Author: sam

Sam is owner of this blog and works as a senior lecturer in digital geographies.
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Reblog> Danse macabre

Derek Gregory points to this really lovely video from Opéra National de Paris and Julien Prévieux inspired by Gregoire Chamayou’s work on ‘schematic bodies and patterns of life’.

I love how the ideas have been translated into performance in such a provocative yet beautiful way – this really gets you thinking about, as Stiegler would put it, the grammatisation of gesture (see, in particular: For a New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 8-13): the sense in which the capture and retention of our movements feeds back into the ways in which institutions and apparatuses address us both as individuals (‘subjects’) and populations (and/or ‘markets’)…

Danse macabre

Grégoire Chamayou writes to say that after our conversations in Irvine last year he has worked with an artist friend, Julien Prévieux (who won the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2014) and the Opéra national de Paris to turn his ideas about schematic bodies and patterns of life into a short film: Patterns of Life.

I’ve embedded it below, but if the link doesn’t work you can watch it here or on YouTube here. You will soon see why Anne Buttimer once described Torsten HÃ¥gerstrand‘s time-geography diagrams as a danse macabre.  The subtitles are in French but the commentary is in English.

I find the combination of intellectual imagination and performance work absolutely compelling – see my comments on ‘Bodies on the line’ here, for example.

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Reblog> How to deal with thew ‘track changes hellstorm’

Some good advice from Alistair Fraser over on the NUIM Geography department blog…

HOW TO DEAL WITH THE ‘TRACK CHANGES HELLSTORM’

Anyone who has shared their written work recently will probably have received back a document with comments and edits inserted using the ‘track changes’ function embedded in word processors. This can be hell on earth. A hellstorm. The first time I saw it was in 2005 when I returned from doing fieldwork in South Africa. I sent a draft of a paper to my adviser and promptly got back a document with hundreds of changes and comments. I’d never seen it before, had no idea what to do with it, and basically nearly had a heart attack.

Today, my heart still skips a few beats when I open a document and see everything leaping out at me. I suspect most academics feel the same. And for students who are new to this whole thing I’m sure it can be difficult to know what to do. So here are five tips to think about it. They work for me. If you have further suggestions, let me know in the comments.

  1. Step away from the computer. Go do something else. Let your heart beat return to normal.
  2. Go back to the computer. Scroll through the whole document and get a general sense for what’s going on.
  3. Accept or reject the editorial changes. A lot of times this will be about agreeing to corrections of grammar or typos. I suspect that, with time, you will see fewer and fewer of these. But even experienced writers make stupid mistakes or write passively when they should probably write in active tense; and so on. We tend to think faster than we type and so it’s normal to miss out a word or get the grammar wrong in some way. Don’t feel bad. But do make yourself (and the person who’s reading your work) a promise. Say: “I won’t make that mistake again.” And don’t. If there’s one thing I know from commenting on other people’s work, it’s incredibly – and I mean, like, totally unbelievably – annoying if mistakes are repeated time and time again.
  4. Read all of the comments, which are usually located on the right margin. Don’t delete any. But take a piece of paper and note which comments are going to be the easiest to deal with. Then work your way through them. One by one. Next, make a start on the harder ones. A lot of times this means doing a ton of extra work. That’s life. But if you’ve cleaned the document of typos, and if you’ve worked your way through the easier comments, you should find that your brain will find the energy and the ideas to sort out the bigger issues. Yes, in many instances this is going to mean you need to completely re-think. Sometimes it can mean the document will need to be entirely re-written. Tough. But writing is about precisely this iterative process – back and forth, changing, reflecting, adjusting, improving – and the point of having someone else read your work is to enrol them in this activity. I’ve been fortunate to know two academics who consistently make excellent, thoughtful comments on my written work. You also need to find good readers and editors. Working with, and gaining from the experience of using, track changes can pay off big time. Keep the faith.
  5. Go get a drink.

Alistair Fraser

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Interesting posts by social scientists on the “refugee crisis” in Europe

Just a quick note to flag a couple of interesting posts on the current asylum/migrant/refugee crisis in Europe/the Middle East.

On the ESRC website, Professor Franck Düvell, ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, has written a piece entitled: From a refugee crisis to a crisis of Europe.

