Category: observations

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CFP> Where Next? Historical Geographies of the Future (via @CritGeog )

This looks really interesting, and if I were going to the RGS conference I’d submit something to be considered –>

Where Next? Historical Geographies of the Future

Jake Hodder (Nottingham) and Mike Heffernan (Nottingham), sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group

Call for Papers – RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London, 30 August – 2 September 2016

How historical subjects have imagined their futures is crucial to understanding their pasts, and invariably reflects a wide range of geographical as well as historical imaginations. Likewise, many key areas of geographical enquiry (such as development, environment, geopolitics, imperialism, political economy) draw significance in part on their ability to lay claim to ideas of the future, implicitly or otherwise. Yet the role played by these collective speculations is seldom directly addressed and their contingent nature makes it difficult to reconstruct their full rhetorical strength.

Until recently, therefore, historical accounts of ‘the future’ have been predominantly shaped by ideas of the ‘distant future’. Distant in both the sense of time, ambiguously blending science and fiction (the future of ray guns and spaceships), and distant in the sense of ideals, realised or lost (the future of utopias and dystopias); but what of our other sense of the future? What has been the role played by the idea of the immediate ‘knowable future’? A future which attends more closely to possibility and prediction than to fantasy and utopia.

2016 marks a pertinent time to reflect on the relevance of these questions for geographers, as historians have also recently done (Engerman 2012; Rosenberg and Harding 2005), and ask where next? This year marks the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia in Latin; and two related, and much anticipated, exhibitions are currently running at The Louvre in Paris (24 September 2015 – 4 January 2016) and Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels (11 September 2015 – 24 January 2016) entitled A Brief History of the Future, based on the 2006 international bestseller by Jacques Attali of the same name. This session invites papers from across the discipline which examine ‘the future’ in its varied manifestations (political, personal, and technological) and may wish to engage some of the following questions:

“¢ What are, and what have been, the geographies of the future – what geographical ideas have shaped future consciousness and from where?
“¢ How have different historical moments or events fostered speculation of other futures?
“¢ What is the relationship between experience and expectation, and how have ideas of the future shaped everyday lives?
“¢ How have conceptions of the future intersected with political, scientific, economic or cultural ideas, or with other areas of geographical interest?
“¢ What are the historical geographies of prediction and other ‘future-making’ practices – surveys, statistics, social trends, forecasting?

Please send your name, title and abstract (300 words) to both conveners by Friday, February 12th.

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Reblog> Civil Society 4.0 – Refugees and Digital Self Organization

This conference/hackathon at HKW in Berlin looks brilliant – it’s a part of a fantastic programme for 2016, including the exhibition Nervous System, which I hope to take our 2nd year field trip students to in March.

Civil Society 4.0 – Refugees and Digital Self Organization

2016, Mar 03, Thu – 2016, Mar 05, Sat

Refugee-Hackathon | © Lionel-Kreglinger/Berlin 2015

Refugee-Hackathon | © Lionel-Kreglinger/Berlin 2015

Refugees are also digital trailblazers; the use of smartphones and social media are essential both for their escape and for everyday life in their new homes. For voluntary refugee aids, digital tools are also of great importance. Recently projects such as the platform www.arriving-in-berlin.de have demonstrated how important the web is for the self-organization of refugees. The Civil Society 4.0 conference aims to network the many initiatives and projects.

Arriving in Berlin is an example of a participatory online platform in which refugees map their new city of Berlin based on their own experiences and needs. The huge response to the launch of the interactive map on social networks reveals the demand for projects by refugees for refugees. The first Refugee Hackathon held in Berlin in October 2015 was similarly popular. Initiated by Anke Domscheit-Berg, it united 300 programmers and designers in Berlin who developed 18 projects including place4refugees.de and volunteer-planner.org. The Facebook page “Moabit hilft!” is the largest social media platform in Berlin aimed at making life easier for refugees in their new neighborhoods. The group Refugees Emancipation e.V. has set the goal of setting up Internet cafés in refugee accommodations where they can help each other learn basic computer skills in order to be able to program online applications according to their own needs.

A three-day conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt will center on digital self-organization by refugees. Between March 3 and 5, 2016 existing projects will present themselves while workshops probe the potentials of project and partner synergies. The idea of the hackathon will be taken up by programmers working together with refugees on the relevant tools.

