Category: conference

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Reblog> CFP: Towards a geographical software studies

Nick Lally has posted this interesting call for papers for the AAG next year in San Francisco, an apposite location for such a discussion 🙂 I am sure that there are plenty of geographers who can and will offer some fascinating reflections on this. I hope you consider contributing…

Toward a geographical software studies

A series of sessions for the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco, March 29-April 2, 2016

Ryan Burns (Temple University)
Nick Lally (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

A growing body of recent geographic scholarship has focused its attention on software and algorithms. Some of these studies analyze geographic technologies –GIS and the geoweb, for example– as such, while others investigate a myriad of digital technologies that have become ubiquitous within the spaces of everyday life. These software/code objects interact with and modulate the world in complex ways, enact processes that connect humans and nonhumans, and become entangled with social, cultural, political, and economic systems. Moreover, software created to visualize data is used to produce knowledge about urban environments and everyday life, but obscure the processes and contexts which underlie its development. Engaging these topics, geographers have developed concepts like the “automatic production of space” (Thrift and French 2002), “software-sorted geographies” (Graham 2005), and “code/space” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011) to describe how software and space are co-constituted in the contemporary world. Productive research is building on these topics to explore new ways geographies are produced (Rose, Degen, and Melhuish 2014), governed (Amoore 2011), materialized, represented (Woodward et al. 2015), and lived through software (Kinsley 2014).

This session seeks to bring together a range of spatial thinkers who are producing new studies, theories, and methods for understanding and producing software. We welcome submissions that address all facets of software: the context of its production, its internal operational logics, the material work it does in the world, and its spatial distribution of social and political effects. Suggested themes could include:

“¢ Radical, feminist, or postcolonial political theories of software, software production, and/or hacking. What are the liberatory potentials/limits of coding or software and its critiques?
“¢ The political economy of software, code, attentional economies, and the audience as commodity.
“¢ Methodological contributions for the study of software (deconstruction, ethnography, reading code, reverse-engineering, archival research, hacking, writing software, visual studies, understanding processes, online research, etc)
“¢ Software and visual and affective epistemology.
“¢ The materiality of software and the work it does in the world (the production of space, embodiment, urbanization, social sorting, securitization, infrastructure, etc).

Amoore, L. 2011. Data Derivatives: On the Emergence of a Security Risk Calculus for Our Times. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (6):24–43.

Graham, S. D. 2005. Software-sorted geographies. Progress in Human Geography 29 (5):562–580.

Kitchin, R., and M. Dodge. 2011. Code/space: software and everyday life. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Kinsley, S. 2014. The Matter of “Virtual” Geographies. Progress in Human Geography 38(3): 364-384.

Rose, G., M. Degen, and C. Melhuish. 2014. Networks, interfaces, and computer-generated images: learning from digital visualisations of urban redevelopment projects. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (3):386–403.

Thrift, N., and S. French. 2002. The automatic production of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (3):309–335.

Woodward, K., J. P. Jones, L. Vigdor, S. A. Marston, H. Hawkins, and D. P. Dixon. 2015. One Sinister Hurricane: Simondon and Collaborative Visualization. Annals of the Association of American Geographers :1–16.

Please submit a 250 word abstract to Nick (nlally [AT] wisc [DOT] edu) and Ryan (ryan.burns [AT] temple [DOT] edu) by October 9th, 2015.

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RGS History & Philosophy of Geography Research Group AGM at the RGS annual conference

A quick plug for the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group AGM at the RGS conference in Exeter(!) this September:

AGM AT THE RGS-IBG

This year, our AGM will take place on Wednesday 2 September, at 13:10 in Forum – Seminar Room 1 at the University of Exeter (it’s also listed in the conference programme).

While we do not have any committee members with named roles coming to the end of their term we encourage anyone who is interested in becoming involved in the committee and its activities to attend; we’d very much welcome people who want to become involved in – and expand on – the group’s activities.

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Symposium on Innovations in Ethnographic Methodology

The Centre for Ethnographic Research (UC Berkeley) is holding a symposium on innovations in ethnographic methodology, please find the CFP copied below. Looks interesting!

CFP: Symposium on Innovations in Ethnographic Methodology

On March 4, 2016, CER is hosting a one-day symposium on Innovations in Ethnographic Methodology. We invite scholars from any discipline to submit paper proposals that focus on methodological innovations in conducting ethnographic research.  Exemplars to illustrate methodological contributions may be drawn from any substantive field, e.g. education, everyday life, inequality, health, migration, organizations, urban, etc. Scholars working in ethnographic traditions including Intepretivism, Symbolic Interaction, Ethnomethodology, Phenomenology, the Extended Case Method, and Behavioralism are encouraged to participate.