On Geography Directions, Julian Shaw, Kings College London, has written a piece entitled: Housing Refugees: Prejudice and the Potentials of Encounter.

Quite useful for student discussions…

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Geographies of Popular Culture – a 1st year reading list

As we’re at the beginning of term here in Exeter and I’ve been fiddling with my teaching resources I thought I’d share some of them here, so please find below and in a linked PDF the suggested reading list I offer our first year students for a section of the module Geographies of Place, Identity and Culture concerning ‘Popular Culture’.

GEO1105 Geographies of Place, Identity and Culture

Geographies of Popular Culture: Reading List

 

In addition to Introducing Human Geographies, there are a few very good textbooks that may support further study, especially if you pursue cultural geographies in the second and third years:

Crang, Mike. 1998 Cultural Geography, London, Routledge.

Horton, John and Kraftl, Peter. 2014 Cultural Geographies. An Introduction, London, Routledge.

Storey, John. 2012 Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction, 6th Edition, London, Pearson.

Lecture 1: Popular Culture

This lecture will introduce the theme of popular culture, revisiting key concepts and motifs that have emerged throughout the module and open out, as a context for further study, the pursuits and activities of popular culture.

 

Anderson et al. 2002 “A Rough Guide” in Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S., and Thrift, N. eds. Handbook of Cultural Geography, London, Sage, pp. 1-9

Storey, J 2012 ‘What is popular culture?’ in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction, London, Pearson, pp. 1-16

Wider reading

Bryman, A. 2004 The Disneyization of Society, London, Sage. –In library 306.3 BRY

du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. 1997 Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London, Sage.

Harvey, D. 1989 The condition of postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell.

Klein, N. 1999 No logo, New York, Picador.

Mitchell, D. 1995 “There’s no such thing as culture: towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20: pp. 102-116.

Skelton, T. and Valentine, G. 1998 Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, London, Routledge.

Turner, G. 2003 British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 3rd Edition, London, Routledge.

 

Lecture 2: Geographies of Music

Music is the focus of the second lecture, situated both as forms of performance and a means of expression. We will look at the ways in which music is performed and how its audiences are convened. We will also explore how music is key medium for the expression of identity and the enactment of place.

 

Fraser, A. 2012 “The Spaces, Politics, and Cultural Economies of Electronic Dance Music”, Geography Compass 6(8): pp. 500-511.

Rogers, A. 2012 “Geographies of the Performing Arts: Landscapes, Places and Cities”, Geography Compass 6(2): pp. 60-75.

 

Wider reading

Anderson, B. 2004 “Time-stilled space-slowed: how boredom matters” Geoforum 35(6): pp. 739-754.

Cresswell, T. 2006 “‘You cannot shake that shimmie here’: producing mobility on the dancefloor”, Cultural Geographies 13: pp. 55-77.

Hudson, R. 2006 “Regions and place: music, identity and place”, Progress in Human Geography 30: pp. 626-634.

 

Kong, L. 1995 Music and cultural politics: ideology and resistance in Singapore. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20: pp. 447–459.

Leyshon, A. 2009 “The software slump? Digital music, the democratisation of technology, and the decline of the recording studio sector within the musical economy”, Environment and Planning A 41(6): pp. 1301-1331.

Mels, T. 2004 “Lineages of a geography of rhythms”, in Mels, T. ed. Reanimating Places: A Geography of Rhythms, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 3-44.

Revill, G. 2000 “Music and the politics of sound: nationalism, citizenship and auditory space”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: pp. 597-613.

Saldanha, A. 2002 “Music, space, identity: geographies of youth culture in Bangalore”, Cultural Studies 16: pp. 337-350.

Simpson, P. 2008 “Chronic everyday life: rhythmanalysing street performance”, Social and Cultural Geography 9(7): pp. 807-829.

Simpson, P. 2012 “Apprehending everyday rhythms: rhythmanalysis, time-lapse photography, and the space-times of street performance”, Cultural Geographies 19(4): pp. 423-445.

Watson, A., Hoyler, M. and Mager, C. 2009 “Spaces and Networks of Musical Creativity in the City”, Geography Compass 3(2): pp. 856-878.

