Category: geography

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Escaping Badiou’s metapolitics towards a Tunisian political event?

Clive Barnett recently blogged about an interview with philosopher (and native Tunisian) Mehdi Belhaj Kacem over on lacan.com a website I find nearly impossible to navigate(!). In the interview Kacem is rather damning of Badiou (whom I believe he previously had worked with):

It’s obvious that Badiou and Zizek, who reacted very late to the first positive event of historical and global scope of the twenty-first century, know absolutely nothing about the situation, although, in Badiou’s case, it’s truly spectacular: almost like Sarkozy he manages to talk about the Tunisian revolution as if it were no more than some “riots.” He says: “maybe some interesting utterances will come out of this, let’s wait and see”¦” He’s completely out of it.

The whole interview is an interesting read and I need to reflect on this a little more before passing serious comment but I wanted to point people towards it: http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1046

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Practising tomorrows? PhD Thesis online

I’ve uploaded a PDF of my PhD thesis for people to download [2.1Mb PDF ] should anyone feel so inclined. I have had a finalised version for a little while and have been meaning to make it available but just haven’t got round to it before now.

This work was conducted between 2006 and 2009, with the substantive fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2008 in Silicon Valley. It principally focusses on the ways in which those involved in ubiquitous computing research development, in a corporate context, anticipate particular kinds of future. This work remains interesting and, I would argue, important because “the future” continues to figure as a significant frame of reference in the ways in which we discuss and relate to/through technologies. I have reproduced the abstract, with the inclusion of a key quote, below. Please do get in touch to discuss this work! [ sam (dot) kinsley (at) uwe (dot) ac (dot) uk]

Practising Tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) research is characterized primarily by a concern with potential future computational worlds. This notion of research by future envisionment has been a feature of ubicomp discourse and reasoning since it earliest days… Such visions, however, are interesting not just for what they say about the future but also for what they say
about the present. This seems to be particularly the case when it comes to normative social relationships.

Bell & Dourish Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision

The thesis describes the ways in which technological futurity is a complex array of performative and proactive dispositions towards the future that are irreducible to normative and deterministic understandings of ‘progress’. It takes ubiquitous computing as a significant case study because the future orientation practised in ubiquitous computing research and development is emblematic of the perpetual technological forecasting in which humanity engages. While ubiquitous computing has existed as an agenda for nearly 20 years it is still largely concerned with a future that has not (yet) been realised. In the context of ubiquitous computing the thesis argues that it is necessary to make the politics of anticipation, as the particular discursive and performative ways in which future-orientation is codified and conditioned, explicit in technology development. The thesis therefore enacts a critical framework that charts a discourse of anticipation, as the multiple means for articulating proactive future orientation, internal to which are anticipatory logics that structure and rationalise how such forms of futurity are practised.

The motivation and ambit of the research is to thereby describe a politics of anticipation as the ways in which the anticipation of technological futures is codified and contested, whilst performative and multiple. Empirically, the argument is made through the discussion of interviews conducted with a range of internationally significant practitioners of ubiquitous computing research and development, which were carried out in Silicon Valley, California, in 2008. Attending to discourse, logics and emergent politics of anticipation provides a means of making explicit how our ‘knowledge’ of technological futures is produced. It is therefore argued that we should attend to socio-technical futurity as inherently situated in the living present, with all of its associated concerns, and allow for the indeterminacy of the future.

Practising tomorrows? – Sam Kinsley’s PhD Thesis [2.1Mb PDF ].

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Global coffee harvests and their arrival in the UK

As my coffee geekery has no bounds I have compiled these tables for my own use, so that I can remind myself when to expect particular coffees to be available here in the UK. Obviously people involved in coffee professionally probably know these things but I thought it may be of interest to a couple of other people. The inimitable Sweet Maria’s have a more complex table showing the full harvest period, the best harvest period, the full shipping period and the nest shipping period. I have used this alongside Mercanta’s loose reporting of when they expect particular countries’ harvests to arrive (cos Mercanta source a vast chunk of the [good] coffee that comes into the UK). I’m presuming things take quite a long time, so the periods listed here align with the ends of Sweet Maria’s periods. This sort of matches up with how the Cup of Excellence country programmes function too.

