Author: sam

Sam is owner of this blog and works as a senior lecturer in digital geographies.
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Reblog> Top ten questions for the PhD oral exam

Over on Medium, there’s a post by Patrick Dunleavy, shared by a few people (I saw it cos of Jo Sharp), about the kinds of questions you get when undergoing a ‘viva’, which for those with their heads still buried in text may come as a surprise”¦ As Dunleavy points out, the oral exam (in my limited experience of the British context) tends to be quite a general discussion. Its worth a read, especially for those about to go through the exam, so I’ve reproduced it here.

When you have finally finished writing a PhD dissertation or thesis, and submitted it to the university for review, you are at the end of a long period of grappling with dozens of tricky and detailed problems and issues. For instance, how to upgrade the dodgy paragraph on page 102; what the sources were for Figure 5.7; or how to best (re-)phrase your hypotheses or expectations so as to fit the research you actually did. Perhaps for some weeks after submission these kinds of concerns will buzz around your head. They may even prompt you to lie awake at night rehearsing answers to the examiners, if they should ask about why you did x at one point, instead of y.Yet an oral examination of a doctorate (a ‘viva’ in British parlance) is rarely just an exercise in ‘Spot the problem’/ ‘Frame an answer’ mode. Many PhDers are surprised to find themselves immersed in a far more generalist (albeit still highly professional) conversation than they had initially anticipated. To prepare effectively for the big day and avoid being blind-sided you may need to change mindset a lot. The oral exam is a crucial session where you almost always need to reconnect with some fundamental themes and claims in your work. You need to think ahead to the issues that examiners often have when they read unfamiliar work, implemented in a way that is new to them. Their concerns generally revolve around: Is this legitimate innovation and focusing? Or it it instead somewhat weird? PhD examiners are guardians of the professional temple, so these issues weigh a lot with them. (These sit alongside some more prosaic concerns, like checking you really did the work yourself, and that you did all that you say you have) The opportunity to meet you in person is key to assuaging these wider concerns.

Here’s where the Top 10 list of questions below can come in useful, as a frame to encourage you to think wider and more generally about the professional conversation to come.

Value-added and originality

  • What are the most original (or value-added) parts of your thesis?
  • Which propositions or findings would you say are distinctively your own?
  • How do you think your work takes forward or develops the literature in this field?
  • What are the ‘bottom line’ conclusions of your research? How innovative or valuable are they? What does your work tell us that we did not know before?

Origins and the scope of the research

  • Can you explain how you came to choose this topic for your doctorate What was it that first interested you about it? How did the research focus change over time?
  • Why have you defined the final topic in the way you did? What were some of the difficulties you encountered and how did they influence how the topic was framed? What main problems or issues did you have in deciding what was in-scope and out-of-scope?

Methods

  • What are the core methods used in this thesis? Why did you choose this approach? In an ideal world, are there different techniques or other forms of data and evidence that you’d have liked to use?

Data or information

  • What are the main sources or kinds of evidence? Are they strong enough in terms of their quantity and quality to sustain the conclusions that you draw? Do the data or information you consider appropriately measure or relate to the theoretical concepts, or underlying social or physical phenomena, that you are interested in?

Findings

  • How do your findings fit with or contradict the rest of the literature in this field? How do you explain the differences of findings, or estimation, or interpretation between your work and that of other authors?

What next?

  • What are the main implications or lessons of your research for the future development of work in this specific sub-field? Are there any wider implications for other parts of the discipline? Do you have ‘next step’ or follow-on research projects in mind?

To put these ideas in a wider context, you might also find it helpful to read parts of my book: Patrick Dunleavy, ‘Authoring a PhD‘ (Palgrave, 2003), especially the chapter on ‘the endgame’ of finishing a doctorate. See also @Write4Research

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Video > Anne Sauvagnargues talks through Deleuze on the composition of experience & meaning

This is an interesting and very rich video of Anne Sauvagnargues, at what must be a kind of postgrad workshop(?), talking through Deleuze’s (Simondon-ian) thinking concerning the composition of meaning and experience. It’s quite a master class! There’s so much in this that I can’t really offer a précis and its quite hard to hear Sauvagnargues because of persistent white noise but its definitely worth the effort of watching an accomplished exposition of a creative way of thinking:

Anne Sauvagnargues from Vasco Barbedo on Vimeo.

