Category: observations

Posted on

Reblog> Gender, Feminism, and Geography – a new book series from West Virginia University Press

Via Nicholas Crane.

News from West Virginia University Press:

West Virginia University Press is pleased to announce Gender, Feminism, and Geography, a new book series edited by Jennifer L. Fluri and Amy Trauger.

The first book series to focus on the study of feminism and gender in geography, it spans several subdisciplines, emphasizing the role of gender and intersectional identity in politics, the economy, and human-environment interactions.

The series editors hope to bring together disparate fields of scholarship that are both theoretically rich and empirically grounded in feminist methodologies. They are particularly interested in books that engage emergent areas such as intimate geopolitics, black geographies and indigenous studies, political ecology, animal geographies, participatory research methods, scholar activism, critical development studies and sexuality studies.

About the series editors:
Jennifer L. Fluri is associate professor of geography at the University of Colorado and the coauthor of The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements.

Amy Trauger is associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia. She is the editor of Food Sovereignty in International Context: Discourse, Politics, and Practice of Place and author of “We Want Land to Live”: Space, Territory, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty.

The editorial advisory board for this series includes: Karen Culcasi, West Virginia University; Caroline Faria, University of Texas; Robyn Longhurst, University of Waikato; Tish Lopez, Dartmouth College; Sharlene Mollet, University of Toronto-Scarborough; Anu Sabhlok, IISER Mohali; Jo Sharp, University of Glasgow and Brenda Yeoh, National University of Singapore.

To learn more about this series and WVU Press, or to join our mailing list, visit wvupress.com.

Source: West Virginia University Press announces a new book series focusing on gender and geography

Posted on

Video> Imagining automation – public talk

I gave a talk for the SW Futurists meet up group this week and they’ve recorded the talks. There are two speakers: Lucas Godfrey (Edinburgh) talked about the challenges of creating models of phenomena in the world so that you can automate things. I talked about the politics of the kinds of stories we tell about automation and how they orient our understandings of how automation might function. Both are included in the video but I’ve skipped to the start of my talk below.

Feel free to leave comments, ask questions etc. using the “Comments” function below… this presentation is sort of based on two bits of work about automation that have been developing as academic presentations. The first is about how we tell stories about work in relation to automation, and way we use ‘algorithm’ as a proxy for that idea. The second is about how we imagine what apparently automated/automatic technologies are doing and what they can do. I think both of these things constitute what I’ve come to call an “automative imaginary”… I started out calling this “algorithmic–“, but I don’t think that ‘s what I have ever really meant. I also don’t think, another fashionable term, “robots” is a particularly helpful way to frame the ideas I’m interested in. Anyway, I’m hoping to develop this into a journal article.

Posted on

1967 + 50: the age of grammatology

Saw this very interesting conference via Stuart Elden:

1967 + 50: The Age of Grammatology

1967 was perhaps the annus mirabilis for the oeuvre of Jacques Derrida: Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomenon and Of Grammatology all appeared in French in that year. More generally, 1967 figures as a decisive moment in the history of what came to be called ‘theory’, ‘continental philosophy’, ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘deconstruction’. The Oxford Literary Review is holding a one-day symposium on Friday 23 June 2017 at the University of Sussex, in order to celebrate, commiserate and otherwise reflect on the 50 years since the French publication of Of Grammatology. We invite papers (20 minutes in length) from scholars working in any subject or area of research touched by or touching on ‘the Age of Grammatology’. We envisage a day of talks, concluding with a roundtable discussion with Geoffrey Bennington (Emory), Peggy Kamuf (USC), Michael Naas (DePaul), Nicholas Royle (Sussex) and Sarah Wood (Kent).

Send proposals to: Nicholas Royle at n.w.o.royle@sussex.ac.uk by 1 December 2016.

Posted on

Research seminars and ‘environment’

Many permanently contracted ‘early career’ academics get the job of organising departmental seminars at some point. It can be great, you talk to interesting colleagues from across the discipline, listen to talks about research you simply haven’t heard about before and meet people you admire and wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to do so. It can also be thankless – you ask for recommendations, book those speakers and your colleagues fail to turn up to their own recommended speakers’ talk(!)

