conference – Page 2 – Sam Kinsley

5 September, 20185 September, 2018

Automative Imagination – slides

Automated taxi figure in the 1990 film Total Recall

Last week I was fortunate to convene and chair a fantastic double session at the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) in Cardiff.

The session was ‘New Geographies of Automation?‘ and featured some great papers, which I hope to reflect on in a subsequent post.

For now, I wanted to share my own slides from the paper I gave – “The Automative Imagination”. The paper was in part an attempt to set the scene of subsequent papers and also, in part, a pitch for my book project of the same title.

The presentation is more or less in two parts. First, I pitch the book topic and the way I plan on structuring it – in terms of some key ‘figures’ and some key, overlapping, geographical contexts. Second, I offer an example of one way in which the figure of ‘progress’ appears in discussions about automation in relation to widely quoted risks of redundancy and joblessness due to automation. I chart how particular forms of evidence travel through the sorts of documents often used as the basis of such claims – reports by think tanks and consultants – who in turn draw upon academic and NGO work. The aim here is to show how evidence, which becomes ‘fact’, travels, and how this is contributes to particular ways of imagining future contexts of work and living.

For more on the ‘Automative Imagination‘ project please visit the project page.

14 August, 201814 August, 2018

‘New geographies of automation?’ at the RGS-IBG conference

All of a sudden the summer is nearly over, apparently, and the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers is fast approaching, this year in Cardiff.

I am convening a double session on the theme of ‘New geographies of automation?’, with two sessions of papers by some fantastic colleagues that promise to be really interesting. I am really pleased to have this opportunity to invite colleagues to collectively bring their work into conversation around a theme that is not only a contemporary topic in academic work but also, significantly, a renewed topic of interest in the wider public.

There are two halves of the session, broadly themed around ‘autonomy’ and ‘spacings’. Please find below the abstracts for the session.

Details: Sessions 92 & 123 (in slots 3 & 4 – 14:40-16:20 & 16:50-18:30) | Bates Building, Lecture Theatre 1.4

This information is also accessible, with all of the details of venue etc., on the RGS-IBG conference website: session 1 ‘autonomy’ and session 2 ‘spacings’.

New Geographies of Automation? (1): Autonomy

1.1 An Automative Imagination

Samuel Kinsley, University of Exeter

This paper sets out to review some of the key ways in which automation gets imagined – the sorts of cultural, economic and social forms of imagination that are drawn upon and generated when discussing how automation works and the kinds of future that may come as a result. The aim here is not to validate/invalidate particular narratives of automation – but instead to think about how they are produced and what they tell us about how we tell stories about what it means to be ‘human’, who/what has agency and what this may mean for how we think politically and spatially. To do this the concept of an ‘automative imagination’ is proposed as a means of articulating these different, sometimes competing – sometimes complementary, orientations towards automation.

1.2 The Future of Work: Feminist Geographical Engagements

Julie MacLeavy (Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol)

This paper considers the particular pertinence of feminist geographical scholarship to debates on the ‘future of work’. Drawing inspiration from Linda McDowell’s arguments that economic theories of epochal change rest on the problematic premise that economic and labour market changes are gender-neutral, it highlights the questions that are emerging from feminist economic geography research and commentary on the reorganisation of work, workers’ lives and labour markets. From this, the paper explores how feminist and anti-racist politics connect with the imagination of a ‘post-work’ world in which technological advancement is used to enable more equitable ways of practice (rather than more negative effects such as the intensification of work lifestyles). Political responses to the critical challenges that confront workers in the present moment of transformation are then examined, including calls for Universal Basic Income, which has the potential to reshape the landscape of labour-capital relations.

1.3 Narrating the relationship between automation and the changing geography of digital work

Daniel Cockayne, Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo

Popular narratives about the relationship between automation and work often make a straightforward causal link between technological change and deskilling, job loss, or increased demand for jobs. Technological change – today, most commonly, automation and AI – is often scripted as threatening the integrity of labor, unionization, and traditional working practices or as creating more demand for jobs, in which the assumption is the more jobs the better. These narratives elide a close examination of the politics of work that include considerations of domestic and international racialized and gendered divisions of labor. Whether positive or negative, the supposed inevitability of technological transition positions labor as a passive victim of these changes, while diverting attention away from the workings of international financialized capital. Yet when juxtaposed against empirical data, straightforward cause and effect narratives become more complex. The unemployment rate in North America has been the lowest in 40 years (4.1% in the USA and 5.7% in Canada), which troubles the relationship between automation and job loss. Yet, though often touted by publications like The Economist as a marker of national economic well-being, unemployment rates ignore the kinds of work people are doing, effacing the qualitative changes in work practices over time. I examine these tropes and their relationship to qualitative changes in work practices, to argue that the link between technological change and the increasing precaratization of work is more primary than the diversionary relationship between technological change and job loss and gain or deskilling.

