I think we should be concerned with media and political use of the term radicalism and radicalisation to describe the current extremist crisis.
A few things have been really stressing me about the now ubiquitous use of ‘radicalisation’ in media/political accounts of (Muslim) extremism.
We really need to save the idea of being radical from being used to describe people turning to extremism, terrorism and violence. They are going through something else – criminalisation, pathologicalisation, evilisation or something.
Radical thinking has a noble and important tradition which needs to be saved and continued. The great radicals were those who kicked against entrenched power and injustice. And did so through politics expressed in thought, language and, in some cases, direct action that was illegal and or violent (e.g. the Suffragettes). But such violence was usually against the self or property rather than indiscriminately targeted others. See Andy Fitzgerald’s article
A list of the great radicals would include Tom Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, an on and on
I would hope and expect that many young people today would feel the urge to be radical because they can see the dire conditions of society in terms of quality of life, justice (both social and ecological) and so forth. Young people – all people – who really are paying attention to the conditions of contemporary society should be radical in outlook.
The issue is for many young (Muslim?) people who are turning against the ‘values’ of the West is that that it is difficult to see powerful, clear, alternatives being put forth, and which have a strong profile in culture and the media – for instance green radicalism, or social(ist) radicalism – that really can challenge the direction of travel on neo-liberal consumerist society. So turning to a powerful counter narrative – in this case alternative fundamentalist theologic doctrines – with (in the most extreme instances) their guns and videos must be tempting.
What ‘red blooded’ ‘angry young men/women’ are going to be content with lives, which, for some at least, involve low paid, dead-end jobs in degraded ecological and social environments, while the excessive wealth and comsumptiion of the elite is blazened all over our cities and media At the moment the alternative for them is extremism.
It might be very handy for those seeking to preserve the status quo in terms of power to marginalise and demonise the very notion of being radical through its repeated association with extremism.
All media and political use of the term radicalism to describe the current extremist crisis should be stopped forthwith.
Here’s Bradley Garrett, Leo Hollis and Anna Minton talking at the Festival of the Future City, in Bristol – found through Deterritorial Investigations Unit
This new article in Geoforum [paywall] by Lizzie Richardson (@LizzieCIRich) looks really good – I’ve only skim read it so far but looking forward digging in 🙂
The sharing economy converges around activities facilitated through digital platforms that enable peer-to-peer access to goods and services. It constitutes an apparent paradox, framed as both part of the capitalist economy and as an alternative. This duplicity necessitates focusing on the performances of the sharing economy: how it simultaneously constructs diverse economic activities whilst also inviting the deconstruction of ongoing practices of dominance. Such performances hold open the question of what the (sharing) economy is, suspending it as a space for both opportunity and critique. Drawing on participant observation at a sharing economy ‘festival’ and analysis of the vocabularies of online platforms, the paper outlines three performances of sharing through community, access and collaboration. It argues through these performances that the sharing economy is contingent and complexly articulated. It has the potential to both shake up and further entrench ‘business-as-usual’ through the ongoing reconfiguration of a divergent range of (economic) activities. Whilst offering an antidote to the narrative of economy as engendering isolation and separation, the sharing economy simultaneously masks new forms of inequality and polarisations of ownership. Nonetheless, the paper concludes in suggesting that by pointing to wider questions concerning participation in, access to and production of resources, the sharing economy should not be dismissed. Instead, it should serve as prompt to engage with ‘digital’ transformations of economy in the spirit of affirmative critique that might enact the promise of doing economy differently.
Some time ago (in 2014), I participated in the Open University’s annual ‘Doreen Massey event’, which had the title Provocations of the Present: What culture for what geography?, and I presented a provocation concerning culture, technology and what is meant by ‘popular’ culture when it’s studied by people like me (broadly – cultural geographers).
I was invited, a few months later, to write this provocation up for a theme section of Social & Cultural Geography. This has finally come to fruition, after some helpful comments by two anonymous reviewers and some very kind help from Nadia Bartolini, Parvati Raghuram & George Revill at the OU and S&CG editor Mary Gilmartin.
I wanted to design something to send to my friends as a Christmas message. I’d been looking around for inspiration when I heard that the British Library had released a million free-use images onto Flickr. My first thought was to dig around for some Victorian Christmas imagery, something Dickensian with feasting and sleigh rides – someone had even created a set of all the Christmas images they’d found, most of which were just the kind of thing I was expecting.
The more I looked though, the more interesting material I found and I eventually came across a Victorian map of someone’s travels round the world and, separately, the stamp of the Royal Geographical Society.