If we’re supposed to be participating in the creation of “An environment that is conducive to producing research of world-leading quality, in terms of its vitality and sustainability” – as per the REF criteria, and if we were to take that seriously, then perhaps running the seminars, organising wider events, reading groups and so on would be explicitly recognised and rewarded – in workload terms, and so on…

So, with that in mind, if you are an academic reading this – please can you answer the following simple question:

Posted on

Handbook on Geographies of Technology

Edward Elgar have a new title advertised: The Handbook on Geographies of Technology, edited by Prof. Barney Warf (Kansas). It is good to see such a volume is being produced and encouraging that someone as qualified as Prof. Warf is editing it. Having said that, there are two things I find disappointing from the information on the EE webpage for the book: 1) the price: £162 with a “web discount”. Why?! 2) the rather narrow range of topics and conceptual engagement – at least indicated by section and chapter titles. I understand that such a book cannot cover everything but only three chapters on conceptual issues seems a bit stingey (although if you only had three available they are well-chosen) and then the relatively traditional thematics chosen (comms., transport, energy, manufacturing and life science) seems like a bit of a missed opportunity. I look forward to seeing a copy, somehow (cos I cannot afford to buy one!!), to get a better sense of the contents. I hope there may be material in there to support my final year option module: Geographies of Technology.

Here’s the blurb:

This Handbook offers an insightful and comprehensive overview from a geographic perspective of the numerous and varied technologies that are shaping the contemporary world. It shows how geography and technology are intimately linked by examining the origins, growth, and impacts of 27 different technologies and highlighting how they influence the structure and spatiality of society. Following summaries of important conceptual issues such as diffusion, gender and science studies, the book explores various technologies from difference categories including computational, communications, transportation, energy, manufacturing and life sciences.

Posted on

Live writing about live coding – Cox et al.

This morning I had one of those ‘update’ emails I normally delete but this one pointed to a fascinating paper by Alan Blackwell, Geoff Cox and Sang Won Lee entitled “Live writing the live coding book“. I really like Geoff’s book, with Alex McLean, on Speaking Code and this paper and the book it refers to on “live coding” are an interesting extension of that work. Here’s a couple of interesting snippets… I recommend reading the whole paper:

In drawing attention to the writing of a book still in progress and yet to be completed, we are in danger of disappearing into an endless loop of reflexivity. Yet this is not meant to be solipsistic, but rather a way of working through some of the technological constraints that allow for us to think and write at a particular moment in time, share our ideas in public and thus to contribute to the development of our ideas. The time aspect of this is particularly complex in that we write about the writing as we write, in parallel to the way that live coders edit code as it runs. In this way examining live coding and live writing together confuse strict definitions between them but also between past, present and future states, between the act of writing and its execution, allowing us to rethink some of our pre-existing notions of notation, liveness, temporality, systems and knowledge (that are the provisional focus for later chapters of the book). These concepts become ongoing conversations, inasmuch as all books are provisional and open to multiple interpretations and further modification.
…
There is far more to be said here, and too much for this paper. The “patterns of experience” identified by Blackwell (2015) offer many descriptions that are equally evocative of the writing performance. When we open up the process of writing to an audience, whether on a projected screen, a whiteboard, a collaborative editor or simply a laptop shared on a table, serious consideration of the written word as a dynamic occupant of its new electronic home must surely follow.

Figure 2. A collage of book fragments, linearising a wiki.
Figure 2. A collage of book fragments, linearising a wiki.

The method of this paper has been to think about the future of writing, by doing writing. We have reported on the writing of a book, and of course we have written this paper. In doing so, we have taken some care to avoid the obvious navel-gazing that might result from reflecting on a paper whose intention is to reflect on itself. Nevertheless, this fact must be acknowledged, both as an obvious implication of our thinking, and in order to make best use of the empirical resources that come most readily to hand. The live coding book is a work in progress. This paper, on the other hand, is nearly complete and live. What does it tell us about live writing as live coding, and where is the future of live coding as live writing directed?