White, B. and Day, F. 1997 “Country music radio and American culture regions”, Journal of Cultural Geography 16: pp. 21-35.

Wood, N., Duffy, M. and Smith, S. J. 2007 “The art of doing (geographies of) music”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25: pp. 867–889.

Wyndham, M. and Read, P. 2003 “Buena Vista Social Club: local meets global and lives happily ever after”, Cultural Geographies 10: pp. 498-503.

 

Lecture 3: Geographies of Life Online

In this lecture the we will explore the growing number of ways in which life is mediated with and through the internet. We will investigate the ways in which the internet reconfigures the performance of identity and our understandings of space and place.

 

Kinsley, S. 2013 “Beyond the screen: Methods for investigating geographies of life ‘online'”, Geography Compass 7(8): pp. 540-555.

Wider reading

Adams, P. C. 1997 “Cyberspace and virtual places”, Geographical Review 87(2): pp. 155-171.

– 2011, “A taxonomy for communication geography”, Progress in Human Geography 35(1): pp. 37-57.

Dodge, M. and Kitchin, R. 2001 Mapping Cyberspace, New York, Routledge.

Graham, S. 1998 “The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualising space, place and information technology” Progress in Human Geography 22(2): pp. 165-185.

Hillis, K. 1998 “On the margins: the invisibility of communications in geography” Progress in Human Geography 22(4): pp. 543-566.

Kellerman, A. 2002 The internet on earth: a geography of information, Hoboken, NJ, Wiley.

Mossberger, K., Tolbert, C. J., and Stansbury, M. 2003 Virtual Inequality: beyond the digital divide, Washington DC, Georgetown University Press.

Thrift, N. 1996 “New Urban Eras and Old Technological Fears: Reconfiguring the Goodwill of Electronic Things”, Urban Studies 33(8): pp. 1463-1493.

Zook, M. 2005 The Geography of the Internet Industry: Venture capital dot-coms, and local knowledge, New York, Blackwell.

Lecture 4: Geographies of Books & Reading

While literature can be considered as ‘high’ culture, in this lecture we will consider the ways in which literature and fiction are a significant source of imaginative geographies and particular types of spatial experience.

 

Hones, S. 2008 “Text as It Happens: Literary Geography”, Geography Compass 2(5): pp. 1301-3117.

Kitchin, R. and Kneale, J. 2001 “Science Fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geographies of the new millennium”, Progress in Human Geography 25: pp. 17-33.

 

Wider reading

Cresswell, T. 1993 “Mobility as resistance: a geographical reading of Kerouac’s On the Road“, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18: pp. 249-262.

DeLyser, D. 2005 Romana memories: tourism and the shaping of Southern California, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press.

Kneale, J. 1999 “The virtual realities of technology and fiction: reading William Gibson;s cyberspace”, in Crang, M., Crang, P., and May, J. eds. Virtual Geographies, London, Routledge, pp. 205-221.

Lando, F. 1996 “Fact and fiction: geography and literature”, GeoJournal 38(1): pp. 3-18.

Livingstone, D. 2005 “Science, text and space: thoughts on the geography of reading”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(4): pp. 91-401.

Romanillos, J-L. 2008 “‘Outside, it is snowing’: experience and finitude in the nonrepresentational landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 795-822.

Said, E. 1995 (originally, 1978) “Imaginative geography and its representations: Orientalizing the Oriental”, in Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin, pp. 49-73.

Sharp, J. 2000 “Towards a critical analysis of fictive geographies”, Area 32(3): pp. 327-334.

Shortridge, J. R. 1991 “The concept of the place-defining novel in American popular culture”, Professional Geographer 43(3): pp. 280-291.

 

Lecture 5: Geographies of Cinema and Television

As one of the key media of the 20th and 21st centuries, the moving image is crucial to understanding material cultures, changing ideas about landscape, and identity. In this lecture we will examine the ways in which cinema and television have both reflected and created kinds of spatial experience.

Rosati, C. 2007 “Media Geographies: Uncovering the Spatial Politics of Images”, Geography Compass 1(5): pp. 995-1014.

 Wider reading

Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. 1999 Remediation: understanding new media, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Carter, S. 2007 “Mobilising generosity, framing geopolitics: Narrating crisis in the homeland through diasporic media”, Geoforum 38: pp. 1102-1112.

