Spotlight on Travel – Standing at the Junction

Travel is often framed as escape, leisure, or consumption. In this edition of Spotlight on Travel, the conversation moves in a different direction. John Coster and Rob Watson reflect on travel as a practice of attention, discomfort, and perspective-shifting, shaped as much by winter darkness at home as by encounters abroad.

Drawing on recent journeys to India, Nigeria, Japan, and Cambodia, the discussion explores what travel reveals when it is undertaken with purpose rather than spectacle. Sound becomes as important as image, whether it is the organised chaos of a Mumbai junction or the quieter atmospheres of places shaped by difficult histories. These moments resist easy interpretation. They sit with complexity, memory, and contradiction.

The programme also considers why travel still matters at a time of climate anxiety and cultural fatigue. Not as a moral badge or lifestyle choice, but as a way of testing assumptions, encountering other social models, and understanding one’s own position in the world more clearly.

Ultimately, this episode is less about destinations than about orientation. Travel here is not about ticking places off a list. It is about noticing what changes in you when the familiar frame of reference no longer holds.