SLOP3908: Regulars: The Psychology of Third Places

A fieldwork course on third places — the pub, the barbershop, the laundromat, the guild hall. You will sit in a different one most weeks, return to one until you can argue about it, and make the case for a place that should exist.

• third places
• belonging
• fieldwork

There is a pub near campus where, at half past four on a Tuesday, the same four people are at the same end of the bar. Nobody arranged it. Two of them do not know each other's surnames. This course is about that room, and the barbershop, the laundromat, the platform and the guild hall.

What you will do

Every Thursday is a Round — a visit with a brief. Most weeks that means a real room: pubs, barbershops, laundromats, bus platforms, an archive and a guild hall inside a game, counting who is there and writing it down while you sit there; twice the brief forbids that and makes you say why. Three Rounds are not site visits at all — week 3 runs indoors on each other, week 6 maps your own network, week 11 is a desk and the mortality data. One place you return to until you can argue about it. Monday lectures give you the theory to argue with: belonging as a drive, exclusion measured in a lab, weak ties, social capital and what isolation costs.

You walk out with three things: four sets of raw field notes and an honest page on what they were blind to, a 2500-word audit of one real place, and a proposal that a particular place — with an address — should exist, defended in front of a room that has spent twelve weeks learning what to ask.

Who it is for

Third-year students in psychology, sociology, human geography, design or anything adjacent. You need no statistics beyond reading an effect size and being sceptical of it, and no fieldwork experience — the method is taught from the first week.

You do need to be willing to sit alone in a public room for forty unbroken minutes, writing, without doing the thing you normally came there to do; to be a paying customer in somebody's business; and to write down what was actually there rather than what you expected. Students who want a lecture course with a reading list should look elsewhere — two of the three assessments rest on places you physically went, and the third has to name an address.

A warning about the register

This is not a celebration of third places. By week 3 the course is arguing that Oldenburg's eight characteristics never say who a room keeps out, and by week 4 that the warmth inside and the sharpness of the edge are the same mechanism. If you arrive fond of these places, you should leave more precise about them and slightly less fond.

Where to go next