Carter, S. and McCormack, D. 2006 “Film, Geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention”, Political Geography 25: pp. 228-245.

Couldry, N. and McArthy, A. eds. 2004 MediaSpace: place, scale, and culture in the media age, New York, Routledge.

Lukinbeal, C. 2005 “Cinematic landscapes”, Journal of Cultural Geography 23(1): pp. 3-22.

Morley, D. 1996 “The geography of television: ethnography, communications and community”, in Hay, J., Grossberg, L., and Wartella, E. eds. The audience and its landscapes, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, pp. 317-342.

Rosati, C. 2007 “MTV: 360° of the industrial production of culture”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32(4): pp. 556-575.

 

Lecture 6: Spaces of Games and Play

Fun can be a serious business. In this lecture we will explore the various ways playing and playfulness are important to how we understand the world. We will examine how play allows us to be ‘other’, how structured games are important to how we negotiate individual and collective identity, and the ways playfulness is central to our performance of everyday life.

Woodyer, T. 2012 “Ludic geographies: not merely child’s play”, Geography Compass 6(6): pp. 313-326.

Wider reading

Ash, J. and Gallacher, L. 2011 “Cultural Geography and Videogames”, Geography Compass 5(6): pp. 351-368.

Borden, I. 2001 Skateboarding, space and the city: architecture and the body, Oxford, Berg.

Caillois, R. 1961 Man, play and games, New York, NY, Free Press of Glencoe.

Flusty, S. 2000 “Thrashing downtown: play as resistance to the spatial and representational regulation of Los Angeles”, Cities 17(2): pp. 149–158.

Holloway, S. L. and Valentine, G. 2000 Children’s geographies: playing, living, learning, London, Routledge.

Huizinga, J. 1949 Homo Ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Stevens, Q. 2007 The ludic city: exploring the potential of public spaces, Abingdon & New York, Routledge.

Sutton-Smith, B. 1997 The ambiguity of play, Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press.

Valentine, G. and McKendrick, J. 1997 “Children’s outdoor play: exploring parental concerns about children’s safety and the changing nature of childhood”, Geoforum 28(2): pp. 219–235.

Winnicott, D. W. 1971 Playing and reality, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Waitt, G. 2008 “Urban Festivals: Geographies of Hype, Helplessness and Hope”, Geography Compass 2(2): pp. 513-537.

Lecture 7: Geographies of Consumption

Consuming goods and services lies at the heart of everyday life, for subsistence, work and for leisure. The ways we consume are a significant focus for cultural geographies research. We will explore how consumption relates to identity and place.

Crewe, L. 2000 “Geographies of retailing and consumption”, Progress in Human Geography 24: pp. 275-290.

Clarke, N. 2008 “From ethical consumerism to political consumption”, Geography Compass 2(6): pp. 1870-1884.

 

Wider reading

Anderson, B. 2004 “Time-stilled space-slowed: how boredom matters” Geoforum 35(6): pp. 739-754.

Bell, D. and Valentine, G. 1996 Consuming Geographies: We are what we eat, Routledge London.

Clarke, D., Doel, M. and Housiaux, K (eds) 2003 The Consumption Reader, Routledge London.

Crewe, L. 2001 “The besieged body: geographies of retailing and consumption”, Progress in Human Geography 25: pp. 629–40.

Crewe, L. 2003 “Geographies of retailing and consumption: markets in motion”, Progress in Human Geography 27(3): pp. 352-362.

du Gay, P. 1997 ‘Introduction’, in: du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London, Sage, pp. 1-7. –In library: 301.243 DUG

Lury, C. 1996 Consumer Culture, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Mansvelt, J. 2005 Geographies of Consumption, Sage, London.

Paterson, M. 2006 Consumption and Everyday Life, Routledge, London.

Ritzer, G. 2013 The MacDonaldization of Society, 7th edition, London, Sage. –In library: 306.0973 RIT

Urry, J. 1995 Consuming Places, Routledge, London.

Urry, J. 1990 The Tourist Gaze, Sage, London.

