Dr. Scott G. Knowles received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Since returning to Drexel in 2005 following a year at John Jay College in New York City, Knowles returned to the University as the assistant director of Drexel's Great Works Symposium. As the assistant director of the program, Dr. Knowles teaches symposia courses, schedules lectures and helps develop course topics. Knowles is currently working on several research projects, including two books and the revival of the psychogeography movement in Philadelphia.
Knowles recently sat down with ASK to talk about his teaching career, the Great Works Symposium and his other research ventures.
: Can you tell me a little bit about your education and fields of study, and also about any research projects you're involved in that are relevant to your fiels of expertise?
Dr. Scott Knowles: I started out broadly in modern American history, and I found my way into a program at Johns Hopkins, the history of science, medicine and technology. My dissertation work was about fires in 19th century cities; why cities were burning down and what sort of technological systems were involved to try to deal with those fires. You get this situation in the 19th century where industry and science and technology are allowing cities to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And, at the same time, they were becoming more and more dangerous, so you see this interesting paradox. The technology of safety had a long way to go to catch up with the ability to create big cities. Philadelphia was one of the few cities that didn't burn down.
: Really? Was there a reason for that?
SK: It wasn't a city like Chicago. Chicago was a relatively new city, and the whole infrastructure was of wood. Philadelphia had an older infrastructure; it had been around since the 18th or early 19th century. Plus, they had stricter codes here, and they had better volunteer fire departments in Philadelphia. In fact, I'm working on a book called Experts in Disaster: a History of Risk and Authority in Modern America.
: Are you still in the process of writing this, or can we expect to see it on shelves over the next few weeks or months?
SK: I'm researching right now, and I hope to have it finished by next year. It's the history of disaster experts in the 20th century: people who claim to be able to tell us what happens in a disaster, why it happened and how we can avoid it in the future. That covers everything from engineers and scientists thinking about earthquakes and floods early in the century to federal bureaucrats and the New Deal trying to deal with Mississippi River flooding, all the way to Cold War civil defense planners trying to figure out what to do when major cities are attacked. In the more modern period, we're talking about FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and issues like 9/11 and Katrina, where we feel like we're prepared and should be prepared, but we find out again and again that we're not always up to it.
: Besides writing books and teaching, I'm told that there's another aspect to your job.
SK: Yes, there's another half to my job. I'm the assistant director of the Great Works Symposium out of the Pennoni Honors College. It's a program that started five years ago, and it is an attempt to introduce Drexel students to multi-disciplinary learning. Drexel is an engineering university with a strong business focus, and now a medical focus and soon a law focus, and yet it has lots of resources in the humanities. So this is an attempt to try to get professors with different backgrounds and expertise and perspectives in the same class, and to get students from different colleges to come in and look at a topic in a different way. For example, we've had classes on the atomic bomb or the Brooklyn Bridge. Right now, we're doing one called Physical Philadelphia, which is looking at Philadelphia's infrastructure. It looks at everything from health to environmental justice to water delivery to the nuts and bolts of the transportation system.
: How often are Great Works Symposium courses offered?
SK: They're every term. We've been doing three a year, but since I've come on, we're going to try to double our offerings and do six a year. We have some interesting upcoming ones. We have one on the Mississippi River in the spring. It'll be everything from jazz and blues music to the history of slavery to the actual control over the river to Hurricane Katrina. Then, in the fall, we're offering a course on evolution. Really, the goal with the symposium is to have outside speakers and actual practitioners come in to talk about these different issues.
: Now, are these symposium courses for specific majors at Drexel, or can anyone take them?
SK: This symposium is a program that's open to everyone, and the lectures are open to the public. We're really trying to make a push to get the word out to have people not only from this campus but community-wide come to these events. It's Drexel's version of a humanities seminar or capstone seminar where the University says, ''Look we're bringing in a handful of notable speakers, and we invite you to come and talk with them.'' That's what we're trying to do.
: You mentioned your research career; are you doing any other research right now, or have you been focusing on your book?