1.4 Sensing automation

David Bissell, University of Melbourne

Processes of industrial automation are intensifying in many sectors of the economy through the development of AI and robotics. Conventional accounts of industrial automation stress the economic imperatives to increase economic profitability and safety. Yet such coherent snapped-to-grid understandings risk short-circuiting the complexity and richness of the very processes and events that compose automation. This paper draws from and reflects through a series of encounters with workers engaged in the increasingly automated mining sector in Australia. Rather than thinking these encounters solely through their representational dimensions with an aim to building a coherent image of what automation is, this paper is an attempt at writing how automation becomes differently disclosed through the aesthetic dimensions of encounters. It acknowledges how automation is always caught up in multiple affective and symbolic ecologies which create new depths of association. Developing post-phenomenological thought in cultural geography, this paper articulates some of the political and ethical stakes for admitting ambiguity, incoherence and confusion as qualities of our relations with technological change.

1.5 Technological Sovereignty, Post-Human Subjectivity, and the Production of the Digital-Urban Commons

Casey Lynch (School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona)

As cities become increasingly monitored, planned, and controlled by the proliferation of digital technologies, urban geographers have sought to understand the role of software, big data, and connected infrastructures in producing urban space (French and Thrift 2002; Dodge, Kitchin, and Zook, 2009). Reflections on the “automatic production of space” have raised questions about the role and limitations of “human” agency in urban space (Rose 2017) and the possibilities for urban democracy. Yet, this literature largely considers the proliferation of digital infrastructures within the dominant capitalist, smart-city model, with few discussions of the possibilities for more radically democratic techno-urban projects. Engaging these debates, this paper considers alternative models of the techno-social production of urban space based around the collective production and management of a common digital-urban infrastructure. The paper reflects on the notion of “technological sovereignty” and the case of Guifinet, the world’s largest “community wireless network” covering much of Catalonia. The paper highlights the way its decentralized, DIY mode of producing and maintaining digital urban infrastructure points to the possibilities for more radically democratic models of co-production in which urban space, technological infrastructures, and subjectivities are continually reshaped in relation. Through this, the paper seeks to contribute to broader discussions about the digitalization of urban space and the possibilities for a radical techno-politics.

New Geographies of Automation? (2): Spacings

2.1 The urbanisation of robotics and automated systems – a research agenda
Andy Lockhart* (a.m.lockhart@sheffield.ac.uk), Aidan While* (a.h.while@sheffield.ac.uk), Simon Marvin (s.marvin@sheffield.ac.uk), Mateja Kovacic (m.kovacic@sheffield.ac.uk), Desiree Fields (d.fields@sheffield.ac.uk) and Rachel Macrorie (r.m.macrorie@sheffield.ac.uk) (Urban Institute, University of Sheffield)
*Attending authors
Pronouncements of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’ or ‘second machine age’ have stimulated significant public and academic interest in the implications of accelerating automation. The potential consequences for work and employment have dominated many debates, yet advances in robotics and automated systems (RAS) will have profound and geographically uneven ramifications far beyond the realm of labour. We argue that the urban is already being configured as a key site of application and experimentation with RAS technologies. This is unfolding across a range of domains, from the development of autonomous vehicles and robotic delivery systems, to the growing use of drone surveillance and predictive policing, to the rollout of novel assistive healthcare technologies and infrastructures. These processes and the logics underpinning them will significantly shape urban restructuring and new geographies of automation in the coming years. However, while there is growing research interest in particular domains, there remains little work to date which takes a more systemic view. In this paper we do three things, which look to address this gap and constitute the contours of a new urban research agenda. First, we sketch a synoptic view of the urbanisation of RAS, identifying what is new, what is being enabled as a result and what should concern critical scholars, policymakers and the wider public in debates about automation. Second, we map out the multiple and sometimes conflicting rationalities at play in the urbanisation of RAS, which have the potential to generate radically different urban futures, and may address or exacerbate existing socio-spatial inequalities and injustices. Third, and relatedly, we pose a series of questions for urban scholars and geographers, which constitute the basis for an urgent new programme of research and intervention.

2.2 Translating the signals: Utopia as a method for interrogating developments in autonomous mobility

Thomas Klinger1, 2
Brendan Doody2
Debbie Hopkins2
Tim Schwanen2
1. Institute of Human Geography, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main
2. School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are often presented as technological ‘solutions’ to problems of road safety, congestion, fuel economy and the cost of transporting people, goods and services. In these dominant techno-economic narratives ‘non-technical’ factors such as public acceptance, legal and regulatory frameworks, cost and investment in testing, research and supporting infrastructure are the main ‘barriers’ to the otherwise steady roll-out of CAVs. Drawing on an empirical case study of traffic signalling, we trace the implications that advances in vehicle autonomy may have for such mundane and taken-for-granted infrastructure. We employ the three modes of analysis associated with Levitas’ (2013) ‘utopia as a method’. Starting with the architectural mode we identify the components, actors and visions underpinning ‘autonomobility’. The archaeological mode is then used to unpack the assumptions, contradictions and possible unintended effects that CAVs may have for societies. In the ontological mode we speculate upon the types of human and non-human subjectivities and agencies implied by alleged futures of autonomous mobility. Through this process we demonstrate that techno-economic accounts overemphasise the likely scale, benefits and impacts these advances may have for societies. In particular, they overlook how existing automobile-dependent mobility systems are the outcome of complex assemblages of social and technical elements (e.g., cars, car-drivers, roads, petroleum supplies, novel technologies and symbolic meanings) which have become interlinked in systemic and path-dependent ways over time. We conclude that utopia as method may provide one approach by which geographers can interrogate and opening up alarmist/boosterish visions of autonomobility and automation.