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Reblog > Writing for impact (Rob Kitchin)

Over on the excellent Programmable City blog, Prof. Rob Kitchin offers an interesting set of observations and suggestions about the kinds of writing academic social scientists (and I think particularly geographers here) engage in, how they can be received and thus what one might aim to do in the writing of an academic paper. In particular, I think Rob highlights the challenge (and implicit conflict) for the contemporary (and in particular early career) academic – to be productive and to have impact. In other words, one can read the piece as kind of saying – its all very well pumping out the papers but if you’re simply recycling other material, i.e. applying a bit of well-worn theory to a new empirical example, its not really enough.

My reading of such an argument is as a kind of implicit critique of the logic of exercises like the REF – especially if, in the future, it moves over to being driven by bibliometrics . Its all very well to be cited, but are people actually engaging with your material. This is certainly a challenge I don’t feel like I’ve cracked (and my work has only been very modestly cited)!

Anyway, for colleagues in academia (especially those who are early career), I suggest that this is definitely worth a read:

Writing for impact: how to craft papers that will be cited

For the past few years I’ve co-taught a professional development course for doctoral students on completing a thesis, getting a job, and publishing.  The course draws liberally on a book I co-wrote with the late Duncan Fuller entitled, The Academics’ Guide to Publishing.  One thing we did not really cover in the book was how to write and place pieces that have impact, rather providing more general advice about getting through the peer review process.

The general careers advice mantra of academia is now ‘publish or perish’.  Often what is published and its utility and value can be somewhat overlooked – if a piece got published it is assumed it must have some inherent value.  And yet a common observation is that most journal articles seem to be barely read, let alone cited.

Both authors and editors want to publish material that is both read and cited, so what is required to produce work that editors are delighted to accept and readers find so useful that they want to cite in their own work?

A taxonomy of publishing impact

The way I try and explain impact to early career scholars is through a discussion of writing and publishing a paper on airport security (see Figure 1).  Written pieces of work, I argue, generally fall into one of four categories, with the impact of the piece rising as one traverses from Level 1 to Level 4.

Figure 1: Levels of research impact

Level 1: the piece is basically empiricist in nature and makes little use of theory.  For example, I could write an article that provides a very detailed description of security in an airport and how it works in practice.  This might be interesting, but would add little to established knowledge about how airport security works or how to make sense of it.  Generally, such papers appear in trade magazines or national level journals and are rarely cited.

Level 2: the paper uses established theory to make sense of a phenomena. For example, I could use Foucault’s theories of disciplining, surveillance and biopolitics to explain how airport security works to create docile bodies that passively submit to enhanced screening measures.  Here, I am applying a theoretical frame that might provide a fresh perspective on a phenomena if it has not been previously applied.  I am not, however, providing new theoretical or methodological tools but drawing on established ones.  As a consequence, the piece has limited utility, essentially constrained to those interested in airport security, and might be accepted in a low-ranking international journal.

Level 3: the paper extends/reworks established theory to make sense of phenomena.  For example, I might argue that since the 1970s when Foucault was formulating his ideas there has been a radical shift in the technologies of surveillance from disciplining systems to capture systems that actively reshape behaviour.  As such, Foucault’s ideas of governance need to be reworked or extended to adequately account for new algorithmic forms of regulating passengers and workers.  My article could provide such a reworking, building on Foucault’s initial ideas to provide new theoretical tools that others can apply to their own case material.  Such a piece will get accepted into high-ranking international journals due to its wider utility.

Level 4: uses the study of a phenomena to rethink a meta-concept or proposes a radically reworked or new theory.  Here, the focus of attention shifts from how best to make sense of airport security to the meta-concept of governance, using the empirical case material to argue that it is not simply enough to extend Foucault’s thinking, rather a new way of thinking is required to adequately conceptualize how governance is being operationalised.  Such new thinking tends to be well cited because it can generally be applied to making sense of lots of phenomena, such as the governance of schools, hospitals, workplaces, etc.  Of course, Foucault consistently operated at this level, which is why he is so often reworked at Levels 2 and 3, and is one of the most impactful academics of his generation (cited nearly 42,000 time in 2013 alone).  Writing a Level 4 piece requires a huge amount of skill, knowledge and insight, which is why so few academics work and publish at this level.  Such pieces will be accepted into the very top ranked journals.

One way to think about this taxonomy is this: generally, those people who are the biggest names in their discipline, or across disciplines, have a solid body of published Level 3 and Level 4 material – this is why they are so well known; they produce material and ideas that have high transfer utility.  Those people who well known within a sub-discipline generally have a body of Level 2 and Level 3 material.  Those who are barely known outside of their national context generally have Level 1/2 profiles (and also have relatively small bodies of published work).

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Reblog > Deleuze in Southend-on-Sea (Tony Sampson)

In a very cogent performance of Deleuzian theory through a discussion of Southend-as-assemblage, Tony D. Sampson (author of, amongst other things, Virality) gave one of the opening talks of Club Critical Theory, a really lovely idea for bringing about public engagement with critical theory–resolutely beyond the ‘ivory towers’ (or concrete slabs in some cases) of academia. Definitely worth a read:

Deleuze in Southend-on-Sea

Applying Deleuze to Southend in the context a Club Critical Theory discussion is a doubly difficult task. To begin with Deleuze introduces a new vocabulary that sits atop of an already complex layer of philosophical debate. We will need to grapple with complexity theory and a strange incorporeal materialism. Then there are personal reasons that make this task problematic relating to my own situation here as a Southender. Deleuze, for me, represents an escape from certain aspects of my early working life in Southend at the local college and particularly my time spent in what we referred to then as the School of Media and Fascism. Deleuze was part of my escape plan from this horror, so returning to Southend with him in mind presents all kinds of problems, but let’s put those aside for a moment and see where Deleuze in Southend takes us.

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Christian Fuchs on the Marx-Engels Complete Works debacle

Christian Fuchs has written a compelling argument that looks beyond the tit-for-tat political economic argument over the object of the Complete Works book, acknowledging the original labour of the authors as the creation of public good, and positing a contributive economic alternative – new translations.

I recommend reading the whole thing, but the final paragraphs are great:

Marx and Engels’ knowledge work is the primary work objectified in MECW and all other translations and editions. It is therefore ridiculous to stage struggles about copyrights, access and who is allowed to monetarily benefit from the sale of Marx and Engels’ dead work that has created works that are very alive up until today and into the future. Limiting access or making it more difficult makes these living works partly dead. The most important task is to make good translations as easily and as widely available to as many people as possible in order to enable them to read Marx and Engels’ analyses of capitalism that have crucial political relevance. The current debate has highlighted that there is a political economy of Marx and Engels’ writings that concerns questions of authorship, work and ownership. It has rather overlooked that there is also a cultural political economy involved that must aim at finding ways, means, media, resources and the work necessary to globally disseminate Marx and Engels’ writings. We should not deflect attention away from the importance of having good translations readily available in easy and accessible form for as many people as possible. The WWW can make an important contribution to this purpose.

The task should therefore be that we create a new and improved English online edition of Marx and Engels’ works, starting with Capital Volume 1, by making use of wiki-based collaborative translation work. We shouldn’t pay L&W, but gather work force and resources to improve the availability and quality of Marx and Engels’ works.

Marxist translators of the world unite!

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Some interesting blog posts on capitalism & Marxism by Ken Wark

I stumbled across the Public Seminar ‘commons‘ blog today, after seeing syndicated versions of Mackenzie Wark’s ‘thanaticism‘ essay (linked, for example, by Stuart Elden) and was interested to see further pieces concerning (shifting) contemporary understandings of capitalism and Marxism.

In particular, I enjoyed reading two pieces:

In “Is this still capitalism?” Wark looks at the common assumptions upon which understandings of the definition of ‘capitalism’ are based and thinks through how these might be challenged or at least re-worked through contemporary global business practices. In particular, Wark discusses how we may need to rethink understandings of capitalism as the dominance of one class over others through ownership of the means of production because, in many, cases the ‘dominant class’ do not own the means of production but, rather, they own the intellectual property, like Apple (for whom others, like Foxxcon, actually make their products), or the distribution chain, like Walmart and perhaps Google:

Perhaps what is going on is a kind of power that has less to do with owning the means of production thereby controlling the value cycle, as in capitalism. Perhaps it is more about owning the means of mediation, thereby controlling the means of production and hence the value cycle. The actual production can be outsourced, and manufacturing firms will have to compete for the privilege of making products with someone else’s intellectual property embedded in it, and sold under some else’s brand.

Wark poses the question, ‘is this something other than capitalism’, in particular, in relation to Google because there is perhaps no longer a capturing of surplus value by exploiting labour but rather–in an argument that resonates with that of both Stiegler and Lyotard–a capturing of value by exploiting data. In concluding, Wark argues that its not enough to merely label this a form of ‘immaterial’ labour (again resonances with Stiegler’s critique of ‘immateriality’ here):

None of this, one should hasten to add, is ‘immaterial’. Can we just admit that this was a terrible (non)concept? Just as it took an incredible amount of infrastructure to seize power from the old landlord class, so too seizing power from a capitalist class to vest it with something else takes a powerful infrastructure, one no longer about making and distributing things but about controlling that making and distributing.

In short, considered in a really vulgar way, in terms of the forces of production, maybe there’s something new going on. Some of the relations of production look familiar. This is still an economy that appears to have markets and prices, firms and profits and so on. But perhaps power is shifting away from owning the means of production, which merely extract surplus value from labor, toward owning the means of mediation, by which a surplus can be extracted from any activity at all.

In the other essay I enjoyed, “Four cheers for vulgarity“, Wark explores the ways in which the labelling of ‘vulgar’ Marxism has been used as a means of Othering:

There are then four general actions of othering involved in calling something vulgar. The first is political. The vulgarians think in terms of a gradual, evolutionary process of historical change. They lack a taste for the political leap. The second is theoretical. The vulgarians pay too much attention to specialized knowledge such as the sciences. They lack a sense of the central role of philosophy as guarantor of the correct method. The third is cultural. The vulgarians are too close to the self-identity of the working class. They lack a sophistication about the struggle within bourgeois culture. The fourth is more strictly academic. The vulgarian ranges too freely across disciplinary knowledge.

Wark goes on to both critically reflecting upon the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’–in particular citing Bogdanov and Platonov as ‘losers’ (‘who?’ you ask – exactly!)–and of those processes as well turning the possible meaning of ‘vulgar’ by offering alternative models of vulgarity that might be seen as worthwhile and/or desirable. In particular, Wark discusses the work of Donna Harraway and Kim Stanley Robinson as alternative (‘positive’) models of ‘vulgarity’.

In concluding, Wark suggests that many of the preoccupations of contemporary social science (especially geography) can be seen as ‘vulgar’ concerns in the guise of ‘nature, labour, techne and utopia’, particularly in relation to anthropogenic climate change:

So here are four kinds of vulgarity: about nature and labor, techne and utopia, that are not quite those usually covered by the “vulgar Marxist!” insult. They are surely useful kinds of vulgarity with which and about which to think, given that the era of climate change is upon us. There are surely other senses of the vulgar that one might add, and other writers who make them thinkable. That might be part of a larger project of rethinking the paths through the archive that open these traditions up again in news ways to confront the present.

And so: four cheers for vulgar Marxism!!!! Four rather than three, as the vulgar is always a little excessive. Four cheers for these four vulgar Marxist writers, although they are also much more than that. Bogdanov and Platonov offer unique perspectives on what Jodi dean calls the ‘communist horizon’; Haraway and Robinson on what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism.’ I have been thinking for a while now about why I chose to write about them together, in my book Molecular Red, for which these might be some provisional notes. Perhaps it is because if we are to have a low theory for the times, it will be vulgar, or not at all. Opening up the vulgar wing of the archive again might open some more plural pathways through which to think from past to present, to inhabitable futures.