SK: I have other projects underway, but this is the ''big book'' if you will. I'm also working on a collaborative project on deindustrialization. It's basically about industrialization marching across America in the 18th and 19th century, starting in Massachusetts and ending in California. We want to tell the opposite story in the format of a road trip. That is to say we'll start in Lowell, Massachusetts, and look at places have been de-industrialized. They don't make what they used to make there anymore. Maybe they do, but it's only a fraction of the number of people who used to be involved in manufacturing.
Philadelphia is a perfect example of that. Philadelphia was the workshop of the world for textiles and steam locomotives, and a navy yard, and a handful of other things. Now Philadelphia is a manufacturing center, but it's a shadow of itself. We want to trace that story through the Mid-West and all the way out to California, looking at particular cities and how they've been transformed by the closing of the factories. It's a pretty dismal story for a lot of these places. We're talking about Flint, Michigan, places like Beaumont, Texas, or Birmingham, Alabama, and we're going to end up in Silicon Valley. It's kind of funny to think of Silicon Valley as an industrialized place, but it certainly was in the 70s and 80s. And that the industrialization process that's happening is being off-shored. So I'm working on that with Bill Lesley, who's a historian of technology at Johns Hopkins. It was one of those ideas where I think we just want to get on the road and to talk to people who used to work in factories. We're going to hit the road this summer, and we're going to start in Reading, Pennsylvania.
: Really? I grew up in Reading.
SK: I guess you know the whole story then.
: Yeah, the Reading Railroad and the factories ...
SK: It's a difficult transition. Take Philadelphia, for instance. The population quadrupled in a short amount of time. The size of the city grows from two square miles to over 100 square miles in the 1850s. Industrialization is a process that happens very quickly in most places. Within a generation, you can go from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, including everything that goes with it: the roads, the communication systems, the labor unions, the whole thing, including immigrants. But what we're finding is the reverse takes way more than a generation. You can't revert back to an agricultural economy, there's no going back. So Philadelphia was left with this in the 1950s and 1960s, wondering, ''What kind of economy will we be if we're not making steam engines or coats?'' I still don't think they've answered that question. Services, tourism, education, pharmaceuticals, research, these seem to be the answer, but that leaves a lot of people and a lot of post-industrial space just kind of sitting there wondering what's next for them.
Philadelphia has been creative with this. You go up to Northern Liberties and look at all the factories that have been turned into high-priced condos, and you can see that Philadelphia, because of its size and its proximity to New York and Washington, will weather this storm. It will probably never be as big as it once was. There were over two million people in 1950; we've lost over 400,000 people. Imagine that process working on cities with a fraction of that, like Reading, or a Flint. A place that doesn't have any diversity of industry but one, and then they pack that one up and move it to Mexico or California. What's left, I think, is decaying buildings, some people who are trying to retrain themselves, some stories, some bars, restaurants and coffee shops, and usually museums.
: Along with all these kind of interactive experiences and research projects you've been involved with, I've read that you've done a psychogeography project in New York City. Can you explain what that is and how you got involved?
SK: This is something I founded with two friends of mine right after 9/11. First, let me give you a very short history of psychogeography. It starts in the 1950s in Europe around a group of artists and writers and architects that called themselves ''situationists.'' In short, their idea was that cities, and life in general, were becoming bourgeoisie, highly planned, very structured, very stultifying. There was no place for spontaneity or artistic expression, and that ensured that all the poor neighborhoods and the marketplaces were being moved out for shopping centers. So their idea was to create situations: street theater, unscripted walks, mapping of cities. The most famous artifact of the area was a map of Paris. It's a strange map, because, if you know Paris, this map has just the neighborhoods in Paris that they liked connected by their walkway between those neighborhoods. It's supposed to be a map for people who want to find authentic situations in Paris, something that isn't mass produced or staged. If you want to find something authentic, then go out and do this situationalist map.
After 9/11, two friends of mine, one is a comedian and one is in city government, were having a beer at a bar in Penn Station and we felt, like so many people, that there should be a way for people to react sort of organically to 9/11, like what can the average person really do? At the time they were talking about the ''master plan'' for rebuilding Lower Manhattan, which still hasn't really happened. So we thought we'd take these ideas of the situationists and put together some walks and just open it up to anyone who wanted to come and just walk New York and try to experience the city again. This happens to anybody in your daily life, particularly in the city where there's so much information coming at you that you get in a rut. They did another map that showed a girl and her walk to college. It turns out that, of all the different options, she basically traveled the same two routes everyday. We got to thinking about that. That you get into the patterns of taking the same routes. And especially at the time of 9/11, it might be a good time to reevaluate the city and think about those parts of New York that were affected by 9/11, that might get torn down and rebuilt. And again, it was an excuse to walk, which is something I really like to do.
So we started doing that and we did different themes. We did one called ''The Life Map of Objects'' where we collected found objects. We just found things like lids, paper, a light bulb. You find a lot of junk in New York. We publicized the event, and we had about 50 people show up. Everybody took an object, and the goal was to take it anywhere in New York City that you think it should go. Then we all got back together and we mapped where we'd picked up the objects and where they ended up. So we ended up with this sort of odd map with a rationale for why this thing should end up here. It was really an excuse to look at the ground and examine all the stuff that's around you on the streets and then to really think, ''Where does this really belong? Should I take this down to Penn's Station? Should I give it to a child on the street? Should I burn it?''
We had one called ''Take the A-train'' where we traveled the entire route of the A train, which goes from Inwood at 207th street all the way down to Rockaway. Some people rode the train the whole way, some people rode the bus the whole way, and some people rode bikes the whole way. The goal was just to examine that pathway from that perspective. We're going to be doing one in Philadelphia, actually, pretty soon. I've been threatening to do this for a couple of years since I've been teaching here.
: Do you know when you'll be doing this or what the theme will be?
SK: I'm really not sure. Sometime in the spring, I hope. Anyone who's interested can check out my website. The theme is still up-in-the-air as well, but I'm always open to suggestions. It's a great time to revitalize psychogeography, I think.
: Can you find these situationist ideas in other parts of the country, or is this just something you recreated?
SK: Actually, it's a movement that's started back up over the last few years, and anyone who's interested can go to a website called www.glowlab.org. That's sort of a clearing house for psychogeography. There are events happening all over the East Coast, in Europe, in Asia. Some of them are really high-tech. People are now using global positioning technology. There's an annual conference that Glowlab does where they get all these psychogeographers together in New York and they bring a bunch of wine, and they have these events. One of the great ones I did, you went looking for service doors, which, in Manhattan, is kind of an interesting thing to do because everybody focuses on the front of all these exquisite skyscrapers, but back doors are where all the workers entered. Some of them are really creative.
: So how did you get involved with psychogeography? Did you read about it, or did you have friends involved in the movement?
SK: I'm still trying to figure out cities. I grew up in the suburbs, and I lived the first 18 years of my life there. In a place that had no center, no grid. Family was there, it was good in that score, but in terms of the things that a city does to nurture a person's creativity and their interaction with people that aren't like them and let the architecture of a place sort of work on them, I didn't have that. I'm still exploring cities. The suburb is not a naturally created environment. One of the goals of psychogeography is to get even people who don't live in the city to go in to spaces and environments they may think dangerous or not interesting and to really look at it at the ground level.
: In reflecting on all your research, psychogeography, your own experiences and the courses you teach, do you have any advice for Drexel students?
SK: This is a good year to be acquainted with Philadelphia. People should look at www.benfranklin300.org, and look at all the events that are going on and the history of Philadelphia and go out and do some of them. Every civic institution, every museum in the city has tons of programming going on, and much of it's free. It would be a shame to get a degree in a world-class city, and never have learned anything about it. I think a lot of students do that because we're across the river, they're busy. I walk here almost every day. It takes 40 minutes to walk here from the Italian Market. In 20 minutes, you can walk to one of the densest collections of historical institutes in the world. I'll be leading a walking tour on Ben Franklin this summer, and it's open to anyone. Those would be my words of wisdom: know the place in which you live, even if you're only living there for a short time.