Country Harvest Arrival in UK
Brazil September October-April
Colombia November-December & May-June January-February & July-August
Costa Rica March April-July
Guatemala December-March April-July
Honduras February March-June
Nicaragua March April-July
El Salvador March May-August
Ethiopia November-February April-August
Kenya February April (possibly more in September from a ‘Fly Crop’)
Rwanda October December-January
Dominican Republic February-April (long season) April-August
Panama (for those who’re lucky!) March April-June

This table shows the most likely times for coffee to be arriving from the respective country.

Jan Feb Mar Apr May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec
Bolivia X X X
Brazil X X X X X X X
Colombia X X X X
Costa Rica X X X X
Dominican Republic X X
El Salvador X X X X
Ethiopia X X X X
Gautemala X X X X
Honduras X X
Kenya X X X X
Nicaragua X X X X
Panama X X X X X
Rwanda X X
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PhD: “Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation”

On Friday 26th February I submitted my PhD thesis, entitled “Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation“. I am now working as a Research Fellow in Digital Cultures, as part of the newly founded Digital Cultures Research Centre and the University of the West of England. [UPDATE: You can read the whole thesis here.]

Here is the abstract for the thesis:

This thesis describes the ways in which technological futurity is a complex array of performative and proactive dispositions towards the future that are irreducible to normative and deterministic understandings of ‘progress’. It takes ubiquitous computing as a significant case study because the future orientation practised in ubiquitous computing research and development is emblematic of the perpetual technological forecasting in which humanity engages. While ubiquitous computing has existed as an agenda for nearly 20 years it is still largely concerned with a future that has not (yet) been realised. In the context of ubiquitous computing this thesis argues that it is necessary to make the politics of anticipation, as the particular discursive and performative ways in which future-orientation is codified and conditioned, explicit in technology development. This thesis therefore enacts a critical framework that charts a discourse of anticipation, as the multiple means for articulating proactive future orientation, internal to which are anticipatory logics that structure and rationalise how such forms of futurity are practised.

The motivation and ambit of this research is to thereby describe a politics of anticipation as the ways in which the anticipation of technological futures is codified and contested, whilst performative and multiple. Empirically, the argument is made through the discussion of interviews conducted with a range of internationally significant practitioners of ubiquitous computing research and development, which were carried out in Silicon Valley, California, in 2008. Attending to discourse, logics and emergent politics of anticipation provides a means of making explicit how our ‘knowledge’ of technological futures is produced. It is therefore argued that we should attend to socio-technical futurity as inherently situated in the living present, with all of its associated concerns, and allow for the indeterminacy of the future.

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Laying claim to technological futures

At the recent Association of American Geographers annual conference in Boston I was lucky enough to take part in an interesting session: “Governing Technologies(I) – Representation, participation and governance in the ‘digital age'”, organised by Matt Wilson and Kevin Ramsey of U Washington.

I particularly enjoyed talks by Jeremy Crampton on ‘progressive’ political blogs as cartographies of left-leaning American politics, Richard Donahue on critical cartography, digital mapping and how participatory GIS might be usefully engaged with, and Matt Wilson on cyborg subjectivation (via Harraway) in relation to GIS technologies.

My own talk was an attempt to articulate one of the specific questions that is arising in my research, and how we might look to answering: Do anticipatory practices of technology development condition expectations for those technologies? What follows is an edited and tidied version of my notes.

Continue reading “Laying claim to technological futures”

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Finding a thesis title

Half-way through my three years of PhD research project I am still mentally searching for, and experimenting with, titles. Thus far I have had the following titles in chronological order:

  • Practising Tomorrows’ Today – Examining the anticipatory logics and techniques of urban-ubiquitous computing development
  • Practising the technics of disappearance: emergent spatialities and the experimental development of ubiquitous computing
  • Mobilising the Socio-technical: The cultural politics of mobile communications technologies
  • Socio-technical spatial formations: Living with the cyber-hybrid
  • Cybrid Spaces

Continue reading “Finding a thesis title”