Probably because I’ve been reading Alan Moore’s From Hell, I immediately assumed that the Royal Geographical Society would have a secretive wing (reporting only to Queen Victoria, arriving at the palace under cover of darkness), and what else would they do at Christmas but track Santa’s movements?
Given how close it was to Christmas and how hard they’d been pushing the release of their images on Twitter, I was hoping the British Library might retweet it and they did, which considering they have over 500K followers was great news. Then the retweets really started, eventually reaching over 225, with almost one hundred favourites as well as lots of nice conversations! Not bad at all for a couple of hours work on a Sunday afternoon.
Living in a world that is increasingly saturated with algorithmic processes has profound implications for ethics. The scholarly and public accounts of the ethical dimensions of algorithm have overwhelmingly placed the human being as the locus of ethical deliberation. Thus, philosophers and scientists search for ethical frameworks or guidelines for the human designers of software; legal scholars remind us that the protection of humans from “automated decisions made about them” by algorithms is enshrined in data protection law; and social scientists urge that the “black box” of algorithmic decisions be opened to critical scrutiny. Yet, the idea of an ethics that opens the algorithm to human scrutiny has important limits, not only because many algorithms are proprietary and secret, but more significantly because they can operate at a speeds and scales beyond the threshold of human perceptibility.
Louise’s Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship provides an account of the potential for an ethics of algorithm. In a tradition of ethics as the situated giving of an account of one’s actions at the limits of intelligibility – “I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the conditions under which I emerge” (Judith Butler 2005) – the research excavates how the algorithm might give an account of itself and its emergence. The research develops six conceptual themes – to form the chapters of a book – opening up dimensions of the relation of algorithm to ethics: undecidability; doubt; cognition; perception; association; automation.
It’s with great pleasure that I can announce the publication of the first issue of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. I’m fortunate enough to be on the Editorial Board of this new journal and – although my involvement in this first issue was very minor indeed – I look forward to helping bring some interesting and engaging future issues to fruition focused on the relationship of media and cities.
I’ve posted the formal press release text below, which provides some more detail on the journal’s aims and scope, and importantly, its distinctive format. The journal is explicitly aimed at ‘small-gauge’ scholarship, meaning that while it may occasionally include research articles, it aspires to be a platform for alternative forms of scholarship, such as podcasts, video, interactive content, roundtable discussions, trend pieces and reviews.
One of my responsibilities as an Editorial Board member is to help curate content for future issues of the journal, and to that end I’d welcome anyone getting in touch with ideas, inquiries and formal expressions of interest. And of course, by all means, please do circulate details about this journal to anyone you think would be interested.
Press Release Text:
We’re proud to announce the publication of the first issue of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. Taking inspiration from our historical moment, which is defined by both the increasingly constitutive role media plays in our everyday life and by the force the urban and urbanization exert on those lives, Mediapolis places urban and media studies in conversation with one another. In doing so, we aspire to create a venue for discussion that operates outside the territory of the traditional academic journal, complementing existing publications by producing open-access scholarship whose approach and topics are equally accessible and of interest to a wide audience. Mediapolis will take full advantage of the flexibility afforded by our format to feature podcasts, video, and interactive content alongside roundtable discussions, trend pieces, reviews and peer-reviewed research articles.
We are excited by the possibilities of Mediapolis, and look forward to continuing conversations begun at conferences, gathering a community for teaching resources around the urban and media, and providing a home for innovative “small-gauge” scholarship. Above all, we believe Mediapolis affords the opportunity to foster a broader dialogue around media and the city with colleagues from cinema and media studies, art history, communication, urban studies, and other fields within and outside the academy. These goals are reflected in our editorial and advisory boards, as well as in the content of our first issue, which is available at mediapolisjournal.com. If you’re interested in contributing to the journal in any way, archiving your course materials there, or serving as a reader for future submissions, please email Brendan Kredell (Oakland University) or Erica Stein (Marymount Manhattan College), at editor@mediapolisjournal.com.
An interesting blogpost by MSc Society & Space student Jethro Brice on the blog for the course concerning the installation art of Dani Landau, gentrification and nonrepresentational interventions in the city…
I couldn’t make it into Bristol in time to see this but wanted to, sadly teaching kept me in Exeter…
Screens, by artist Dani Landau, is a pop-up installation which recently featured in a contested public space in Bristol. The work explores themes of urban renewal through the affective, material dimensions of processes of construction and deconstruction. The installation mobilises tensions between the virtual and the actual, and speaks to an interest in the more-than-human aspects of geographical processes of spatial distribution and bodily encounter. My particular interest in Screens arises with my own research (see profile) which explores the use of art methods to elicit affective registers in geographical research, and more specifically, in processes of change that operate in landscapes at different scales. I met with Landau for a post-exhibition ‘crit’; while this review reflects my own impressions, it is also informed by a lively discussion with the artist.