2.3 Automating the laboratory? Folding securities of malware
Andrew Dwyer, University of Oxford
andrew.dwyer@cybersecurity.ox.ac.uk

Folding, weaving, and stitching is crucial to contemporary analyses of malicious software; generated and maintained through the spaces of the malware analysis laboratory. Technologies entangle (past) human analysis, action, and decision into ‘static’ and ‘contextual’ detections that we depend on today. A large growth in suspect software to draw decisions on maliciousness have driven a movement into (seemingly omnipresent) machine learning. Yet this is not the first intermingling of human and technology in malware analysis. It draws on a history of automation, enabling interactions to ‘read’ code in stasis; build knowledges in more-than-human collectives; allow ‘play’ through a monitoring of behaviours in ‘sandboxed’ environments; and draw on big data to develop senses of heuristic reputation scoring.

Though we can draw on past automation to explore how security is folded, made known, rendered as something knowable: contemporary machine learning performs something different. Drawing on Louise Amoore’s recent work on the ethics of the algorithm, this paper queries how points of decision are now more-than-human. Automation has always extended the human, led to loops, and driven alternative ways of living. Yet the contours, the multiple dimensions of the neural net, produce the malware ‘unknown’ that have become the narrative of the endpoint industry. This paper offers a history of the automation of malware analysis from static and contextual detection, to ask how automation is changing how cyberspace becomes secured and made governable; and how automation is not something to be feared, but tempered with the opportunities and challenges of our current epoch.

2.4 Robots and resistance: more-than-human geographies of automation on UK dairy farms

Chris Bear (Cardiff University; bearck@cardiff.ac.uk)
Lewis Holloway (University of Hull; l.holloway@hull.ac.uk)

This paper examines the automation of milking on UK dairy farms to explore how resistance develops in emerging human-animal-technology relations. Agricultural mechanisation has long been celebrated for its potential to increase the efficiency of production. Automation is often characterised as continuing this trajectory; proponents point to the potential for greater accuracy, the removal of less appealing work, the reduction of risks posed by unreliable labour, and the removal of labour costs. However, agricultural mechanisation has never been received wholly uncritically; studies refer to practices of resistance that have developed due to fears around (for instance) impacts on rural employment, landscapes, ecologies and traditional knowledge practices. Drawing on interviews with farmers, observational work on farms and analysis of promotional material, this paper examines resistant relations that emerge around the introduction of Automated Milking Systems (AMS) on UK dairy farms. While much previous work on resistance to agricultural technologies has pitted humans against machines, we follow Foucault in arguing that resistance can be heterogeneous and directionally ambiguous, emerging through ‘the capillary processes of counter-conduct’ (Holloway and Morris 2012). These capillary processes can have complex geographies and emerge through more-than-human relations. Where similar conceptualisations have been developed previously, technologies continue to appear rather inert – they are often the tools by which humans attempt to exert influence, rather than things which can themselves ‘object’ (Latour 2000), or which are co-produced by other nonhumans rather than simply imposed or applied by humans. We begin, therefore, to develop a more holistic approach to the geographies of more-than-human resistance in the context of automation.

2.5 Fly-by-Wire: The Ironies of Automation and the Space-Times of Decision-Making

Sam Hind (University of Siegen; hind@locatingmedia.uni-siegen.de)

This paper presents a ‘prehistory’ (Hu 2015) of automobile automation, by focusing on ‘fly-by-wire’ control systems in aircraft. Fly-by-wire systems, commonly referred to as ‘autopilots’ work by translating human control gestures into component movements, via digital soft/hardware. These differ historically from mechanical systems in which pilots have direct steering control through a ‘yoke’ to the physical components of an aircraft (ailerons etc.), via metal rods or wires. Since the launch of the first commercial aircraft with fly-by-wire in 1988, questions regarding the ‘ironies’ or ‘paradoxes’ of automation (Bainbridge 1983) have continued to be posed. I look at the occurrence of ‘mode confusion’ in cockpits to tease out one of these paradoxes; using automation in the aviation industry as a heuristic lens to analyze automation of the automobile. I then proceed by detailing a scoping study undertaken at the Geneva Motor Show in March this year, in which Nissan showcased an autonomous vehicle system. Unlike other manufacturers, Nissan is pitching the need for remote human support when vehicles encounter unexpected situations; further complicating and re-distributing navigational labour in, and throughout, the driving-machine. I will argue that whilst such developments plan to radically alter the ‘space-times of decision-making’ (McCormack and Schwanen 2011) in the future autonomous vehicle, they also exhibit clear ironies or paradoxes found similarly, and still fiercely discussed, in the aviation industry and with regards to fly-by-wire systems. It is wise, therefore, to consider how these debates have played out – and with what consequences.

4 July, 2018

CFP > Memories of the future, London 2019

the character Doc Brown in the film Back to the Future

Via Temporal Belongings.

