Within Worlds: London Docklands and the Phenomenology of Global Thinking

This project provides an intimate world history of London's docklands from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 until 1939. Through this history it explores a counterintuitive idea: that 'the world' is made through everyday sensory experience and that it is therefore historical and particular, not pre-given and universal.

I develop this idea through two core questions. First: How did the sensory and affective encounters of docklands inhabitants create the scales, or 'worlds', they inhabited? Contemporary commentators regarded the opening of the Suez Canal, and the quadrupling of global shipping this caused, as enabling the integration of the world into a single time and space.

The history of London's docklands is often told as that of a hub of trade and migration making this integration possible. My project instead examines how the diverse social groups of London's docklands, from dockers to Chinese sailors, made their own worlds through historically particular embodied encounters. I read against the grain of police and legal documents to reconstruct everyday sensory encounters within dock warehouses, wharfs, and waterways, showing how these inflected global transformations in trade, migration, and imperial expansion.

I also examine the ways in which the architectural divisions of docklands space demarcated racial, national, and legal boundaries within its inhabitants' worlds.

Second, I ask: How did docklands inhabitants' sense of scale shape fundamental existential experiences of capability, trust, belonging, and uncertainty? I explore this question through tracing relationships between select docklands families over three generations. Using personal papers and online newspapers and databases, I show how the sensory and affective encounters of docklands inhabitants cut across ethnic, religious, and national lines, creating worlds which, like the families themselves, spanned both streets and oceans.

I examine how docklands families were fractured or bound together by ties of commerce, love, or simply proximity, and use these stories to contest generic accounts of migrant 'assimilation' or 'cosmopolitanism' in London. By following this web of connections across the docklands and over time, I demonstrate how what we perceive as possible-our experiences of hope, desire, and precarity, for example-is grounded in our everyday embodied relationships with others and our environment.

I explore these questions through several experimental outputs. Inspired by novels which tell the history of a nation through that of a family, I will develop a book which weaves together the stories of docklands families to narrate the history of the 'worlds' they inhabited. This work will be the first to use phenomenology, or the philosophy of perception, as a form of historical writing, an idea I will also develop through an interdisciplinary journal article and three major international online forums.

I will also, with a postdoctoral research assistant, produce a film and podcast episode which creatively imagine how contemporary architecture mediates our sense of belonging in a world.

Taken together, this project provides a unique integration of the sensory and global history of London's docklands, pioneers a new methodology for examining the construction of worlds, and develops creative interpretations of the embodied perception of architecture in the contemporary city.