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Tweets about Ernesto Laclau

[Amended: 15/04/2014 22:24 to reflect better stats on the links being shared]

As a number of other bloggers have highlighted, and as I noted on Twitter, the political philosopher Ernesto Laclau sadly passed away on the 13th of April. There is an excellent obituary on the publisher Verso’s blog, which is worth reading.

Like, I think, a lot of others I discovered this news on Twitter and, as is the modus operandi of the tweeter, I re-tweeted the tweets through which I discovered the news. I certainly do not intend to trivialise this news, but what is quite interesting about the spread of this sad news is that while the English spread of the news on twitter was largely driven by retweets, a lot of which linked to a story in the English language Buenos Aires Herald, the Spanish spike in tweets was not wholly driven by retweets.

There was, therefore, a muted version of a @BBCBreaking sort of effect in English tweets, in the way that there was for example with the news about the death of Peaches Geldof (again, I’m not seeking to trivialise that news or intervene in the discussions about whether or not there was genuine grief being expressed). So, for a ‘concerned public’ (in this case those who are at least partly familiar with Laclau, his work and the topics it addresses) social media became a conduit and key actor in the movement of the information in different ways.

I ran a quick search on ScraperWiki, from yesterday, that encompasses the relevant dates and used some of the tools we have been developing for the Contagion project to look at the time series of tweets and in particular the movement of the news between Spanish and English. We can see how the initial spike of tweets in Spanish leads the spike in English by approximately an hour (please bare in mind that the Spanish tweets are more numerous by an approximate multiple of ten).

Now, the spike in tweets in English can be mostly, but not quite wholly, attributed to retweets of the link to an English language article posted on the Buenos Aires Herald. Yet, there remains a majority of the tweets in the Spanish spike that are a case of other forms of ‘passing it on‘. Tweets featuring a direct link (some as shortened URLs) to the Buenos Aires Herald article account for over a half (at various moments in the spike) of all English tweets between 8pm and midnight on 13th April, and a few more of these tweets link to Stuart Elden’s blog post that links on to the Buenos Aires Herald.

So, its interesting to see how the combination of an emergent ‘public’ convened around that news and the somewhat phatic interaction of re-tweeting once the movement of easily shared links begins (this is related to what Martin Thayne discussed in a paper about Facebook in the issue of Culture Machine I co-edited with Patrick Crogan). This speaks to what Steve Hinchliffe and I have been trying to get at with the definition of ‘contagion’, inspired by Tony Sampson’s Thrift-ian reading of Tarde, as the ‘movement of movement’ – the sense in which the various intersecting constituents of a public / a network, propagate and in some senses ‘accelerate’ the iteration and mutation, hence difference, in repetition.

Obviously, there’s more to what we do, and, indeed, more to do, in this kind of critical theory-inflected analysis of virality in social media and that’s what I’m busy working out with both Steve and our diligent research fellow Rebecca Sandover, who has recently presented some initial ideas from the project at the AAG (the abstract linked here isn’t quite what was presented but it gives you a flavour!).

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Reblog > Anne Galloway at Mobilities & Design Workshop, Lancaster

The Mobilities and Design workshop (later this month) looks interesting, not least cos Anne will be joining from afar to talk about her excellent Counting Sheep project, as she says on her blog:

I’m really pleased to be participating (via video & Skype) in the Mobilities and Design Workshop at Lancaster University, 29-30 April, 2014.

The event is being live-streamed so you’ll be able to follow along, and this is what I’ll be talking about:

Why Count Sheep, and Other Tricky Questions About Speculative Design Ethnography

Governments around the world require livestock farmers to tag their animals and track their movements from birth to death. Mandated for the purposes of local biosecurity and global market access, electronic identification is also used to keep track of breeding information and health treatments. Combined with location technologies like GPS, and sensor technologies that can monitor individual animal health and external environmental conditions, livestock are now capable of generating and transmitting enormous amounts of data.