In cooperation with Asyl-in.de, Chaos Computer Club Berlin e.V., Hackathon, Maptime Berlin, Metrozones

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Reblog> CFP: Epigenesis and Philosophy: A Workshop on the work of Catherine Malabou

This looks interesting:

CFP: Epigenesis and Philosophy: A Workshop on the work of Catherine Malabou

Call For Papers

Philosophy and Epigenesis

A Workshop on the work of Catherine Malabou

March 15-16, UWE, Bristol.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Catherine Malabou (CRMEP, Kingston), ‘Epigenesis of the Text’

In her 2014 book, Avant demain: Èpigenèse et rationalité (Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality) Catherine Malabou explores contemporary philosophical attempts to move beyond the Kantian transcendental via an epigenetic account of the emergence of rationality. In particular, Malabou makes this analysis not only with the intellectual tools of recent European philosophy, but also with the tools of contemporary neuroscience. This project, along with much of Malabou’s other recent work, cuts through the trend to relinquish the Kantian transcendental by reframing the very terms of this debate with reference to recent natural science. In this way, Malabou points the way towards a new future in which continental philosophy boldly embraces recent developments in the natural sciences and rejects the anti-scientific bias which has infected many dominant strands of continental philosophy.

This event aims to further explore Malabou’s recent work both constructively and critically by bringing together scholars in both the humanities and the natural sciences to discuss the questions opened up by Malabou. We invite submissions for 20-minute presentations that fit broadly with the themes of Malabou’s recent work, and in particular, the themes of epigenesis and rationality.

 

Relevant topics include, but are by no means limited to:

  • The work of Catherine Malabou (and in particular, the project outlined in Avant demain)
  • Philosophical considerations of plasticity, life, and the brain
  • Deep History and the brain
  • Materialist and naturalist accounts of life
  • Epigenetics and contemporary European philosophy
  • Philosophical anthropology and natural science
  • Naturalist accounts of reason
  • The place of the organic in Kantian philosophy
  • Epigenesis in German idealism
  • Critical encounters between neuroscience and psychoanalysis
  • The role of plasticity in contemporary thought
  • The relationship between contemporary philosophy and the natural sciences

We especially encourage submissions from underrepresented groups in the humanities.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Michael2.Burns@uwe.ac.uk by February 4th, 2016.

Hosted by the Natural World and Technology Theme of the UWE, Bristol Social Science Research Group, and the Working Group on Contemporary Materialism.

http://www.uwephilosophy.org.uk/

https://contemporarymaterialism.wordpress.com/

malabou event CFP

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Reblog> exhibitions visualising digital data

Some great observations by Gillian Rose on her blog about exhibitions visualising data and some healthy scepticism ~ which I share!

exhibitions visualising digital data

There seem to be a few exhibitions around at the moment – as well as one that ran for a few weeks and closed at the end of November, in Riga, called Data Drift – that look at the intersection of digital data and digital visualisations of various kinds.  Maybe there’re always these sorts of exhibitions around and I just haven’t noticed them, but if there aren’t, it’s kind of interesting that I found four in the past month or so.

bigbang

One’s at Somerset House in London, focussing on data and called Big Bang Data, until the end of February.

Another is called Animated Wonderworlds at the Museum fur Gestaltung Schaudepotin Zurich.  It’s curated by Suzanne Buchan and runs til 10 January.  I was hoping to get to this one, but my plans were scuppered so I’ve had to make do with the exhibition catalogue and a YouTube video.  It’s focussed on animation rather than on digital data specifically but does include some data visualisations, and the catalogue has a great essay by Suzanne, which talks about just how pervasive digital animations are now.

And the third is at the Institute for Unstable Media (what a great name – though I guess all institutes are made of unstable media”¦) in Rotterdam.  Its title is Data in the 21st Century and it’s on until 14 February, exploring the frictions between ‘data’ and ‘reality’, according to its homepage.

As I haven’t actually been to any of these shows, this is more of a hand-wave than a proper blog post.  Interesting, though, that there’s so much work by artists, designers and digital humanists (Lev Manovich features in all but Digital Wonderlands, I think) using visualisations to interrogate data.  The claim that data – especially the big data sets generated by so much of the digital infrastructure of everyday life now – is understood more easily if it’s visualised is one that’s made very often.  I’m not so sure.  As others (like Johanna Drucker) have worried, once data is visualised, certain questions about it are prioritised over others.  A visualisation (as Suzanne Buchan argues about animations) invite affective responses, they let us “see the unseeable”, to quote Suzanne, and we can get carried away into their beautiful, glowing worlds.  That can be a wonderful thing.  But it also makes the robustness of the data, and the process of visualisation (both the technical process and the labour process) much harder to see, in fact.  Making something visible always seems to entail making something else much less visible.