Memories of the Future

International conference. Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Dates: 29-30 March 2019
Confirmed speakers: Stephen Bann (Bristol); Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths); Paolo Jedlowski (Calabria); Anna Reading (KCL); Michael Rothberg (UCLA)

Proposals for panels or papers by 31 July 2018 to memories.future@sas.ac.uk.

Call for papers
What does it mean to remember the future? What roles do memory, history, the past play in our consciousness as citizens of the early twenty-first century?

David Lowenthal (2015) reminds us that ‘commands to forget coexist with zeal to commemorate’, which raises the very important yet often overlooked questions of: what to remember and what to forget, who is well positioned to lead on or judge in that process, with whose legacies in mind, and with what consequences for future and past generations. In the 1980s, a significant body of scholarship on cultural memory emerged to protect the past from ‘time’s corrosive energy’, leading to ‘collective future thought’ (J. Assmann, 2011; Szpunar and Szpunar, 2016). Cultural memory acted as a moral imperative, a prerequisite to overcome not merely violent pasts but the violence inherent in linear temporality. As such, cultural memory has been seen as redemptive, enabling a more productive relation between past, present and future.

More recently, ‘thinking forward through the past’ has been central to a number of AHRC-funded projects in the UK examining environmental change, postcolonial disaster, gender and colonialism, heritage futures, ruins and more. Climate change, big data and the crisis of democracy are challenging our future in ways that may suggest a misalignment of temporal scales. One way of responding to this is through what Reinhart Koselleck (2000) called horizons of expectations and spaces of experience, namely, the horizons implicit in our anticipations of the future and the degree to which our experience of these have changed and will change over time. Utopian imaginaries and deploying utopia as a method (Levitas, 2013) invite us to think about hope, empathy, and solidarity, each contributing to create different places from which to imagine a future outside crises, fears and risk.

The past and the future constitute our cultural horizons in ways which are neither neutral nor solely technical, but, as Appadurai (2013) has suggested, ‘shot through with affect and sensation’. One of the key challenges of our time is how to study and create futures we truly care for and which are more social (Adam and Groves 2007; Urry, 2016).

Memories of the Future invites contributions to articulate the future in relation to cultural memory, and interrogate the precise and diverse manners in which the past, the present and the future are intertwined and dialogical, complicating our understanding of temporalities in an age saturated with memory and ‘past futures’.

Suggested themes and areas of inquiry include:

The future of memory
Temporal multi-directionalities
Memories of the future
Utopias and dystopias
Past, present and future mobilities
Smart cities and future/ist metropolises
Science-fiction and other subsets of utopia
Housing, cohousing and the future of habitation
Futurisms, modernisms, afro-futurisms
The future in/and the Anthropocene
Post-humanism and the non-human
Intentions, expectations, anticipations
Counterfactuals
Trauma, violence and conflict
Tangible and intangible heritage

Please submit proposals for panels or papers (max 20 minutes) by 31 July 2018 to memories.future@sas.ac.uk, including a 150-250 words abstract.

9 January, 201814 May, 2018

A reminder: CFP > New Geographies of Automation? RGS-IBG 2018, Cardiff

Still from the video for All is Love by Bjork

A friendly reminder and invitation to submit ideas for the below proposed session for the RGS-IBG annual conference in late August in Cardiff.

My aim with this session is to convene a conversation about as wide a range of tropes about automation as possible. Papers needn’t be empirical per se or about actually existing automation, they could equally be about the rationales, promises or visions for automation. Likewise, automation has been about for a while, so historical geographies of automation, in agriculture for example, or policies for automation that have been tried and failed would be also welcome.

There all sorts of ways that ‘automation’ has been packaged in other rubrics, such as ‘smart’ things, cities and so on, or perhaps become a ‘fig leaf’ or ‘red herring’ to cover for unscrupulous activities, such as iniquitous labour practices.

I guess what I’m driving at is – I welcome any and all ideas relevant to the broad theme!

New Geographies of Automation?

Please send submissions (titles, abstracts (250 words) and author details) to me by 31st January 2018.

This session invites papers that respond to the variously promoted or forewarned explosion of automation and the apparent transformations of culture, economy, labour and workplace we are told will ensue. Papers are sought from any and all branches of geography to investigate what contemporary geographies of automation may or should look like, how we are/could/should be doing them and to perhaps question the grandiose rhetoric of alarmism/boosterism of current debates.

Automation has been the recent focus of hyperbolic commentary in print and online. We are warned by some of the ‘rise of the robots’ (Ford 2015) sweeping away whole sectors of employment or by others exhorted to strive towards ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (Srnicek & Williams 2015). Beyond the hyperbole it is possible to trace longer lineages of geographies of automation. Studies of the industrialisation of agriculture (Goodman & Watts 1997); Fordist/post-Fordist systems of production (Harvey 1989); shifts to globalisation (Dicken 1986) and (some) post-industrial societies (Clement & Myles 1994) stand testament to the range of work that has addressed the theme of automation in geography. Indeed, in the last decade geographers have begun to draw out specific geographical contributions to debates surrounding ‘digital’ automation. From a closer attention to labour and workplaces (Bissell & Del Casino 2017) to the interrogation of automation in governance and surveillance across a range of scales (Amoore 2013, Kitchin & Dodge 2011) – the processes and experiences of automation have (again) become a significant concern for geographical research.

The invitation of this session is for papers that consider contemporary discussions, movements and propositions of automation from a geographical perspective (in the broadest sense).

Examples of topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):

Promises of ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent environments
Identity, difference and machines
‘Algorithmic’ places/spaces
Activism for/against automation
Autonomous weapons systems
Robotics and the everyday
Techno-bodily relations of automation
Working with robots
AI, machine learning and cognitive work
Automation and bias
Sovereignty, law-making and automated systems
Automated governance and policing
Boosterism and tales of automation
The economics of automation
Material cultures of robots
Mobilities and materialities of ‘driver-less’ vehicles

20 November, 201714 May, 2018

CFP: RGS-IBG 2018 – New geographies of automation?

New Geographies of Automation?
Please send submissions (titles, abstracts (250 words) and author details) to me by 31st January 2018.

The invitation of this session is for papers that consider contemporary discussions, movements and propositions of automation from a geographical perspective (in the broadest sense).

Examples of topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):

AI, machine learning and cognitive work
Automation and bias
Autonomy, agency and law-making
Automated governance
Boosterism and tales of automation
The economics of automation
Material cultures of robots
Mobilities and materialities of ‘driver-less’ vehicles
Robotics and the everyday
Techno-bodily relations of automation
Working with robots

15 September, 201715 September, 2017

Reblog> CFP: Alternative urbanisms

My colleagues Clive Barnett and Jon Cinnamon have a great CFP out, take a look:

Alternative Urbanisms: Call for papers

Do please circulate the Call for Papers below for a session at the Annual Meeting of the AAG next April, in New Orlean, on the theme of Alternative Urbanisms to anyone who might be interested:

Call for Papers

Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers,

New Orleans, 10th-14th April, 2018.

ALTERNATIVE URBANISMS

Organizers: Clive Barnett and Jon Cinnamon (University of Exeter)

Cities are increasingly characterized as important sites of political, economic, cultural and environmental transformation, yet the proliferating attention to ‘the urban’ from policymakers threatens a narrowing of the boundaries of urban imaginaries around certain favored models. This session thus seeks to bring together papers that address one or more aspects of a growing contemporary concern with developing ‘alternative urbanisms’ in theory, policy and practice (e.g. Derickson 2015, Buckley and Strauss 2016, Parnell and Robinson 2012). We conceive of ‘alternative urbanisms’ along three dimensions. Firstly, alternative urbanisms might describe a focus on counter-hegemonic forms of urban living and practice that are alternative in relation to mainstream models and trends. Secondly, it can refer to a focus on how urban spaces are configured as experimental fields for the development of new practices in response to imperatives to restructure and reconfigure economic, social and technological infrastructures. Thirdly, alternative urbanisms might refer to a concern to broaden the scope of intellectual reference points through which urban practices can be conceptualised and investigated methodologically. Across these dimensions, it is agreed that more effort is needed to extend the canon of contemporary urban studies, urban and regional science, planning, and human geography to include insights from the humanities, natural sciences, or engineering, and also to draw on empirical and theoretical resources from beyond the Global North.

We welcome theoretical and empirical papers that push up against the boundaries of urban thought, policy and practice – papers that aim to critique the urban mainstream as well identify new possibilities for understanding and acting on urban challenges. The following is a sample of questions germane to this session, although we welcome papers on all topics that fit the broad scope.

â–ª What marginalized or emerging theoretical and methodological traditions demand the attention of urban scholars?

â–ª Why do ‘mainstream’ urban ideas and policies not take root in certain jurisdictions? What localisms prevent the successful uptake of mainstream, globally circulating urbanisms?

â–ª What epistemological or political work can alternative urbanisms do?

â–ª What are the temporalities and spatialities of alternative urban thought and practice, and how is this reflected in or distinct from local and global political, economic or cultural hegemonies?

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words by 13th October to: Clive Barnett (c.barnett@exeter.ac.uk) and Jon Cinnamon (j.cinnamon@exeter.ac.uk).

References

Barnett, C. and Bridge, G. (2016) The situations of urban inquiry: thinking problematically about the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, 1186-1204.

Buckley, M. & Strauss, K. (2016) With, against and beyond Lefebvre: Planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34, 617-636.

Derickson, K. D. (2015) Urban geography I: Locating urban theory in the ‘urban age’. Progress in Human Geography, 39, 647-657.

Parnell, S. & Robinson, J. (2012) (Re)theorizing Cities from the Global South: Looking Beyond Neoliberalism. Urban Geography, 33, 593-617.

10 August, 2017

Putting the philosophy of geography into practice – RGS-IBG 2017

conference session with someone holding up a sign saying 'dis-agree'

There are two sessions at the RGS-IBG conference this year concerned with putting the philosophy of geography into practice. These sessions have a diverse range of speakers and paper topics that address both the pleasures and the problems of ‘doing theory’ in geography – both for research and in teaching.

