Five years in the making, A Certain Logic of Expectations is a surprising, intriguing photo narrative of a well-known university-dominated city, created by Mexican photographer Arturo Soto.
Soto studied at Oxford as a doctoral student, traversing the city incognito, capturing the quirkiness of British suburbia, a counter-narrative to the tourism blurbs that often quote Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s line that Oxford is a city of ‘Dreaming Spires’.
As he writes: “Photographers can either carry their cameras at all times or lament the pictures they missed. Undergraduates become walking tourist attractions. Visitors love to take pictures with them when they wear their ‘subfusc’ and a carnation on their lapel on exam days, or when they get trashed with foam, confetti, and prosecco at the end of Trinity term. The University’s guidelines stipulate that students have to live within twenty-five miles from Carfax Tower. The rule is rarely enforced with doctoral students, many of whom rather keep their cosmopolitan London lives. Some even commute from Amsterdam, Berlin, or Zurich just for the graduate seminars. They are usually unimpressed by the quality of coffee here and return to their havens as soon as possible.”



Walking Writers Salons are hour-long events in which you will get to meet a Walking Writer and learn from them how they weave writing and walking, and how they interpret their surroundings. Each Salon will include a discussion with the author, inviting questions from the audience, and may include a multiple choice quiz or other amusing challenge, in which a winner will receive a prize.
| VIdeo recording |
Related
A Certain Logic of Expectations
A Certain Logic of Expectations proposes a counter-narrative of the British city of Oxford that resists the visual imperatives of its ancient university. For the past five years, Arturo Soto (MX) explored the longstanding division between town and gown through a careful selection of spaces and objects.His visual narrative is loosely structured around the following thematic strands: notions of home and
Beneath the Dreaming Spires; Walking Wriers Salon with Arturo Soto
Five years in the making, A Certain Logic of Expectations is a surprising, intriguing photo narrative of a well-known university-dominated city, created by Mexican photographer Arturo Soto. Soto studied at Oxford as a doctoral student, traversing the city incognito, capturing the quirkiness of British suburbia, a counter-narrative to the tourism blurbs that often quote Victorian
Find Your London: Tree or False?
Devised by Andrew Stuck of the Museum of London, this walkshop became a regular event as part of the Mayor of London’s London Tree Week, and subsequent Urban Tree Festivals. Everyone has heard ‘an old wives’ tale’ about a certain tree species, some of which have a layer of truth within them, others are downright
Walking the blue and the green
We welcome back Martyn Howe as a Walking Writers Salon guest to celebrate his new book The Coast is Our Compass. Why are we drawn to a place where the land meets the sea? And what deeper truths emerge when these instincts come together in a journey around England’s shoreline? The Coast is Our Compass
Walking towards a home in Greece
When author Julian Hoffman first arrived in Greece’s remote Prespa region, his Greek was “almost non-existent.” Walking became a form of literacy for him—a way to learn the language of the land by tracing the steps of others, reading stone walls, abandoned houses, plant communities, and animal tracks. “Walking was a way in,” he says,
A 100 day Walk across Europe with a Wolf for company
Conservation policies across Europe have been encouraging ‘re-wilding’ of landscapes, including the re-introduction for animals that once roamed more freely. Scientists have been tracking such re-introductions, and back in 2011, a wolf left its family pack in Slovenia, crossed the Alps and journeyed across Europe for thousands of kilometres. Critically-acclaimed and celebrated travel writer Adam
Words to Light the Dark: Writing the worlds of other animals
How do we bridge the experiential gap between that of humans and other animals with writing that feels intelligible to us, while reaching for the differences in how other animals sense, think, and act? Join Chantal Lyons author of Groundbreakers: the return of Britain’s Wild Boar and our story writer-in-residence as she hosts Emma Geen,

You must be logged in to post a comment.