Something is doing in the city. That much is hardly news – nor has it gone unremarked (Turner, 2015; Clement, 2012). Notwithstanding the UK’s experiences of economic and political stagnation in recent years, Bristol pulsates with the insistent, percussive buzz of demolition and construction, renovation and displacement. It is a transformation that has become so ordinary it hardly bears comment – hidden in stark visibility behind ephemeral screens of chipboard and scaffolding, the perpetual drone of activity recedes and is filtered out as white noise. On the daily commute (for those of us who have a job to go to), our transitory attention is confined to the felt effects of inconvenient bottlenecks and ambient road rage, and (for those of us who don’t drive) the prolonged ‘temporary’ disappearances of walkways and cycle tracks. Yet in all its ordinariness, this is a pulse that disrupts and displaces lives, alters flows and redistributes relations of power across the city. Back home, in rapidly changing residential neighbourhoods, the felt effects are more personal and sustained – heightening an awareness, that in among the busy-ness of the city centre, other intimately lived spaces and social relations persist or are obstructed and obliterated by the grind of the urban renewal machine.
One such space is the open cavity beneath a block of brick-and-concrete office blocks overlooking the juncture of Quay Street and Nelson Street, in central Bristol. Like more recent urban developments, such as Cabot Circus, the office block straddles and effectively encloses a public space. Imagined initially as a lively hub, with shops and adjacent pub, the blank module became (for a while) a social commons – a meeting point and sheltered “hang-out” for young people post work or school. Now, public right of passage through the space is curtailed by heavy steel gates that, while they do not lock, open only outwards. Office workers still use it as a place to smoke, but after hours this is a space where it is only possible to leave.
When I arrived there, however, on a dark evening towards the end of October, the space had been subtly transformed. Not a makeover – the walls were still laced with exhaust dust, and the hard, uninviting floor remained littered with a carpet of cigarette stubs – but something new inhabited the space. A tangle of gutted wires, broken bricks and disarticulated laptops lay strewn across the concrete terrace. On stripped-down, translucent screens perched precariously among the debris, something moved with the ponderous, deliberate grace of prehistoric reptiles. Light from recumbent spotlights caught in soft, drifting billows of dust. The shift of scale was at once immense and intimate. Drawn down on hands and knees to the gritty floor, I found myself perched knee-to-knee with strangers, straining to watch the delicate dance of high-reach excavators as they picked away at the towering carcass of an old tower block. Across the road, visible through the railings, bright slabs of new concrete rose tier on tier where a block of high-end student accommodation was under construction.
There is something decidedly animal about Screens – a temporary pop-up installation by Bristol artist Dani Landau (danilandau.com) that recasts footage of recent demolition work as an ephemeral but momentous presence in the now-disused space. The sense of liveliness is not merely figurative. ‘Life’ here is in the tensions made tangible: between enormity and intimacy; between the heavy materiality of buildings and machines, and fragility of translucent screens; between the virtual (of digital media; of possibility and change) and the actual (of concrete; of felt effects); between fixity and movement; growth and decay. Overwhelmingly the tendency is to situate politics in the world of cerebral thought, in rational decision-making – here was an immense and immediate reminder that politics is also, and always, both spatial and tactile. Politics plays out at the level of visceral, shocking encounters between moving bodies in space.
Conclusion
The city writhes in an ecstasy of perpetual becoming, yet it is a transformation so ordinary that it effects nothing new. Gentrification, urban renewal, studentisation – the words are effectively sapped of their power by that very same process of enforced novelty which they attempt to call into question. Familiarity, it is said, breeds contempt. The something, however, is still doing. Bodies and lives are relocated and social assemblages unravel; flows are truncated, overextended or subsumed. People and other beings (that heterogeneous majority who in different ways are quietly displaced by urban renewal) struggle to reinvent familiar lives and orientations in unfamiliar situations.
