Totally. But the graduate student in me is like … you guys are so benefiting from the privileges of whiteness, middle-classness, able-ism.  One of the explorers I go out with, he has darker skin. He told me one time that he is the wrong color to be an explorer. That’s a telling statement. Certain people would not be able to get away with what we’re getting away with. And of course, if you’re unemployed and you’re struggling to survive, you’re not going to spend your weekend figuring out how to get into a sewer. And this is another interesting aspect in terms of the politics of the practice. A lot of the people involved with it are sort of libertarian existentialists. They take very seriously their personal responsibility for their actions. One of the things that urban exploration does say is, ‘Look, I can make a decision about what dangers I want to undertake, and what risk I want to undertake’. And if we get hurt, I can’t imagine any explorer I know even thinking for a moment that they would sue the property owner for being hurt on a site that we were trespassing on. So people do take responsibility for themselves. I think that one of the things they are saying: ‘Society is over controlled, over secured, over sanitized—it’s fucking dull, it’s mundane, and you can do something else and we should be able to make the decision to do something else and take those risks.’

On your blog, I saw that you referred to the Chicago school sociologists of the early 20^th century that categorized the homeless into  tramps, hobos, and bums. Is that still a useful framework?  No, not at all! I just think it’s interesting to look back at the work sociologists were doing and realize that as a scholar—what I find interest in is that they had the ability to study those things whereas now, especially in the United States, if you try to study a sub-cultural movement that’s maybe dangerous, like people studying prostitution or heroin addiction, and you’re actually doing an ethnography where you want to go into these communities, there’s a backlash against it. As a result, we’re missing out on some important scholarship that needs to be undertaken. The work I’m doing for instance—I’ve been illegally trespassing my entire PhD and everyone in my department is aware of what I’m doing and I don’t think it’s something I could get away with at a U.S. university. As academics, we have to be the first ones to not be ruled by fear—to say, ‘This is something important going on in the world, it needs to be studied.’