About the CUCR

CUCR is a well established interdisciplinary research centre within Goldsmiths' Department of Sociology with a distinguished history of collaboration with local communities and activists. It combines theoretical investigation with critical ‘local’ project implementation from Deptford to Jakarta. CUCR is concerned with key issues in the constitution and social (dis)organisation of city life; it plies the intersections between the built and the social fabric of cities in the global South as well as the global North, with a strong orientation towards the cultural and the visual. Within a moving matrix of constant transformation of urban physical and social forms we work across five strands.

• The circulations of people and objects constituting the global world. We are concerned with the chains and circuits composing all scales of migration: rural to urban as well as the trans-national and trans-local. Similarly, we track circulations of commodities and other objects of material culture.

• Non-Cities. These include assemblages called cities that serve as multiple sites and portals where urban life exceeds cities’ abilities to provide for its residents, including many parts of Africa, South America etc: cities that don’t look like cities. These also include refugee camps, special economic zones other non-city forms.

• Urban interventions through project implementation in the global North, including our Deptford backyard, and in the global South. Our focus is on participative action research, visual and other inventive methods. CUCR participates in major public policy interventions around key issues of urban governance in regeneration programmes, youth and community action.

• Communities, difference and social inequalities forms part of a long tradition of innovative work on race, ethnicity, nation, gender, sexuality and faith communities.

• The relationship between art and urban intervention/conceptualisation and art as urban intervention/conceptualisation combines our interest in visuality, mapping and urban culture. This is a strand of work that draws on the expertise of young scholars graduating from our MA and PhD programmes and who combine multi-media, film, photography and art skills with urban theory.

CUCR is the ‘intellectual’ home of two MA programmes and a PhD programme which are formally part of Sociology, and benefit from the size and diversity of scholarship in the Sociology Department. These are MA in Photography and Urban Culture, MA World Cites and Urban Life and a new practice-based MPhil/PhD in Visual Sociology. This unique combination of programmes consolidates and extends Goldsmiths international reputation in visual forms of urban social analysis. Academic programmes are supported with urban walks, extra seminars and workshops.

The head of centre is Professor Caroline Knowles. Our magazine is called Street Signs.