This is not an esoteric and navel-gazing exercise in bolstering a sense of disciplinarity or individual eminence but rather a means to discuss the relations between the everyday practises of doing geography and the, sometimes-maligned, theoretical-methodological techniques we variously employ in geographical research and teaching.

Please find below the list of papers with links to the sessions in the online conference programme.

Session 1: ‘Putting philosophies of geography into practice in research‘ (session 88), Wednesday, Session 3 (14:40 – 16:20), Skempton Building, Room 307.

Performance, theory and economy in geography
Lizzie Richardson (Durham University, UK)

This intervention examines the variety of relationships between performance and theory in geography. It outlines three different performances of theory in geography. One is theories of space that might be understood as a core concern of the discipline although not always expressed in geographical scholarship. Another is attempts to find space and place in forms of philosophy and theory ‘beyond’ geography. A final performance is the movement (or lack thereof) of theory through space and time, into and out of geographical scholarship. These theoretical performances each have different implications for what is understood of as geography and geographical knowledge. The intervention then moves on to examine how theorisations of performance itself cut across these three different approaches with a variety of implications for constructions of contemporary geographical knowledge. This is examined through the example of the changing parameters of ‘economic geography’ and approaches to economy in geography.

Transdisciplinarity and Translation
Keith Harris (University of Washington, USA)

This paper focuses on the problem and potential of collective knowledge production by revisiting the notion of transdisciplinarity as it was practiced by the Centre d’études, de recherches et de formation institutionnelles (CERFI). CERFI was social science research collective founded by Félix Guattari in 1967 as a practical outgrowth the Fédération des groups d’études de recherches sur la functionnement des institutions (FGERI), which he had established two years earlier in an effort to gather and intensively share research from independent research groups focused not only on psychoanalysis – Guattari’s own domain as the co-director of the La Borde psychiatric clinic in the Loire Valley – but also from “teachers and professors, urban planners, architects, economists, filmmakers, [and] alternative military service teachers” (Dosse 2010, 76; cf. Morford 1985 and Fourquet 1982). The journal Recherches (1966-1983) was the vehicle for disseminating CERFI’s and other FGERI groups’ work, and was staunchly transdisciplinary in its attempt to challenge various disciplines to articulate their research trajectories in a way that neither repeated the jargon unique to each discipline nor diluted the complexity of the research for the alleged benefit of readers from other disciplines (an approach that Guattari and Gilles Deleuze adopted in their own coauthored work). Instead, the journal was envisioned as a place where different disciplines could create “‘distinctive oppositions’ rather than remaining in antagonistic structures of mutual misunderstanding” (Guattari 1966, 3, my translation). The paper also addresses Guattari’s concept of transversality (Guattari 2015), which underpins these groups’ commitment to transdisciplinarity, and explicitly address how the contemporary activity of translating such work – in particular, my current efforts to co-translate CERFI’s research on urban problems and problematization that was published in Recherches 13 (Fourquet and Murard 1973) – extends the process of collective knowledge production both spatially and temporally, and opens up new avenues for contemporary interventions, discussions, and connections across disciplines.

Combining post-human, participatory and situated philosophies of geography: a humble research practice?
Samantha Saville (Aberystwyth University, UK)

In this paper, I explore what kinds of research practice are suggested when combining insights from posthuman philosophies and ethical leanings of participatory, co-produced, situated knowledges. I argue that one potential conceptual framework these directions could lead to is the notion of a ‘humble geography’. Through examples from my doctoral research in Svalbard, in which a humble geographic practice emerged and developed, I sketch out some ideas as to how such philosophies play out ‘in the field’ and indeed afterwards when ‘writing-up’, re-presenting and re-producing knowledges. The humble approach I outline sits at odds with traditional senses of academic authority and with rising pressures to sell oneself and work as highly impactful, important, in short anything but humble. In this way, there is scope to join thinking with the emerging ideas of slow scholarship, activist and gentle geographies.

Disruptive interventions: Art practice and the generation of politically complex cultural geographies
Veronica Vickery (University of Exeter, UK)

Current commentaries on art-geographies tend to focus on questions of inter-disciplinarity, rather than the potential for art practice-as-research to be generative of politically complex cultural geographies. Reflecting on the way that human-scaled landscape events can be haunted by deep-time Earth forces, I undertook a series of live-art-to-camera performances, leading to a productive theoretical engagement bringing new materialisms into dialogue with landscape studies. This work demonstrates the unpredictability and riskiness of researching through a critical arts practice. It also shows how these conditions, or disruptive interventions, can be generative of new ways of (body)knowing in the world; ways of knowing which in this project serve to confront the violence and contradictions of a fast changing enviro/geopolitical landscape. I propose that landscape is inherently violent, and that as such, landscaping practices are always politically differentiated and situated. It is a violence in which there can be no innocent place of on-looking; we are all mutually implicated in landscape and landscaping-practices, and indeed, the ghosts of our own vulnerabilities are never far away. Therefore, working from within an art practice–as geographical research–can contribute a perspective of political complexity and generative encounter, in which unexpected collisions, between things, practices, and bodies function to produce spatial connections beyond contemporary analysis.

Critical Realism, Spatial Relations and Social Science Research
Alan Patterson (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)

Arguing for a critical realist approach, this paper draws upon the work of Bhaskar, Sayer, and others to focus on the relational nature of causality, and the significance of this for undertaking ‘real world’ research – i.e. human geography!
The paper addresses the often ambiguous and ill-defined role of ‘space’ in social science research. Only rarely are the causal mechanisms and structures which result in spatial differentiation explicitly considered. Where attempts have been made to consider such factors this is often undertaken in a simplistic fashion, as though concrete reality was simply the result of an unproblematic ‘mapping out’ of abstract processes. These approaches are considered to be inadequate and the discussion takes up the question of the importance of spatial structures to the understanding of causal processes, and examines the implications of this for the design of social science research. In particular, an original ‘relational’ view of causality is presented (which sees reality as forged only when social objects are concretised in a specific set of spatial and temporal relations) which has the potential to resolve the incipient aspatiality of abstract research. It is concluded that the use of intensive case study methods, contextualised within a theoretically informed research design, is a fundamental requirement in order to obtain adequate explanations of complicated social phenomena.

Session 2: ‘Putting philosophies of geography into practice in teaching‘ (session 119), Wednesday, Session 4 (16:50 – 18:30), Skempton Building, Room 307.

Thinking media through the urban: Practicing geography beyond classroom and discipline
Scott Rodgers (Birkbeck, University of London, UK)

This paper addresses two linked questions. How might philosophies of geography be put into pedagogical practice beyond the classroom? And how might this pedagogical practice be negotiated, when the classroom in question lies beyond the discipline of geography? In recent years I have designed and taught a final year undergraduate module titled The Mediated City. This module, directed at media studies as well as general arts and humanities students, encourages an approach to media forms as they emerge through everyday experiences of urban environments and urban living. In so doing, the course interfaces with the ordinary modalities of Birkbeck students, who attend classes at night, tending to work during the day, and in so doing traverse all manner of London spaces. My discussion will centre on an alternative assessment used in this module, in which students build up a compilation of encountered ‘urban media’ examples including text, photos, audio, video, maps and other elements, combining the use of mobile media technologies with a personal blog. Through this coursework, students practice geographical forms of knowing through ordinary urban encounters. In opening themselves to the ordinary and unexpected, they are invited to challenge representational knowledge narrowly conceived. But for the first time in their studies, they are also asked to reckon with the more formal representational knowledge of geography-as-discipline. I will argue that in provisionally deploying geographical philosophies, beyond classroom and discipline, openings are created that challenge media centrism, encouraging students to see and experience media as inherent to their everyday worlds.

Teaching critical GIS historically
Matthew Wilson (Harvard University, USA / University of Kentucky, USA)

In the nearly twenty-years since the publication of Nadine Schuurman’s dissertation on critical GIS, there have been sustained and wide-ranging conversations around what it means to practice criticality with and about geographic information systems. For a new generation of GIScience practitioners and scholars, there is an open question around the role of an historical approach to technical training that has deep roots in early 20th century approaches to Anglophone cartographic education. More recently, advancements by feminist critiques of GIS and mapping have inspired renewed contextualization of mapping techniques, offering either/both social and historical contingencies and implications in critical GIS practice. The point, I argue, is not to teach students a singular history or origin story of geospatial innovations and techniques, but to assist students in understanding that there were many ways forward in the development of GIS and that an historical approach should inspire further tinkering and experimentation — beyond a pervasive ‘recipe-book approach’ within more conventional GIScience pedagogy. In this presentation, I overview and reflect upon both successful as well as more challenged efforts to forward a critical GIS approach in undergraduate teaching and chart an agenda of continued debate and inquiry into the role and responsibility of GIS in the discipline of Geography.

‘Geography is what Geographers do’: a Wittgensteinian reprieve
Pauline Couper (York St John University, UK)

The assertion that “Geography is what Geographers do” has been both cited and criticised for so long (e.g. Putnam, 1957; Bird, 1973; Pacione, 1987; MacDougall, 2003) that it has become something of a disciplinary cliché. When considered a definition or description of Geography the criticisms have some justification. This paper instead takes the phrase as a prompt for thinking through ‘what geographers do’ in the everyday practices through which the discipline is brought into being. It draws on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty) and the work of subsequent philosophers of education (Burbules, Smeyers) to foreground the ‘rough ground’ of everyday acts in which we exercise geographical judgment. A disconnect exists between this rough ground and the structural separation of research and teaching through funding and assessment mechanisms that provides context for (and so shapes) our work. The paper then considers the implications for geographical pedagogy, the ways in which students co-constitute the life of the discipline, and for the organisation of Geographical university education and its departments.

Theory generation in the classroom
Sam Kinsley (University of Exeter, UK)

The generations of theory in human geography are not only performed in conferences, research group meetings and conference panels but also in the classroom. This is a paper concerned with how those generations are made present. By performance of ‘generation’ I mean both the practical generating of theory, through scholarship and research, and the cultural, discursive and temporal generations of scholars themselves. The aim therefore is to sketch out how such performances may function in the classroom. In particular, I want to think through how we might tackle the ways the dialogical relations between generations in the generating of theory may lead to helpful and unhelpful ‘traditions’ (following Scott 2014) and signal how attention to this may be fruitful for the pedagogy of critique.