Structures, and the structural critique bound to them, become fatigued; they erode and crumble. We are left to hone our attention to distributed processes, a fine tuning of affective relations that elide categorical thought. This is the stuff of our world as we are coming to understand it (Roberts, 2014, p.974). Yet, distributed relations and affective encounters are effects of power accumulating and unearthing expression in emergent differential structures (Massumi, 2015, p. 92–3). How, then, is it possible to reinvigorate worn channels, to reawaken us to the micropolitical affects and effects of urban processes that iterate and endure? Where words fail us, might other modes of enquiry open up a space within which changing material ecologies can be re-encountered (Brice, 2015, p. 61)? Art’s relationship to gentrification is of course neither simple nor unproblematic – artists have been key actors in processes of “detoxifying” neighbourhoods, even as they themselves are eventually displaced by rising property prices. Entangled as it is within relations of class and culture, art can equally work to challenge or normalise trajectories of change. Indeed, it is not always possible to distinguish these two functions – a tension provocatively mobilised in Bristol by the Facebook group Get the Easton Look (n.d.), and in the ambivalent role of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (n.d.)
Landau’s Screens woke a presence in the concrete underbelly of the Nelson Street towers. It made, for a brief episode, something newly alive in a space generally closed off: a space in which to confront the very material affects and elusive political ecologies of the relentlessly “regenerating” city. For me, this was a welcome disruption to the processes of sensory and political attrition that accompany and effectively obscure familiar trajectories of urban renewal – and a promising experiment with the possibilities of art methods to elicit new modes of attunement when researching society and space.
About the Artist:
Dani Landau is an artist doing practice based research through working with images in relation to public spaces. A graduate of Glasgow School of Art currently based at Spike Island Studios in Bristol, he is engaged in AHRC funded doctoral research at the University of the West of England.
Andrés Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin and myself have just published a new edited book on the ‘smart city’ debate. The book, Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Routledge), is a critical examination of the claims, drivers, imaginaries and consequences of smart city discourses.
As we all know, there is an incredible amount of hype and noise made about smart cities, much of it by multinational corporations like IBM and Cisco in their effort to sell expensive ‘urban solutions’. In this book, we sought to take this debate on by bringing together a group of critical, international and interdisciplinary researchers.
The book examines how smart city initiatives are being rolled out, and makes a series of arguments that seeks to advance a critical research agenda. It finds, for example, that the discourse is often in reality a justification for the latest round of neoliberal development and displacement. It finds a common tendency to place far too much faith in technology, with far too little attention to the actual urban context. It also finds that most of the time, and despite high profile cases such as Rio’s control room, the smart city discourse is little more than discourse, bolstered by pervasive imagery that globally circulates and effectively constitutes a powerful form of marketing.
But the book also finds openings in the smart city discourse, including in the actions of social movements, civil society groups, and critical researchers to use or promote digital technologies in more socially and ecologically relevant ways. In these efforts, it is urbanism and social justice that inform whether or not digital technologies are useful, as opposed to the positivist view that technology can be added to cities awaiting ‘enhancement’ through sensors, dashboards and real-time data management. But as the book shows, it would be far too simple to argue that there is an ‘alternative’ smart city discourse that opposes a ‘mainstream’ discourse, partly because the various overlaps between what may initially appear mainstream and alternative, and partly because many critical initiatives with digital technology reject the entire smart city discourse altogether while others seeks to reframe it.
Here’s the list of contributors and chapter titles:
IntroductionAndrés Luque-Ayala, Colin McFarlane and Simon Marvin
Smart cities and the politics of urban dataRob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle
IBM and the visual formation of smart citiesDonald McNeill
The smart entrepreneurial city: Dholera and a 100 other utopias in IndiaAyona Datta
Getting smart about smart cities in Cape Town: Beyond the rhetoricNancy Odendaal
Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart cityJennifer Gabrys
Smart-city initiatives and the Foucauldian logics of governing through codeFrancisco Klauser and Ola Söderström
Geographies of smart urban powerGareth Powells, Harriet Bulkeley and Anthony McLean
Test-Bed as urban epistemologyNerea Calvillo, Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier and Wolfgang Pietsch
Beyond the corporate smart city?: Glimpses of other possibilities of smartnessRobert G. Hollands
ConclusionsColin McFarlane Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin
The latest book in the Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics series is now published (technically it is a 2016 book) – Space, Power and the Commons: The struggle for alternative futuresis edited by Sam Kirwan, Leila Dawney and Julian Brigstocke, and is associated with the Authority Research Network. It’s an important addition to the literature on the theme of ‘the commons’, not least because it draws together discussions of high theory on this topic (Hardt, Nancy, Ranciere, etc) with empirical analyses of practices of ‘commoning’.
This is the second title to appear in the Place, Space and Politics series, after the collection on Urban Refugees. There are more titles in the pipeline. More details on the series, including guidelines for submitting proposals, can be found here and here.
The latest book in the Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics series is now published (technically it is a 2016 book) –