Those wishing to present a paper are requested to submit an abstract (up to 500 words) along with a current cv. Papers should be focused on methodology and not on findings. The abstract should include a description of the innovation and state the contribution the paper makes to the existing issues within one or more ethnographic methodological traditions. Those chosen to present their papers will have their economy airfare and two nights of lodging paid by the Center.  Selected papers from the conference will be submitted for a special issue of the journal Ethnography.  Abstracts for the conference are due by September 10, 2015, and notification of acceptance will be provided by October 10, 2015.  Please send abstract and cv to cer2015conf@gmail.com.

Via Ethnography Matters.

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Algorithmic Practices: Emergent interoperability in the everyday

This year the RGS-IBG Annual Conference will be coming to the University of Exeter, my institution, and there are some exciting sessions already in the pipelines. I wanted to bring one to the attention of those that happen to look at this website:

Algorithmic Practices: Emergent interoperability in the everyday

Sponsored by: the History and Philosophy of Geography Study Group
Convened by: Eric Laurier and Chris Speed (Edinburgh) and Monika Buscher (Lancaster)

An ever-increasing proportion of the interactions that we have with digital platforms, apps and devices are mediated according to complex algorithms. Whether it be the real time analytics that draw us into playing a game on our phone, or tailored recommendations built from our historical searching and buying habits, we structure our daily lives in response to ‘performative infrastructures’ (Thrift, 2005: 224), most of them hidden deliberately by their makers.

Yet, in responding to the summons, the predictions, the recommendations, the help, the calculations that occur as platforms try to anticipate our next actions, we are learning how they work and don’t work. In our ad hoc assemblies of devices, apps and screens we short cut and re-make algorithms. For instance, in disaster response, ad hoc interoperability and agile response are creating incentives for ‘systems of systems’ that allow locally accomplished convergence of diverse information systems, with implications for data surge capacity as well as protection and privacy (Mendonça et al 2007).

Described as “a structured approach to real-time mixing and matching of diverse ICTs to support individuals and organizations in undertaking response”, emergent interoperability maybe becoming common place in less dramatic daily practices as individuals negotiate the range of algorithms that “react and reorganize themselves around the users” (Beer 2009).

This panel invites papers and presentations that provide insight into conditions and settings in which emergent operability and interoperability occurs within society.

Areas of interest:

  • Dashboards, decongestion, security and the other promises of smart cities (Kitchin 2014
  • Wayfaring, wayfinding and other mobilities with map apps (Brighenti 2012)
  • Changing forms of participation and collaboration through social media algorithms
  • Responding to and attempting to manipulate predicted actions and recommendations
  • The production of calculated publics (Gillespie 2014)
  • Political contestation of algorithms
  • Ad hoc systems
  • Textures of communication in digital and traditional media

The deadline is Friday 6th February 2015.

Email speakers, title and abstract to eric [dot] laurier [at] ed.ac.uk

References:

Beer, D. (2009) Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society. London: SAGE. Vol 11(6): 985–1002.

Brighenti, A. M. (2012). New Media and Urban Motilities: A Territoriologic Point of View. Urban Studies, 49(2), 399–414.

Gillespie, T (2014) The Relevance of Algorithms, pp167-194 in Media Technologies, Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kitchin, R. (2014). Thinking critically about and researching algorithms. The Programmable City Working Paper 5, Maynooth

Mendonça, D., Jefferson, T., & Harrald, J. (2007). Emergent Interoperability: Collaborative Adhocracies and Mix and Match Technologies in Emergency Management. Communications of the ACM, 50(3), 44-9.

Thrift, N. (2005) Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage.

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Rob Kitchin on ‘digital geography’

Based on his notes as discussant in the recent ‘co-production of digital geographies‘ sessions at the RGS-IBG conference (2014), Rob Kitchin has written a helpful and concise blog post reflecting on what we might mean when we talk about ‘digital geographies’. This sort of relates to some of what I’ve written about the kinds of spatial imaginaries of a ‘virtual‘ employed within and beyond geography when discussing digital mediation. So, Rob Kitchin’s post is definitely worth a read and I’ve reproduced the body of it here:

Last Friday I acted as a discussant for three sessions (no. 1, no. 2, no. 3) on Digital Geography presented at the RGS/IBG conference in London.  The papers were quite diverse and some of the discussion in the sessions centred on how to frame and make sense of digital geographies.

In their overview paper, Elisabeth Roberts and David Beel categorised the post-2000 geographical literature which engages with the digital into six classes: conceptualisation, unevenness, governance, economy, performativity, and the everyday.  To my mind, this is quite a haphazard way of dividing up the literature.  Instead, I think it might be more productive to divide the wide range of studies which consider the relationship between the digital and geography into three bodies of work:

Geography of the digital

These works seek to apply geographical ideas and methodologies to make sense of the digital.  As such, it focuses on mapping out the geographies of digital technologies, their associated socio-technical assemblages and production.  Such work includes the mapping of cyberspace, charting the spatialities of social media, plotting the material geographies of ubiquitous computing, detailing the economic geographies of component resources, technologies and infrastructures, tracing the generation and flows of big data, and so on.