Some obvious connections with Katherine Hayles’ work (indeed, the authors reference: Writing Machines and My Mother was a Computer) and also an interesting counterpoint to some of the dominant versions of the discourse on ‘algorithms’ that elide authorship and practices of writing code… Indeed, Alex McLean’s work on live coding and in particular ‘algorave‘ are a valuable way of thinking about how to think otherwise the apparently smooth push towards a particular version of automation…

Posted on

N. Katherine Hayles on UAVs/drones as ‘cognitive assemblages’

In a recent article in Critical Inquiry, N. Katherine Hayles formulates an understanding of particular kinds of technological support as ‘cognitive assemblages’ (sort of following Deleuze & Guattari*). She takes as her particular case study the advent of swarming, quasi-autonomous UAVs/drones and their use in warfare. The final paragraph of the piece is interesting but, for me, raises as many questions as it seeks to answer:

Language, human sociality, somatic responses, and technological adaptations, along with emotion, are crucial to the formation of modern humans. Whether warfare should be added to the list may be controversial, but the twentieth and twenty-first centuries suggest that it will persist, albeit in modified forms. As the informational networks and feedback loops connecting us and our devices proliferate and deepen, we can no longer afford the illusion that consciousness alone steers our ships. How should we reimagine contemporary cognitive ecologies so that they become life enhancing rather than aimed toward dysfunctionality and death for humans and nonhumans alike? Recognizing the role played by non conscious cognitions in human/technical hybrids and conceptualizing them as cognitive assemblages is of course not a complete answer, but it is a necessary component. We need to recognize that when we design, implement, and extend technical cognitive systems, we are partially designing ourselves. We must take care accordingly. More accurate and encompassing views of how our cognitions enmesh with technical systems and those of other life forms will enable better designs, humbler perceptions of human roles in planetary cognitive ecologies, and more life-affirming practices as we move toward a future in which technical agency and autonomy become increasingly intrinsic to human complex systems.

(Hayles, 2016: 55)

A couple of immediate questions pop out for me:

  1. Could you get designers of UAVs to factor in affective responses without reducing them to something like galvanic skin response or another quantifiable measure (which Hayles critiques in relation to MIT Prof. Sandy Pentland’s proselytisation of a ‘sociometer‘)?
  2. What is meant by “accuracy” in that final sentence?! How might we qualify the idea of “better” designs? This seems to assert a kind of ethics (and maybe aesthetics) antithetical to the institutions and companies that make military equipment – by not addressing this, there seems to me to be a risk of simply making naive assertions.

I appreciate Hayles’ attempt to harness a broadly Deleuzian understanding of cognition (which might be understood as “affect theory”) in attending to pressing contemporary issues such as the rise of “killer robots” (or quasi-autonomous technological platforms that can inflict death), however – it seems to me that the paper uses the case studies (taken from other researchers’ work, such as Chamayou) to validate the theory, rather than using the theory to critically interrogate the empirical state of affairs. This, it seems to me, is a shame (not least because there’s a fruitful application of aspects of How we became posthuman here), and, as observed above, leaves more questions than answers. Maybe that’s productive, it can open debates – but others are doing slightly more to qualify how we might problematise ethics in this arena. I’d recommend taking a look at Lucy Suchman’s work, especially “robot futures” and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots…

Addendum: I’m not suggesting that Chamayou and other ‘droners’ are “right” and Hayles is somehow wrong… I’d definitely agree with Prof Louise Amoore who suggested on Twitter that those folk could do with reading Hayles’ (and Suchman’s) work

* I’m uncertain about the proposition of ‘cognitive assemblages’ – if we were to follow D&G’s theory of agencements would not all ‘assemblages’ be cognitive? The implication is, it seems, that the ‘cognitive’ in Hayles’ formulation is human cognition – which implies a human exceptionalism that might be seen as antithetical to D&G’s philosophy.