 

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Jean Lievens introduction to Michel Bauwens’ Sauver le Monde

Earlier this year I posted rough translations of both Bernard Stiegler’s Preface and Dirk Holeman’s Postface to Michel Bauwens and Jean Lievens’ book Sauver le Monde: Vers une société post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer [To Save the World: towards a post-capitalist society with peer-to-peer].

I’ve translated a bit more now and I make this translation available, for free, to the publishers to do as they wish with it. I hope it helps in some small way…

These are the first few pages of the book following the Preface, in two short sections: Introduction and About this book.

As usual, clarifications or original French are in square brackets and I welcome any comments or suggestions – although I’m not trying to offer an ‘authoritative’ translation…

Introduction

“We do not live in a changing age, but rather a change of age”
Professor Jan Rotmans
(Professor of the Theory and Management of Transition,
Erasmus University Rotterdam)

It would be pointless to try to convince the reader of a book entitled To Save the World that life on Earth, as we understand it today, is in peril. Following a recently published study in the journal Nature Climate Change, more that half of terrestrial plants and the habitats of around a third of animals will disappear because of climate change if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at the current rate. Scientists at the renowned Global Footprint Network (an international laboratory of ideas that measures ecological sustainability using ‘ecological footprints’) have calculated that, at present, we will need a planet and a half to maintain the current global economy. Furthermore, the growth rate required to maintain this system until 2053 would require the global economy to quadruple. In this case, we would need six planets. One does not need to be genius to understand that endless growth on a finite planet is a scientific nonsense and we are heading for a crash. Faced with this bleak perspective for the future, there are different ways to react: simple denial, to resign ourselves to it, or to attempt to do something about it.

To change the world, we can draw inspiration from the past, but we need a new way of addressing the challenges of the future. Michel Bauwens brings us such a vision. Not the visions, but a vision. The title of this book thus reflects a certain arrogance inconsistent with his character. Indeed, very intelligent people are often very modest, because they are very conscious of their own limitations. But who is Michel Bauwens? Beneath the title “The most stimulating Belgian thinker is an unknown philosopher” in the newspaper De Morgen (on the 23rd March 2012) presents him as follows:

“Do you know Michel Bauwens? Perhaps not. This 54-year-old cyberphilosopher is not well known. Bauwens is the first Belgian to figure in a list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He finds himself in the illustrious company of people such as Mahatma Ghandi (9), Martin Luther King (24), The Dalai Lama (28), Thomas Malthus (55) and John Kenneth Galbraith (70). Bauwens occupies 82nd place, a few rungs above Eleanor Roosevelt (87).”

The list referred to in De Morgen, “The (En)Rich List”, is a table of 100 people established by the Post Growth Institute, an international group of scientists that lobby for a sustainable society in which prosperity can be created without a need for economic doctrine [besoin de croissance économique]. The list of the “most enriching people” is a foil [clin d’Å“il – literally “a wink”, could be translated to ‘a nod’] to the 100 “richest people” in the world, published annually by the American financial magazine Forbes.

Cyberphilosopher, futurologist, economist, researcher, conference convener, entrepreneur”¦ These are some of the epithets given to Michel Bauwens by journalists. Wikipedia designates him as a “peer-to-peer theorist”, and he describes himself in this book as a commentator and thinker attempting to forge a coherent link between the theories, hypotheses and explications of peer-to-peer, and to do so in the most ethical way possible.

So what is ‘peer-to-peer’ (abbreviated to P2P)? This is a term not well known or understood outside of the world of IT enthusiasts and geeks, nevertheless the collaborative economy, forged through networks of peers, has rapidly gained in popularity throughout our countries. A year before the publication of that short article in De Morgen, the Dutch-language Belgian newspaper De Tijd (on the 23rd April 2013) published a detailed interview with Michel, across a double-page spread. Little by little, he has gained notoriety even in his country of birth. As is often the case, local recognition comes on the back of an international breakthrough, and not vice versa. It is well-known that: “No one is a prophet in their own country” [«Nul n’est prophète en son pays» – this is an idiom that some suggest traces back to the apostles Luke and Matthew].

About this book

This book is the outcome of twelve Skype interviews, of around an hour each, between January and February 2014. If I had arranged twelve more hours, if someone else had interviewed Michel, this would have been a different book. In any case, our aim is to share with you some ideas at the heart of peer-to-peer, production between peers, in the hope of inspiring you to further your understanding through other lectures, books and studies. As this book contains a number of important new and uncommon terms (for example, you may have already struggled with the term ‘peer-to-peer’ in the subtitle of this book), we have created a glossary that is situated at the end of the book.

Personally, I think that politicians, whether on the right or the left, have a tendency to see the future [l’avenir] through the rear-view mirror. Just as Marxism is an ideological construct of the 19th century, liberalism and nationalism find their origins in the 18th century. From a historical perspective these ideologies each have respective values but they no longer offer a response to the enormous difficulties that confront us today. This is also expressed in the way that politicians are unable to offer solutions. Not only because the political class tends to defend the status quo and their vested interests but also because many of the problems can only be solved at a global scale and thus local authorities are powerless. This certainly does not mean that nothing is possible at a local level, quite the contrary. On those occasions when everything is paralysed at national and international levels, only local level action allows real progress. This is reflected in particular by increased urbanisation (since the beginning of the 21st century more than a half of the global population has lived in towns and cities), or what Eric Corijn calls the emergence of “urbanity” as new form of post-national society, but also by the development of peer-to-peer mechanisms through which a number of people take their fate into their own hands by launching new projects from within the very institutional framework with which they have often clashed. In the face of the pessimism of the political world, there is optimism within the science of peer-to-peer. This is why solutions will come first from civil society.

We live in an era of enormous possibilities, but also of contradictions and gigantic obstacles to the full realisation of those possibilities. Machines have releaved us of a large part of manual labour (and increasingly of intellectual labour), but the automisation of production processes has not translated into the redistribution or the reduction of working time. Financial markets, often governed by mathematical algorithms upon which no one has a grip, have a greater impact than governments upon our lives. Our parliaments vote for laws that render collaboration and sharing illegal. Our economic model is founded upon the absurd idea of material abundance and immaterial rarity. We behave as if the world was limitless and exploit it to the utmost, to the point of jeopardizing the survival of the human species. Furthermore, we use copyright and patents to build artificial barriers around human knowledge to complicate sharing and collaboration as much as possible. Yet, from the society of the industrial revolution emerged new models and ways of working, heralding a new society. Thus, today, in the words of the Dutch Scientist Jan Rotmans: “We do not live in an era of change but in a change of era”.

The emerging model of peer-to-peer, inspired by the open source movement, seeks to circumvent the false logic of material scarcity and the artificial scarcity of the immaterial. In the apparent tangle of new phenomena such as the collaborative economy, peer-to-peer networks, open source, crowd-sourcing, FabLabs, micro-factories, the “maker” movement, urban agriculture and so on, Michel Bauwens sees a model that leads us to a post-capitalist society, in which the market finally submits to the logic of the commons (the common good). This book is a first attempt to articulate ideas concerning peer-to-peer formulated by Michel Bauwens. It is not simply the result of the reflections of a single person but rather the collective inteilligence of a growing minority of active pioneers who are developing and revealing thousands of projects and experiences amongst peers. Hopefully they will be an inspiration for all who are active in this area and work to build a new world, starting with what affects us directly.

Jean Lievens
9th July 2013

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Reblog> New project: Citizen-related data privacy/protection concerns arising from the development of smart cities

This new project with Rob Kitchin seems really interesting >>

New project: Citizen-related data privacy/protection concerns arising from the development of smart cities

Prof. Rob Kitchin has recently been awarded a research contract by the Department of the Taoiseach to examine citizen-related data privacy/protection concerns arising from the development of smart cities.  More specifically, the research is to help inform the work of the new Government Data Forum, an initiative of Dara Murphy TD, the Minister for EU Affairs and Data Protection.  The research is to:

  • Identify, document and summarise key developments in the area of smart cities in Ireland, at EU level and internationally;
  • Identify and report on concerns and challenges for citizens regarding key data protection, data privacy and associated issues that arise in the context of smart cities
  • Identify and report on best practice initiatives that have been undertaken to address these issues.

The project will run for two months from October 1st to November 30th and result in a detailed report setting out the main data privacy/protection issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives.