Geography produced by the digital

This body of work focuses on how digital technologies and infrastructures are transforming the geographies of everyday life and the production of space.  Such work includes examining how digital technologies and ICTs are increasingly being embedded into different spatial domains – the workplace, home, transport systems, the street, shops, etc.; how they mediate and augment socio-spatial practices and relations such as producing, consuming, communicating, playing, etc; how they shape and remediate geographical imaginaries and how spaces are visioned, planned and built; and so on.

Geography produced through the digital

An increasing amount of geographical scholarship, praxis and communication is now undertaken using digital technologies.  For example, generating, recording and analyzing data using digital devices and associated software and databases; the collection and sharing of datasets and outputs through digital archives and repositories; discussing ideas and conducting debate via mailing lists and social media; writing papers and presentations, producing maps and other visualizations using computers; etc.  A fairly substantial body of work thus reflects on the difference digital technologies make to the production of geographical scholarship.

Taken together these three bodies of work, I would argue, constitute digital geography.

At the same time, however, I wonder about the utility of bounding digital geography and corralling studies within its bounds.  To what extent is it useful to delimit it as a defined field of research?

It might be more productive to reframe much of what is being claimed as digital geography with respect to its substantive focus.  For example, examining the ways in which digital technologies are being pervasively embedded into the fabric of cities and how they modulate the production of urban socio-spatial relations is perhaps best framed within urban geography.  Similarly, a study looking at the use of digital technology in the delivery of aid in parts of the Global South is perhaps best understood as being centrally concerned with development geography.  In other words, it may well be more profitable to think about how the digital reshapes many geographies, rather than to cast all of those geographies as digital geography.

Nonetheless, it is clear that geographers still have much work to do with respect to thinking about the digital.  That is a central task of my own research agenda as I work on the Programmable City project.  I’d be interested in your own thoughts as to how you conceive and position digital geography, so if you’re inclined to share your views please leave a comment.

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History & Philosophy of Geography and Social & Cultural Geography Research Group AGMs at the RGS-IBG conference

As a committee member of both the History and Philosophy of Geography and the Social and Cultural Geography Research Groups of the RGS-IBG it would be remiss of me not to highlight that both research groups have their AGMs coming up at the RGS-IBG annual conference in London.

The Social and Cultural Geography Research Group has its AGM on Wednesday the 27th of August at 18:45 in the Drayson Room at the RGS.

The History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group has its AGM on Thursday the 28th of August between 13:10 and 14:25 in the Council Room at the RGS, see the HPGRG website for more details.

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Provocations of the Present: What Culture for What Geography?

I will be participating in the joint OU/RHUL workshop, which is the 6th annual Doreen Massey event, concerning how we can continue to think about how we bring together issues of culture and politics through the engagement between geography and social theory. Should be a stimulating day!

Provocations of the Present: What Culture for What Geography?

Friday, 6 June 2014, 10:00 – 17:00 The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

The Geography Departments of the Open University and Royal Holloway, University of London are delighted to announce that the 6th Doreen Massey Annual Event will take place on Friday 6 June 2014 at the Open University in Milton Keynes. This year’s theme is the role of cultural geography in the contemporary moment.

In his book Maps of Meaning (1989) Peter Jackson set out an agenda for the ‘new cultural geography’ that was firmly committed to bringing together issues of culture and politics through an engagement between geography and cultural theory. In the 25 years since its publication cultural geography has, arguably, come to dominate human geography. Theorisations of production of culture as production of space have formed the basis for addressing a variety of ‘issues’ including race, gender, nation, nature and culture.

Today those provocations for culturally attuned spatial thinking have been significantly reframed. Issues such as the environment, mobility, globalisation, liberalisation, security, sexuality and cultural intolerance have become more prominent political issues while other concerns have faded away. Cultural geography has also transformed, as too have the media and modalities of politics and political debate. How do we understand culture within this context and what is the role of cultural geography in the politics of the present? How will geography as a discipline be shaped by cultural geography? This event brings together some of the key thinkers in cultural geography in order to address these questions. As Peter Jackson said back in 1989:

If cultural geography is to be revitalised, … , ‘it cannot be by the defensive reiteration of well tried and by now well worn formulae. It can only be by an engagement with the contemporary intellectual terrain – not to counter a threat, but to discover an opportunity’(Jackson 1989: 180; Stedman Jones 1983: 24).