10 May, 201710 May, 2017

Reblog> CFP – Online Vitriol: Advocacy, Violence, and the Transforming Power of Social Media

Call for Papers

Online Vitriol: Advocacy, Violence, and the Transforming Power of Social Media

A Joint Conference of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture & the Zentrum fÃ¼r Medien und InteraktivitÃ¤t, Giessen, Germany
Wednesday June 29th – Saturday July 1st, 2017 (optional opening lecture by dr. Sarah Kendzior on the evening of June 28th)
For whom:
Researchers in the fields of culture and (digital) media, and related fields

Professionals dealing with online advocacy and social media presence of their organization

Journalists and others dealing with social media and (violent) online discourse

PhD and MA students in culture and media studies

Conference aim:
To employ our collective knowledge, experience, research and intelligence to arrive at a conceptual and practical understanding of the medial and cultural dynamics of online vitriol.

To work towards “A Rough Guide to Online Vitriol: Dealing with Violence and Activism on Social Media in Theory and Practice” (working title). To be published later.

Social media have become inescapable, and they have an overwhelming impact on sociality and public life. Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram give rise to a diverse range of discourses and communication styles. This conference wants to understand the power of social media, not only – as it has often been perceived – as democratizing, but also as powerful vehicles for politically driven bullying and violence. Relevant to people, organizations, and other agents across twenty-first-century society, this topic is increasingly studied from a range of disciplines and perspectives. Virtually everyone has to deal with social media and the discourses it enables and produces. But while the technology exists and seems at first sight intuitively accessible, the agency, dynamics and ethics of social media platforms are not yet well-understood.
‘Trolls for Trump’, online virus ‘scares’, fake news – social media discourse has become a formidable, yet elusive, political force. This conference wants to begin to address some of the issues around the power of online vitriol, by studying discourses, metaphors, media dynamics, and framing on social media. What is it? How does it work? What does it do? And how can it be addressed or countered?
To fruitfully question the political impact of contemporary communication structures and discourses, the conference goes beyond the traditional presenter/audience dichotomy. Instead, it works towards producing a book for academics and professionals confronted with social media violence, provisionally titled “A Rough Guide to Online Vitriol: Dealing with Violence and Advocacy on Social Media in Theory and Practice”. The conference combines academic theorizing with perspectives from professionals active in media, communication, the public sector and journalism, so as to arrive at conceptually rigorous and useful conclusions to guide our own and our organizations’ use of social media.
Possible topics
Bringing together media and communication specialists from various professions (e.g. public sector, press, NGOs) and cultural and media studies students and scholars, the aim is to create crosspollination between theoretical approaches from cultural and media studies on the one hand, and practical challenges and experiences ‘from the field’ on the other.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Privacy and surveillance through social media platforms

Liveness and online temporalities

Tweeting while female

Clickbait as political activism

Shares, likes, profile clicks and other platform-specific metrics

The impact of Facebook’s platform structure and changing algorithms on what can be expressed

‘Communicative capitalism’ and the dynamics of online virality

Politics of trolling and reporting

Representing social media in popular culture

How ‘new’ are online communication practices?

Framing narratives and ideals in a potentially hostile environment

Practical
The conference is free of charge. However, we ask that, during the conference, all participants agree to be offline, and try to be fully present and contemplative.
We welcome proposals of papers, case studies, ideas, and discussion topics from scholars and professionals in the listed fields, as well as related areas of specialization. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a short biography (100 words) to Sara Polak (s.a.polak@hum.leidenuniv.nl), Rahel Schmitz (rahel.schmitz@gcsc.uni-giessen.de), and Ann-Marie Riesner (ann.m.riesner@gcsc.uni-giessen.de) by May 15th, 2017.

6 February, 2017

Reblog> International conference on Human Geography and the Pragmatic Tradition – QMUL 27 May

Owain Jones blogs about an interesting conference at QMUL in May…

International conference on Human Geography and the Pragmatic Tradition. Queen Mary, University of London; May 23-24 2017

I very pleased to say I am to present a paper at this conference as an invited speaker

Queen Mary, University of London is pleased to be hosting an international conference on Human Geography and the Pragmatic Tradition: May 23 and 24 2017

This international conference examines the potential for philosophical pragmatism to augment scholarship in the discipline of human geography. It is some time since geographers created the space needed to foster collective reflection about the potential contribution of this tradition of thought for the discipline. Previous efforts to do this have generated a strong legacy for renewing debate (see, e.g., the special issue of Geoforum, edited by Smith and Wood, 2008). We seek to move this conversation forward through an incisive engagement with pragmatist understandings and their application in the discipline of human geography today. The first day will end with a public lecture, given by QMUL’s Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Professor Robert Lake (Rutgers University, USA) on the theme of Hope for democracy: Pragmatism Between Populism and Expertise.

The preliminary schedule is here. Spaces are limited and need to be booked via Eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/human-geography-and-the-pragmatic-tradition-tickets-7469029067