Britain
Rural racism is a serious political problem and this paper explores the conditions of its production. Most significant among conditions producing racism is not the management of racialized otherness, as many writers contend, but the fabrication of white Britishness itself in the peculiar, shifting, social alchemy of rural life and landscape. Particularly important in the production of rural whiteness is the 'Raj factor'; the contribution of retur…
Seeing race through the lens
This article reflects on the uses of visual ethnography to expose the mundane substance of racial categories and intersections with (racialized, ethnicized) cultural difference. Race and ethnicity are lived as well as narrated and, indeed, living is a form of narration which is particularly amenable to visual exploration. It is set in an empirical investigation of a microcosm of global migration in the lives of two white British lifestyle migrant…
Improvising and Navigating Mobilities
This article aims to deepen and extend theoretical understanding of mobility by exploring some of the mechanisms by which it operates. It introduces the concept and practices of 'tacking' as a frame for examining the creative processes of navigation and improvisation through which people approach and reflect on the irregularities and uncertainties of their everyday rounds, enacted or otherwise narrated as spatial biography - lives conceived in mo…
The “Haves” and the “Have YACHTS
In the decade between 2007 and 2017 London changed fundamentally. This article is about how the actions of the transnational über- wealthy — the “have yachts” — impinged on the life- worlds of the “merely wealthy” — “the haves.” As the authors explore the conceptual utility of gentrification as a way of thinking about these seismic urban changes, they conclude that profound socio- spatial changes and new intensities in the financialization of hou…
Burger King, Dunkin Donuts and community mental health care
Cities on the move
This paper explores the imaginative and analytical potential of ‘journeys’ in understanding the fabric and fabrication of cities and urban lives. Journeys foreground navigational skill offering a grounded way of thinking about contemporary mobilities and the interpenetration of distant worlds. This paper suggests some of the ways in which journeys matter and make matter, in flesh and stone, co‐creating social interactions, social relationships an…
The Flip-Flop Trail and Fragile Globalization
The flip-flop trail is an object biography. It follows the translocal journeys of a pair of plastic sandals, unpacking the lives and landscapes hidden in the plastic. An important shoe-infrastructure enabling human mobility, flip-flops work as an offbeat proxy for globalization too. They proffer empirical footings in translocally-connected worlds in which people and the social textures and terrains of their everyday lives come to the fore, in pla…
Handling your Baggage in the Field Reflections on research relationships 1
This paper explores some of the benefits of pursuing difficult, antagonistic, research relationships in the context of biographical interviewing methods that are sensitive to spatial relationships. It argues that confronting sources of tension between researchers and informants and being more open about the emotional baggage we bring to the field as researchers yields more rigorous fieldwork with more insightful results. The argument is developed…
More than Words
[No abstract]
Mobile sociology
John Urry's (2010 [2000]) Mobile Sociology remains as relevant as when it was first published. His 'manifesto for sociology' reveals the kind of grand plans that only theoreticians of Urry's standing have the courage to advance. His eloquent argument for a sociology that attends to 'the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information, and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, such diverse mo…
Walking plutocratic London
Exploring fragments of a spatially calibrated dialogic between wealthy lives and the landscapes of their production and enactment describes this paper’s central aim. The dynamic between plutocrats and their neighbourhood coproduces both, exposing social and built architectures simultaneously; revealing scraps of information about who plutocrats are and how they live, plugging a gap in the literature on elites with a mobile-micro-spatial-biographi…
Race, multiculture and social policy
This book offers a detailed empirical analysis of ethnicity, race and racism in multicultural Britain over key areas of social policy - migration, housing, policing, health, education and employmen
Nigerian London and British Hong Kong
The city remains a crucial arena in condensing the challenges we face in migration and transnational research. Our understanding of cities and their connections with migration and ethnicity lies at the centre of these challenges and raises two problems demanding urgent attention. These relationships are under-theorised and poorly demonstrated. Secondly, older, more settled notions of the relationship between ethnicity, migration and space persist…
Race, Identities and Lives
This paper uses an individual biography to make an analysis of racial-ized identity. It explores the connections between subjectivity and the broader social scenes in which it operates, and argues that identity is the outcome of a negotiation between existential conceptions of the self in racial terms, and the administrative mechanisms through which individuals are dealt with as members of social categories. By thinking about identity in terms of…
Dancing with bulldozers
This paper details two research encounters with Beijing. It explores the connections migrants make with the city in navigating it, and offers this as a way of thinking about cities. The first encounter is with poor internal, sometimes called ‘floating’, migrants in Xiao Jiahe on the NW edge of the city. The second is with UK migrants in the gated community ‘Capital Retreat’ on the NE edge of the city near the airport. Both locations are city arri…
Reframing sociologies of ethnicity and migration in encounters with Chinese London
In this paper I argue that the intersecting sociologies of ethnicity and migration work from a series of interconnected blind spots hindering effective analysis of the current UK situation. Both operate analytically within the limitations of an 'immigrant problem' framework; are overinvested in state agendas; privilege a nation state analysis; are narrowly focused on distributions of migrant bodies, and on receiving, at the expense of sending, co…
Racism and Psychiatry
Psychiatry produces racialized narratives which generate and sustain its own forms of racial distinction; it provides expertise in validating the racialized narratives of a range of social agencies and it offers therapeutic intervention to heal those whose lives are publicly defined with reference to race. This paper explores these fragmented and sometimes contradictory relationships between psychiatry and race through the story of a black teache…
The symbolic empire and the history of racial inequality
Historiography is routinely employed to support contemporary accounts of racial inequality. Subjecting Khan's (1991) exploration of the history of East Indians1 in Canada (1903-47) to critical analysis this article argues that 'empire' is used as a narrative and symbolic device. But the symbolic empire is a constrained analytic tool which can only produce a circumscribed account of race and a limited form of race politics. By substituting the sym…
Afro Caribbeans and Schizophrenia
This paper discusses the various ways in which British Afro Caribbeans are disadvantaged in their encounter with psychiatry. It suggests that far from being monolithic and institutional, racism must be deconstructed and traced to the actions, practices and procedure involved in specific encounters. The procedures of psychiatry are examined through the discourses of psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology. From this analysis it is suggested that p…
The Urban Problematic
In dialogue with Bishop and Phillips’ (2013) concern to establish what the category of the urban might mean in the context of megacities, this piece offers four provocations in the spirit of developing their analysis. The first is the need to attend to the specifics of megacities; the second insists on the importance of including those who navigate them in the analysis; the third is a concern to unwind different forms of urban traction, and the f…
Home and Away
This article conceptualizes the British Empire as a spatial arrangement created and sustained in the everyday activities of women. Focusing on the work of Jane Waterston – a missionary and doctor working in South Africa – and Mary Kingsley – a traveller and political lobbyist – it argues that women played an important part in fabricating the social relationships and practical activities of empire in their daily lives. Women also contributed to th…
Afro Caribbeans and Schizophrenia
This paper discusses the various ways in which British Afro Caribbeans are disadvantaged in their encounter with psychiatry. It suggests that far from being monolithic and institutional, racism must be deconstructed and traced to the actions, practices and procedure involved in specific encounters. The procedures of psychiatry are examined through the discourses of psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology. From this analysis it is suggested that p…
Race, discourse, and labourism
Racism and Psychiatry
Psychiatry produces racialized narratives which generate and sustain its own forms of racial distinction; it provides expertise in validating the racialized narratives of a range of social agencies and it offers therapeutic intervention to heal those whose lives are publicly defined with reference to race. This paper explores these fragmented and sometimes contradictory relationships between psychiatry and race through the story of a black teache…
The symbolic empire and the history of racial inequality
Historiography is routinely employed to support contemporary accounts of racial inequality. Subjecting Khan's (1991) exploration of the history of East Indians1 in Canada (1903-47) to critical analysis this article argues that 'empire' is used as a narrative and symbolic device. But the symbolic empire is a constrained analytic tool which can only produce a circumscribed account of race and a limited form of race politics. By substituting the sym…
Re-Situating Identities
Race, Identities and Lives
This paper uses an individual biography to make an analysis of racial-ized identity. It explores the connections between subjectivity and the broader social scenes in which it operates, and argues that identity is the outcome of a negotiation between existential conceptions of the self in racial terms, and the administrative mechanisms through which individuals are dealt with as members of social categories. By thinking about identity in terms of…
Burger King, Dunkin Donuts and community mental health care
Home and Away
This article conceptualizes the British Empire as a spatial arrangement created and sustained in the everyday activities of women. Focusing on the work of Jane Waterston – a missionary and doctor working in South Africa – and Mary Kingsley – a traveller and political lobbyist – it argues that women played an important part in fabricating the social relationships and practical activities of empire in their daily lives. Women also contributed to th…
Changing Works
Race and Social Analysis
Caroline Knowles combines biographical and spatial analysis to provide an up-to-date account of the ways race and ethnicity operate in a global context. She argues that race and ethnicity is intricately woven into the social landscapes in which we live
Picturing the Social Landscape
We live in a visual culture, and visual evidence is increasingly central to social research. In this collection an international range of experts explain how they have used visual methods in their own research, examine their advantages and limitations, and show how they have been used alongside other research techniques. Contributors explore the following ideas: * self and identity * visualizing domestic space * visualizing urban landscapes * vis…
Picturing the social landscape
"In this collection an international range of experts explain how they have used visual methods in their own research, examine their advantages and limitations, and show how they have been used alongside other research techniques." "The collection showcases different methods in different contexts through the examination of a variety of topical issues. Methods covered include photo and video diaries, the use of images produced by respondents, the …
Making Race Matter
This collection of original pieces brings together critical perspectives on the intersection of ethnic and gender identities as spatialized forms of embodied social practice, tackling important recent themes such as whiteness, masculinity, the body, sexuality, diaspora and globalization. Designed to bring these debates to students in a way that bridges contemporary theory with vivid case material, this is a lively and wide-ranging text of relevan…
Making Race Matter
Race, Discourse and Labourism
Race, Discourse and Labourism argues that the commonwealth of socialism is founded upon a well-concealed history of brutality and repression. Caroline Knowles details the historical conditions of the emergence of race through Labour's dealings with Indian independence negotiations and anti-semitism in the thirties, and the effects of this on the conceptions of black citizenship, multi-racialism and black representation in labour politics
Visually narrating post‐colonial lives
This paper is about two journeys: the first through the memories of an old soldier captured by the Japanese in the Second World War; the second through the present life to which this past gave rise, in which the old soldier tends the graves of his fellow soldiers as part of his current navigation by bus and taxi of the post‐colonial landscape of Hong Kong
More than Words
[No abstract]
Handling your Baggage in the Field Reflections on research relationships 1
This paper explores some of the benefits of pursuing difficult, antagonistic, research relationships in the context of biographical interviewing methods that are sensitive to spatial relationships. It argues that confronting sources of tension between researchers and informants and being more open about the emotional baggage we bring to the field as researchers yields more rigorous fieldwork with more insightful results. The argument is developed…
Introduction
Seeing race through the lens
This article reflects on the uses of visual ethnography to expose the mundane substance of racial categories and intersections with (racialized, ethnicized) cultural difference. Race and ethnicity are lived as well as narrated and, indeed, living is a form of narration which is particularly amenable to visual exploration. It is set in an empirical investigation of a microcosm of global migration in the lives of two white British lifestyle migrant…
The landscape of post-imperial whiteness in rural Britain
Rural racism is a serious political problem and this paper explores the conditions of its production. Most significant among conditions producing racism is not the management of racialized otherness, as many writers contend, but the fabrication of white Britishness itself in the peculiar, shifting, social alchemy of rural life and landscape. Particularly important in the production of rural whiteness is the 'Raj factor'; the contribution of retur…
Hong Kong
Mobile sociology
John Urry's (2010 [2000]) Mobile Sociology remains as relevant as when it was first published. His 'manifesto for sociology' reveals the kind of grand plans that only theoreticians of Urry's standing have the courage to advance. His eloquent argument for a sociology that attends to 'the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information, and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, such diverse mo…
Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organizations
Pauline Leonard, Farnham, Ashgate (Studies in Migration and Diaspora), 2010, 174 pp, ISBN: 978 0 7546 7365 1,, £50.00 (cloth) This book fills important gaps in the literature on professional migran
Cities on the move
This paper explores the imaginative and analytical potential of ‘journeys’ in understanding the fabric and fabrication of cities and urban lives. Journeys foreground navigational skill offering a grounded way of thinking about contemporary mobilities and the interpenetration of distant worlds. This paper suggests some of the ways in which journeys matter and make matter, in flesh and stone, co‐creating social interactions, social relationships an…
Sociology (38 works) · Political science (25 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Art (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · Anthropology (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · History (11 works) · Law (11 works)