Programme:

10.00 – 10.30: Coffee and registration
10.30 – 11.30: Panel presentations (Societies/Economies/Cultures)
11.30 – 11.45: Coffee
11.45 – 12.45: Panel presentations (Histories/Technologies/Environments)
12.45 – 13.45: Lunch
13.45 – 15.00: Small group discussions
15.00 – 15.30: Tea
15.30 – 17.00: Plenary
17:00 – 18:00: Wine reception

This is an opportunity for students to meet and exchange with key figures in cultural geography today.

Confirmed panellists include: Peter Adey, Phil Crang, Anindita Datta (via webcast), Mona Domosh (via webcast), Claire Dwyer, Isla Forsyth, Peter Jackson, Sam Kinsley, Pat Noxolo, George Revill, Gillian Rose, Anna Secor (via webcast), Divya Tolia-Kelly.

Parts of this event will be streamed live (the morning panel sessions and the afternoon plenary) and accessible through the Open University’s Webcast page. Those who are unable to attend in person will be able to join the live streaming and have an opportunity to submit questions that may be selected for discussion.

Registration:
Registration is free, but we ask that everyone confirms their place by filling in their details on this registration form.

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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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Reblog > Video now available for Conditions of Mediation preconference

Scott Rodgers has posted the welcome news that the video from the Conditions of Mediation conference earlier this year is now available. The video comprises the keynote presentations.


After much behind-the-scenes fidgeting and arranging, I’m happy to say we can finally make available an edited video recording of the two keynote symposiums from Conditions of Mediation, the ICA preconference I co-organized with Tim Markham, held at Birkbeck on 17 June 2013. The two keynote symposiums kicked off the intense one-day event. The first group of speakers include Graham Harman, Lisa Parks and Paddy Scannell and the second group include Shaun Moores, Nick Couldry and David Berry. Not only are each speakers’ contributions interesting, but so too were the debates and discussions which followed (between the speakers and audience). Looking back, it certainly was a unique cross-section of phenomenological perspectives as they relate or might relate to thinking about media, technology and communication.

See Scott’s post for more information about the video.

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Economies of Contribution, RGS-IBG 2013 session

Along with Matt Wilson and James Ash, I am co-convening (and chairing) a session at the RGS-IBG annual conference concerning the ways in which we might theoretically and empirically address what Bernard Stiegler has called the economy of contribution. Following James’ post, I thought I’d post the blurb and the running order here.

Economies of Contribution, Paper Session

‘Rather, a pathway to genuine growth must be refound, a growth running counter to the mis-growth [mécroissance] that consumerism has become, and a growth which would consist in a renaissance of desire. Such a rebirth would be achieved by implementing an economy of contribution, an economy for which “to economize“ means “to take care,“ and an economy within which care cultivates associated milieus.’ Stiegler 2010, For A New Critique of Political Economy, p. 108, original emphasis

How might growth be re-imagined as a ‘taking care’? What are the particular spaces and spacings in which such economizations are already occurring? How are re-imaginings of value, consumption, contribution and production re-configured through networked and spaced activities, communities, and infrastructures? We invite papers and other provocations exploring emerging social, political, cultural, economic and biophysical geographies with a particular focus on shifting conceptualizations of technological-mediated consumptions and productions.

Taking an impetus from the work of Bernard Stiegler, this session concerns the rapid changes brought about by networked technologies within economic arenas and how such changes demand broadened and/or revised understandings of consumption, production and value. Of course, a number of economic commentators and theorists have raised the advent of the internet, and particularly the world wide web, as a socio-technical phenomenon that demands that we rethink our understandings of economics. The conjunction of consumption and production, the distribution of the means of production, and the growth of positive externalities have all been raised as benefits of a new technically enabled economy (Benckler, Lessig, Shirky). Equally, the effectively infinite reproducibility of digital media has troubled the economic models of established creative industries, from newspapers to record producers and film studios (Leadbeater, Lessig, Zittrain). New modes of technical interaction between consumers, service providers and industry also ask questions about the bases of value and cost of products and services (Beller, Marazzi, Stiegler).

Novel forms of economic model and activity are active in a range of settings, but it is also important to note these economic paradigms, practices and social theoretical accounts do not always or easily gel. By inviting a range of positions to be collected together in this session we aim to interrogate their geographies and promote not so much a revision of economic geography, but rather a sense of opportunity for an expansive and inclusive engagement with the political economy.

Papers:

Enforced Flexibility: The Opportunities and Challenges of Changing Models of Distribution and Contribution Daniel Cockayne (University of Kentucky)

New economies of residential energy demand reduction Heather Lovell (University of Edinburgh), Martin Pullinger (Lancaster University / ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group / ARCC-Water Project), Nigel Goddard (University of Edinburgh)

Contributing urban space: a genealogy of the High Line Ate Poorthuis (University of Kentucky)

Online Artmaking and Community Building Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield)