On a misty morning in Cambridge, thirty-five participants gathered at Parker’s Piece to begin a one-day cultural field study designed and organised by CSIA. The journey brought together two seemingly contrasting destinations - Oxford, with its historic colleges, museums and stone-built intellectual landscape, and Bicester, a contemporary site of global retail, lifestyle and consumer culture.

The programme was designed as a form of mobile cultural learning: an opportunity for participants to move across different social and historical spaces, and to consider how knowledge, heritage, consumption and everyday life are shaped by their surrounding environments. For CSIA, the field study reflected a broader commitment to building scholarly community not only through lectures and seminars, but also through shared journeys, lived observation and collective reflection.

In Oxford, participants were guided through a city where architecture and intellectual history are deeply intertwined. Under the guidance of Dr Yang Dan, the group visited landmarks…