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CFP> “Virtuality, Becoming and Life” Deleuze Studies 2016, Rome (11-13 July)

[via Keith Harris]

Here’s a call for the ‘Deleuze Studies‘ conference next year, with a nice, if broad, theme…

The triad of terms in the title is meant to indicate three steps that may build a path through Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy. This path is but one among the many possible, as the titles of the previous conferences reveal. To borrow a term from psychogeography, we may call it a “desire path”, where desire paths represent the alternate routes created by the walkers’ desires and necessities. Though it is an open path, it is paradoxically coherent and unified. Each of its step indeed refers to the other in more than one way.The first term –virtuality– refers both to the central issue of time and to the philosophical friendship between Deleuze and Bergson. As Deleuze’s early writings of the Sixties witness, it was a very close friendship which remained vivid also in his later work on cinema in the Eighties. Both Bergson and Deleuze share the common aim to affirm the coexistence and the continuous and mutual interplay between the past and the present, the actual and the virtual. Such an interplay constitute exactly that process of differentiation which grounds the creative dynamics of all different arts, and notably, of cinema.

The creative and positive movement of differentiation, as a process of metamorphosis, underpins the concept of “becoming“ as a fundamental notion for Deleuze’s overall philosophy and particularly for the text he wrote with Guattari, Mille Plateaux. The notion of Becoming is to be understood as a verb rather than a noun –they write- it is not one, nor two, but something between-two, an interaction between two domains, a boundary and an escape line: it is the becoming-animal, the becoming-music, the becoming child, the becoming-woman. As a reaction against the Platonic idea of Being and Essence, the Becoming refers primarily to Nietzsche’s thought and to his notion of the “eternal return”. Since no living being can resist the becoming, the becoming must be a being in itself, a being that coincides with the process of coming back, in the sense of thinking “the same” from “the different”.

The deeper meaning of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to affirm the becoming not only as essential to life –since life is becoming, multiplicity, and fortune- but as something we need to accept and consciously affirm. To this extent, virtue is not renouncing to all passions but saying “yes” to life. In Deleuze’s last text, life is described as immanent and “unique”; no longer individual but completely impersonal, it is a “total power, a total bliss” It is from this starting point that philosophers – both in Italy and elsewhere – have started developing the idea of an “ontology of the present” – which sets itself as the aim of contemporary philosophy.

Following the path we have proposed, and even imagining something different, we welcome individual proposals for papers, panel proposals, as well as alternative approaches to presentation formats (such dialogues or performative pieces).

The conference will accept papers in English from across a very broad range of areas including, not limited to, the following:

Philosophy

Aesthetics and Artistic Practices
Architecture and Urban Planning

Film Studies
Digital Realm and New Media
Literature and Literary Criticism
Sociology and Politics
Gender Studies
Psychology
Education
Science

Abstracts should be 300-500 words and must include title and three keywords.

Biographical statements and affiliations should be approximately 100 words and must include contact information.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 15th, 2015

PAPER NOTIFICATIONS
We plan to notify the acceptances until February 15th, 2016

SEND TO
call@deleuzeconference2016.org

There’s a website with plenty of information: http://www.deleuzeconference2016.org

and here’s some blurb from it:

Deleuze Studies Conference is an initiative created by the Deleuze Studies Journal, the first of which was held in 2008 at Cardiff. The conference explores the themes related to the works of Deleuze and Guattari and brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines.

This year the Deleuze Studies Conference will take place in Italy, at the Department of Philosophy, Communication  and Visual Arts of University of Roma Tre (11th-13th July), aiming to explore the concepts of Virtuality, becoming and life in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought.

 

The conference will be preceded by a Deleuze Camp (4th-8th July), a preliminary intensive research seminar.

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Some interesting papers: mothering with social media, archaeologies of e-waste, and performing tasks with wifi

Just wanted to flag some more interesting papers that have recently come out.

First, Robyn Longhurst‘s fantastic work on mothering with Skype and other social media has been really productive of some great papers and the latest in Social & Cultural Geographies is no exception. There’s some really lovely empirical work here and some interesting discussion of method too. I will be giving this paper to some of my students precisely because of this methods discussion. Good stuff!