Posted on

A dream of an algorithm – Agnieszka Zimolag

Photo by: Agnieszka Zimolag
Photo by: Agnieszka Zimolag

A compelling piece on the Institute of Network Cultures‘ “long forms” website by Agnieszka Zimolag entitled “A dream of an algorithm” explores “our” relation to “technology, or (to my mind) technics as the co-constitutional (and originary [not essential]) relation between what we call, in common sense terms, “the human” and”technology”.

Technology is my reflection. Just as if I never see myself unless I look in the mirror, the same goes for technology. Once I plug, once i turn on the devices, I look at my comforting reflection, I can finally become one with my own image. The perception of the self becomes a continuum, a reassurance of my own existence. Zimolag

It’s a beautiful essay and well worth reading/ looking at in full – the images are lovely and there’s some thoughtful prose reflecting upon this relation. I guess where I’d differ from Zimolag is her implied assertion that the technology, what it does/can do somehow comes after ‘the human’; that technology does something to “us” (humans) that alters us. I can see why, in the face of rapid technological change, we might figure things in this way. Nevertheless, I’m inclined to insist that there never was a “human” somehow separate from “technology”. We have an ‘aporetic origin’ in Derrida & Stiegler’s terms, we continually perform the coming to being of “the human”.

As I’ve observed elsewhere, the theory of technogenesis offered by a range of anthropologists and philosophers is the idea that humans and technology co-evolved together, that you do not get one without the other. Humans are irreducibly distinct because of the reflexive transmission of complex cultures made possible by technics and the ‘exteriorization’ of thought. Both Stiegler and Derrida argue that the mental interior is only recognized as such with the advent of the technical exterior: our conscious self-knowledge is only possible with the ability to exteriorize thought as a trace, commonly as language and gesture. Stiegler explains this aporia of origin as a paradox: ‘The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorization without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorisation’ (Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, p. 141).

Technics can be thought of as a technogenetic ‘double-bind’ between being both constitutive and a supplement of ‘the human’. The interior and exterior, and with them the contemporary understanding of the experience of being human and what we understand to be technology, are mutually co-constituted and continue to be so.

In opposing ‘technology’ and ‘the human’, the apparently immaterial ‘algorithm’ and apparently concrete human, we either oppose technically mediated experience to other forms of experience or we oppose our technical life to other, apparently ‘natural’, forms of exis- tence. Either way, we risk reasserting old, problematic binaries: human/technology and nature/society.

To bring this back to ‘algorithms’ and their devices, following Zimolag – they are not our ‘others’. these technologies discussed and depicted in Zimolag’s beautiful essay are materially of and with us, they are perhaps not so much the ‘reflection’ she asserts (above) but rather a mirror that we ourselves have crafted through which to look upon ourselves, but, precisely in doing so, the “we” is irrevocably altered to include the mirror. The knowledge born from coming to know our own images, in Zimolag’s metaphor, is irreducibly tied to technics.

Posted on

A lack of politics in the geographies of code/software?

An interesting provocation for those who feel wedded to the ‘digital turn‘ from Mark Purcell on his blog… in particular:

the work, in general, seems to be quite aloof, or detached, or trying to stay above the fray, to remain non-committal, as though that were the more professional, academic stance to take.  All this detachment seems to have produced an upshot that is something like: “with all the new technologies coming into our lives in the past 10 years or so, it is important to think through their implications instead of just adopting them uncritically.”

Perhaps those that do “geography o[f] software/ information/ geodata” would like to respond..(?) For me, I think, there is simply a difference in focus between Purcell’s locating of politics and, for example – his colleague at Washington, Sarah Elwood’s in relation to “geodata” (e.g.), i.e. perhaps the difference between a politics of production as such and a politics of implementation.

Nevertheless, Purcell’s point about commons and peer production in open source software is valid – perhaps those involved in recent conference sessions on geographies of software have addressed these issues in some way? (I don’t know, I wasn’t there…)

Read Mark Purcell’s full blogpost on his blog.