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Reasons blogging is beneficial for academics (via THE)

About 6 months ago I wrote a little about blogging here and solicited some responses from other geographers that blog, some of the reasons we gave for blogging possibly sit behind those (very good but slightly more instrumental) ‘seven reasons why blogging can make you a better academic writer‘ given by Pat Thompson and re-blogged recently by the Times Higher on their website. I also think that Martin Weller’s piece for The Chronicle  “The Virtues of Blogging as Scholarly Activity” still stands the test of time and acts as a good companion piece here…

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Reblog> CFP: Participatory Activism

CFP: Participatory Activism

How to Do It – Call for Papers

Creating Bottom up Political Participation

9-10th April 2016 | Kings College London

This conference brings together academics, political activists and community organisers to contribute to the working out of a question central to the current political climate: ‘how can we create progressive and effective political participation?’ From citizen engagement to radical collective action, the focus of the event is how ‘ordinary’ people can come together to collectively act upon and change their environment.

We are living in a time where conventional political processes are losing credibility and traction, as access to social justice is blocked by the capturing of the state by neoliberal forces. There are substantial academic and mainstream literatures on how states, governments and corporate organisations can act upon their citizens for their own ends. Yet there is a big gap in the knowledge of citizens on how to mobilise popular cultural and political participation.

The challenge is to create determined and conscious collective action, which can be effective, shared and scaled up. Left-wing alternatives are frequently discussed but these ideas often quickly stall as pragmatic processes remain under explored and are never fully envisaged. Too often well-intentioned thoughts fail to translate into action.

This event seeks to generate and share concrete knowledge of how bottom up radical political participation can succeed. It aims to reach out beyond the academy to bring people together to strategise, network and celebrate our collective potential to create a better world. It will bring together disparate knowledge to identify best practice. This will be done through a collective and deliberative process; identifying effective sequences and combinations of campaigning tactics and mechanisms, and a practical programme of radical political social change to move towards a truly democratic culture. The event seeks to challenge the established political class and provide a pre-figurative inspiration of popular deliberation to show that another world is possible.

Relevant topics will include:

  • Participatory education
  • Practice: the stories of actual existing politicised groups and communities
  • Encouraging participation through accessible political language
  • Participation through radical art and culture
  • Opportunities and challenges of participatory organisation in the global city
  • Political strategies and tactics for participatory mobilisation
  • Radical media organisations and strategies
  • Models of participatory organisation and political decision-making

Further information and submission guidelines can be found here: https://how2doit2016.wordpress.com/

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Reblog> On the radicalisation (of (Muslim) youth)

Owain Jones on the need to distinguish between extremism and radicalism:

On the radicalisation (of (Muslim) youth)

On the radicalisation (of (Muslim) youth).

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

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/20/we-need-radicals-for-social-change

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.

Hitler was an extremist – not a radical

Edward Vallance in A Radical History Of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries – the men and women who fought for our freedoms, points out that radical individuals and groups in the UK have played a key role in the development of freedom democracy and justice. And at certain times radicalism was in direct conflict with extremism e.g. against the rise of fascism in early 20th century Europe and Britain itself.

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.

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Happy New Year 2016

Although I’m on leave, I couldn’t resist marking the turning of the page on the calendar, or perhaps the turning from one calendar to another (a literal performance of the vestiges of an orientation to a prior industrial calendarity ~ see Stiegler’s Technics & Time 3 for more on that)… So:

Happy New Year to any and all who privilege me with their attention, however fleeting, to this blog. I wish you all a cheerful and peaceful 2016. I hope we can all do a little more to take care of one another.

My year begins somewhat inauspiciously with bruised ribs, pain killers and already feeling flustered with not having prepared enough for the coming term… hey-ho, I’ll find a way through!

In terms of this website, in 2016, I intend to endeavour to continue, as in the last four months of 2015, to regularly blog. Here’s to an interesting year 🙂

2015 brought the most visitors I’ve had to this blog… According to the JetPack review of 2015 for my blog:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

The busiest day of the year was November 27th with 472 views. The most popular post that day was Stiegler on Daesh and ‘the age of disruption”.

I am pleased that one of the most popular posts has been a translation, it’s great to be able to help in some small way other people to access the provocative thoughts of interesting writers… I’ve been privileged to receive support and guidance from both Patrick Crogan and Daniel Ross with my amateur translation, for which I am really grateful.

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Interesting new paper: Performing the sharing economy – Lizzie Richardson

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 🙂

Performing the sharing economy

Lizzie Richardson

Here’s the abstract:

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.