Mothering, digital media and emotional geographies in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand

This article traces a line between two literatures that can usefully be drawn into deeper conversation: geographies of digital media, and geographies of emotion. Its broad theoretical aim is to ascertain what insights might be gleaned by increasingly bringing together these two literatures. The more specific and primary aim, however, is an empirical one and that is to offer a materially grounded example of 35 mothers who live in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand who use digital media to communicate with their children. Particular attention is paid to the capacities of different digital media, both individually and combined, to help facilitate, but certainly not guarantee, different emotions. The research is informed by a feminist geographical reading of theories of digital media and emotion. Findings illustrate that increasingly mothers are making use of digital media, both singularly and collectively, to increase the chances of a particular desired emotional outcome with their child or children. This article concludes that bodies, devices, screens, sounds and images comingle to mediate emotions over time and space.

Second, Sy Taffel has written another interesting article (following on from the paper he contributed to our theme issue of Culture Machine in 2012) concerning the desirable and undesirable materialities of electronic devices, not least when they are discarded and thrown away. This paper is part of an interesting forum convened by Angela Piccini. (You’ll find Sy’s piece between pp. 78-85):

Archaeologies of Electronic Waste

The toxicity and volume of electrical waste (commonly referred to as e-waste) forms one material legacy of contemporary digital culture which emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the deleterious material impacts of technological assemblages upon human and ecological systems, and asks serious questions about the sustainability and ethical orientation of current technocultural systems. Globally, around 50 million tonnes of e-waste are generated each year, and this waste is considered to be toxic due to the presence of a “witch’s brew” of substances which are highly hazardous to humans and other biotic systems. Whilst there exist inter-, supra-, and national laws and conventions mandating that most OECD nations (the US being a notable exemption) cannot legally export hazardous wastes to non-OECD nations, there exists a vibrant illegal market in exporting e-waste which is systematically mislabelled as working second-hand electronics goods for sale in emerging markets, with an estimated 50–100 shipping containers of illegally exported e-waste arriving daily in Hong Kong. This short essay seeks to sketch several ways that media archaeology and archaeologies of media provide productive apertures through which to consider issues surrounding e-waste, whilst contextualizing how media archaeology fits within the broader field of materialist media studies.

Thirdly, and by no means least, Sung-Yueh Perng has written a really thoughtful and interesting article on how the apparently ‘immaterial’ infrastructure of wi-fi is enrolled in ‘human-signal assemblages’ through which are performed the intricacies of everyday life. Again, some really lovely empirical work here and a nuanced synthesis of empirics and theory – with an interesting reading together of Adrian Mackenzie’s work on wireless communications, Ingold’s refrain of the ‘taskscape’ and the technocultural spatial imaginaries that have emerged in Taipei around these technologies.

Performing Tasks With Wi-Fi Signals in Taipei

This article examines the process of constructing, repairing, and improvising “human–signal assemblages” by drawing on in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography regarding the engineering of Wi-Fi connectivity in Taipei, Taiwan. It is demonstrated that spatial, temporal, infrastructural, and embodied orchestrations of Wi-Fi signals both reinforce and challenge prescribed ways of conducting daily tasks. Continuity and change, enacted by attempts to incorporate Wi-Fi signals into daily urban life, are explored by discussing a wide range of practices performed by government entities, local companies and initiatives, and users themselves. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which machines, the city landscape, discourses, maps, and signs grow and multiply, as well as intersect and intervene with each other at various levels, locales, and stages of establishing Wi-Fi connections. The article thus argues for the importance of “machine juggling” as a skillful performance that mends, maintains, and improvises Wi-Fi-enabled urban everyday rhythms.

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Reblog> How We Write – the open access collection reviewed and highlighted

Stuart Elden on the book “How We Write”, which is a really interesting insight into different ways in which writing is practised…

How We Write – the open access collection reviewed and highlighted

How-We-Write-cover-E-216x346How We Write – the open access collection edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, which includes thirteen short pieces on academic writing – has been getting  a bit of attention already. It was chosen as a highlighted title on open access site Unglue.it and has been reviewed in French at Ludite! Jeffrey Jerome Cohen also talks about his piece here.

As I said when I announced the book’s publication, while free to download, it was not free to produce. It is also available to buy in paperback, or you can leave a donationwhen you download the book. This is a book that does not seek to give advice, but to show how a range of people do things in a number of different ways. Please share widely”¦