At the same time, farmers in the developed world respond to increased public concerns about animal welfare and environmental sustainability by developing new online forms of agricultural advocacy, or what they call “agvocacy”. The US-based AgChat Foundation, and its equivalents in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, use social media to promote greater public awareness of agricultural practices and connect producers and consumers through weekly online chats. A “farm to fork” traceability ethos underpins agvocacy efforts, and aligns well with technosocial imperatives related to the “Internet of Things” – or the ability to connect data-rich objects (including animals) to the Internet.

For the past three years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about sheep, talking about sheep, and hanging out with sheep or other people who care about sheep. I’ve done this because I’m interested in what the emergent technologies and politics I describe above might mean for our longest domesticated livestock animal, and for the people who continue to produce and consume them. In most ways, this has been standard STS-based ethnographic research: participant observation, interviews, etc. But the systems that I describe aren’t fully formed–and may not ever fully form as imagined–so I needed to come up with complementary research methods that could help me apprehend the future, or more correctly possible futures, and for that I turned to design.

This presentation will first outline the speculative design ethnography (SDE) methods developed, and outputs created, for the “Counting Sheep: NZ Merino in an Internet of Things” research project. (I encourage people to check out the design scenarios for themselves.) Then I will reflect on the challenges and opportunities of this kind of hybrid research practice, paying particular attention to how future visions act in the present to construct multiple publics and co-produce knowledge. Finally, using preliminary responses to our work, I will consider the potential of SDE as a public engagement strategy, and the role of disinterested or disagreeable publics.

Related reading

Galloway, A. 2013. “Emergent Media Technologies, Speculation, Expectation and Human/Nonhuman Relations.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 57(1): 53-65.

Galloway, A. 2013. “Towards Fantastic Ethnography and Speculative Design.” Ethnography Matters, 17 September, 2013.

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Novels read in the first three months of 2014

I’ve seen others review their year of reading fiction on blogs but I don’t think I’d actually remember all of the books I read in a year, so I thought I’d write a more modest list of the novels I’ve read in the first three months of the year. Hopefully this isn’t too embarassing!

I bought a Kindle in February and so many of these were read as e-books and bought in the failure of willpower through fatal ‘one-click’ purchasing…

  • A Place of Greater Safety, Hillary Mantel – lengthy examination of the beginnings of the French Revolution, focusing on Danton, Demouslins and Robbespiere as protagonists. I learned an awful lot about the revolution”¦ but blimey its long!
  • Rates of Exchange, Malcolm Bradbury – 1980s comic novel satirising both the sham iliac nature of then-Soviet satellite states and attempts at cultural exchange, with a bumbling academic as the protagonist. Quite funny, but not as good as Bradbury’s subsequent novel Dr Criminale.
  • The Apocalypse Codex, Charlie Stross – fourth in the Laundry Files series: a darkly comical commingling of Len Deighton and HP Lovecraft. Laugh-out-loud funny at points and brilliantly paced.
  • Bedsit Disco Queen, Tracey Thorne – an understated wonderfully written tour de force of an autobiography with some great observations about life in the 80s. Wholeheartedly recommended.
  • Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers, Alexander McCall Smith – the 9th in the ‘44 Scotland Street‘ series that began, serialised, in the pages of The Scotsman. I have a soft spot for several of the ongoing characters.
  • Solo, William Boyd – a James Bond novel, quite entertaining and quick to read.
  • Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams – hadn’t read these until now, quite entertaining. I was surprised at how different the TV series of the same name turned out to be…
  • The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Douglas Adams – the Dirk Gently sequel.
  • Bitter Seeds – Ian Tregillis – first in the paranormal spy/war series – ‘The Milkweed trilogy‘. I found this by looking for books similar to Stross’ Laundry series and came across this conversation between Stross and Tregillis, so I tried the books out.
  • The Coldest War, Ian Tregillis – see above.
  • Necessary Evil, Ian Tregillis – see above.
  • Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan – historical spy novel, with some compelling characters.

I’m happy to receive suggestions for books to read, I have a fairly eclectic taste!