Category: academia

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Videos to introduce lectures on geographies of popular culture

I give seven lectures on geographies of popular culture at the end of a 28-lecture torrent of social and cultural geography that is our first-year, first-term module “Geographies of Place, Identity & Culture‘.

We are asked to commence the actual lecture five minutes after the beginning of the session and end five minutes before, thus giving us 50 minutes of time to engage the students.

I have found that it can be rather awkward setting up and just waiting and watching the students pile in, while many of them sort of stare at you… so, I’m going to give them something else to look at!

I did this for one lecture last year and have now found a video for the first five minutes (-ish) of all seven. Here they are:

Introduction to Geographies of Popular Culture, begins with:

Lecture 2, geographies of music, begins with:

Lecture 3, geographies of life online, begins with:

Lecture 4, geographies of books & reading, begins with:

Lecture 5, geographies of cinema and TV, begins with:

Lecture 6, spaces of games and play, begins with:

Lecture 7, geographies of consumption, begins with:

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Reblog> 40 reasons why you should blog about your research

A post from about a year ago on Sociological Imagination – seen via Stuart Elden…

I particularly agree with:

  1. It’s a great way of making connections & finding potential collaborators.
  2. It can provide an archive of your thoughts, ideas and reactions which can later be incorporated into more formal work.
  3. It makes it easier for people to find your published work and increases the likelihood they will read and cite it.
  4. Its informality and immediate accessibility can help make writing part of your everyday life rather than being a source of stress and anxiety.
  5. Its a great way to promote events and call for papers. Particularly if you blog regularly and your blog is connected to Twitter.
  6. It helps ensure you can continue to develop strands of thought which, for now, don’t have any practical implications but might at some point in the future.
  7. It encourages you to reflexively interrogate and organise your work, drawing out emergent themes and placing isolated snippets of commentary into shared categories.
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Thinking Histories of Race and Computation, or “Why are the Digital Humanities so White?”

Dorothea Klein tweeted a link to this excellent piece by Tara McPherson in an online book Debates in the Digital Humanities:

I wanted to quote this paragraph because it offers a fantastic critical and productive response to the problem of a-historical and a-political studies of code and computation that McPherson diagnoses:

Scholars in the digital humanities and in the emerging field of code studies are taking up the challenge of understanding how computational systems (especially but not only software) developed and operate. However, we must demand that these fields not replay the formalist and structuralist tendencies of new media theory circa 1998. This formalist turn displayed a stubborn technological determinism and often privileged the machine over the social. To end run such determinism, the digital humanities and code studies must also take up the questions of culture and meaning that animate so many scholars of race in fields like the new American studies. Likewise, scholars of race must analyze, use, and produce digital forms and not smugly assume that to engage the digital directly is to be complicit with the forces of capitalism.The lack of intellectual generosity across our fields and departments only reinforces the divide-and-conquer mentality that the most dangerous aspects of modularity underwrite.We must develop common languages that link the study of code and culture. We must historicize and politicize code studies. And, because digital media were born as much of the civil rights era as of the cold war era (and of course these eras are one and the same), our investigations must incorporate race from the outset, understanding and theorizing its function as a ghost in the digital machine. This does not mean that we should simply add race to our analysis in a modular way, neatly tacking it on or building digital archives of racial material, but that we must understand and theorize the deep imbrications of race and digital technology even when our objects of analysis (say UNIX or search engines) seem not to be about race at all. This will not be easy. In the writing of this essay, the logic of modularity continually threatened to take hold, leading me into detailed explorations of pipe structures in UNIX or departmental structures in the university, taking me far from the contours of race at midcentury. It is hard work to hold race and computation together in a systemic manner, but it is work that we must continue to undertake.

I’ve only quickly read the piece but I will definitely return to re-read it more thoroughly – brilliant.

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Reblog> I am not here to satisfy you: the NSS and our institutional knickers

Hester Parr tweeted this post by Julie Cupples from a few months ago. As an early career academic on probation it’s difficult to stick your head above the parapet, and os it’s great when you read someone else doing it. This post really does resonate with my feelings about teaching in a university and how that can or should be valued…

There are also some good comments, so take a look.

I am not here to satisfy you: the NSS and our institutional knickers

The neoliberal endeavour to convert university students into consumers is underpinned by a survey culture that is constantly attempting to measure a thing called ‘student satisfaction’. It’s part of the way universities compete with one another and manufacture what is termed the ‘student experience’. In the neoliberal academy, students, faculty and staff are constantly surveyed, a phenomenon that a New Zealand academic has recently described as a tyranny that may “degrade student achievement” and “harm staff” (Heinemann 2015). If you borrow an interloan, ask IT to fix a software issue on your computer, or order sandwiches for a meeting from the preferred corporate supplier, you’re then likely to be sent a survey to assess the level of customer satisfaction with the service. It’s tedious but fortunately most of them can be quickly ignored and deleted. But the survey that seems to produce a bizarre level of managerial emphasis and concern that is quite hard to ignore is the National Student Survey (NSS). In my view, NSS obsession is producing quite pernicious and pedogogically impoverishing outcomes. For those outside the UK, the NSS began in 2005. It is commissioned by HEFCE and carried out by Ipsos Mori. Students are asked 23 questions which relate to student satisfaction and the learning experience (see thestudentsurvey.com for more detail). It then produces scores and rankings to add to the dozens of other league tables in which contemporary universities jostle for position and which get deployed in a highly selective manner in university spin.

The biggest problem with the idea of student satisfaction is that our principal aim as educators should not be to satisfy students. My teaching philosophy is composed in part of the following ideas:

I am not here to satisfy you. I am here to encourage you to interrogate your existing knowledges and possibly your own privilege. This is likely to be a deeply unsettling and uncomfortable process, especially if your class, race or gender location has never required you to interrogate your worldview and how it harms and excludes. I will however do my best to inspire you and encourage you to think. 

In fact, our aim should be to unsettle our students, especially the most privileged ones, not to satisfy them. It can often be satisfying to have your pre-existing values and worldviews endorsed (which is why people with right-wing views tend to watch Fox News for example rather than MSNBC or Democracy Now). While it might be energizing to have them challenged, and sometimes clearly is, for some students it can be deeply and profoundly dissatisfying. Some students react negatively when they are exposed to explicitly feminist perspectives or are forced to confront how they continue to benefit from the legacies of colonialism or white privilege. Engagement with these issues starts at university but is probably not resolved if ever until much later in a student’s life. By the time I graduated after four years of study, I had begun to rethink my worldviews. It wasn’t until much later than I gained a much deeper insight into my own politics and cultural assumptions and began to reformulate them. So if students are dissatisfied, it could be because we are doing our jobs properly, not because we are failing.

Read the rest of the post.

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Interesting job: 5 year(!) RF in Urban Processes, Resilient Infrastructures and Sustainable Environments

Saw this job advertised at the University of Salford, it looks like a fantastic opportunity for someone – and of interest to geographers I’m sure:

5-year Research Fellowship within School of the Built Environment/UPRISE, University of Salford

The School of the Built Environment is seeking to appoint an exceptional candidate for a 5 year Research Fellowship within the newly formed UPRISE Research Centre. UPRISE brings together the expertise and research strengths of three existing groupings: the Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF), the Centre for Disaster Resilience (CDR) and SURFACE – Inclusive Design. UPRISE develops critical and engaged research and practice around the themes of Urban Processes, Resilient Infrastructures and Sustainable Environments.  The distinctiveness of the Centre is in exploring and excavating the boundaries and inter-relationships between these issues, with an emphasis on championing inclusive, resilient and sustainable spaces and places and a commitment to people and communities.

For more information and to apply, please see http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ALT619/research-fellow-uprise/

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CFP> Mobile Work-Life Arrangements: Exploring conceptual and methodological challenges

This was posted to crit-geog and I thought it looks interesting and wanted to share:

Mobile Work-Life Arrangements: Exploring conceptual and methodological challenges.

 An Interdisciplinary Late-Summer School

9-18 October, 2015
University of Freiburg, Germany

Convened by: COME (Research Group Cultures of Mobility in Europe) and ANTHROMOB (EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network)

Anna Lipphardt (Freiburg); Jamie Coates (Waseda/Sheffield) and Roger Norum (Leeds/UCL)

Funded by Volkswagen Foundation

OVERVIEW
The interdisciplinary field of mobility studies has produced a broad spectrum of theoretical works and structural analyses, driven by research focusing on recent innovation in transport and communication. Within that field, economic and work-related aspects of mobility, are often treated as distinct from other life practices. This late-summer school aims to contribute to the field of mobility studies with respect to two key issues: First, it will turn attention to the interplay between work and non-work (e.g. leisure, family life, well-being) spheres of life linked to mobility. Second, it focuses on the complexities of mobile work-life arrangements as they play out in the everyday lives of an ever-growing number of people worldwide, across the economic spectrum and across diverse professional and socio-cultural fields.
The late-summer school explicitly aims to bring together people studying a range of empirical cases including (but not limited to) research across the following subjects:

  • peripatetic and pastoralist groups
  • transport-sector professionals
  • artists, creatives and travelling entertainers
  • seasonal and project-based labourers
  • academics
  • lifestyle migrants

OBJECTIVES AND KEY QUESTIONS
The late-summer school has two core objectives:

1. Providing a forum for discussing qualitative methodological approaches to mobility, including multi-sited, mobile or trajectory ethnography; life-course and life-world analyses; and newly-emerging ICT-based methods;

2. Exploring the differing forms of knowledge production concomitant with mobile work-life arrangements, it will encourage a critical reflection of the theoretical frameworks, empirical operationalisations and political discourses that implicitly or explicitly inform much research on mobile groups. Our intention is to bring together different epistemic communities, thus fostering a comparative perspective.

Key questions which the late-summer school will address are:

  • How do we develop a critical analytical position in light of the complex entanglements between the political and economic discourses on certain mobile groups, the conceptual approaches of our respective research disciplines, and the emic perspectives of the people we study?
  • What are the advantages, challenges, and limitations of differing analytical models such as multi-sited ethnography, qualitative case study, life-course analysis, or phenomenology in exploring mobile work-life arrangements?
  • How can we compare or generalise insights gained from qualitative studies on specific mobile fields? And how can we employ empirical research to advance theoretical stances on mobility, both within a given research area and across disciplinary divides?

PROGRAMME AND WORKING FORMATS
The programme includes keynote lectures and advanced seminars by Noel Salazar (University of Leuven), Michaela Benson (Goldsmiths University) and Huub van Baar (University of Amsterdam/Giessen University). It also comprises presentations by doctoral students, workshops on mobile methods and representational strategies, informal discussions on practical issues of mobile/multi-sited fieldwork, career and professional development sessions, a film screening, and recreational activities. The working language is English.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR
The programme is aimed at doctoral students working on projects situated in qualitative social research focusing on issues related to mobile work-life arrangements. The common ground for all participants will be their interest in the labour/economic aspects of the mobile empirical fields they study, their footing in qualitative social research, and a shared interest in the epistemology of Mobility Studies. We welcome applications from doctoral students based in disciplines such as cultural and social anthropology, sociology, political science, social work, education, geography, and relevant interdisciplinary research fields including mobility, communication, environmental, transport and labour studies. Doctoral students at any stage of their research – including beginners – are invited to present work in progress and to discuss central research issues with which they are currently concerned. To ensure an open and collaborative learning environment, the number of participants will be limited to a maximum of 25.

APPLICATION
Interested applicants are asked to submit the following materials to the convenors by email up until August 10, 2015:

1. Curriculum Vitae (1 page);
2. Short description of your dissertation project (1-2 pages);
3. Personal statement (1-2 pages) that answers the following:
– Why do you wish to attend the Mobile Work-Life Arrangements Late-Summer School?
– What specific aspects of your dissertation and fieldwork are you most interested in discussing?

Successful applicants will be notified by email by the 3rd week of August.

ACCOMODATION AND TRAVEL GRANTS
It is expected that participants take part in the full duration of the late-summer school. All meals and accommodation will be covered, as will reimbursement for the following travel expenses: up to 150 Euro for participants from Germany; up to 300 Euro for those from other European countries; and up to 800 Euro for students who come from overseas. Participants from developing countries and from countries affected by current economic crises are eligible to apply for full travel funding.

For more information, please see www.mobworklife.net. Please feel free to contact us for specific questions about the programme or application.

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Normal service now resumed

historical picture of a man leaning so his nose touches a grindstone

Hello to anyone that actually reads this blog! I’ve been on a ‘stay-cation’ en famille and I’m now back ‘at’ work… for the various values of location that implies for an academic that commutes and makes an office wherever is practical.

So, ‘nose [back] to the grindstone’…