Category: observations

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Running towards publication – Jonathan Sterne on the pace of publishing

Over on the group blog Culture Digitally, Jonathan Sterne has written about the competing paces of publication, audiences and the lifespan of our examples:

The recent Culture Digitally posts by Jeff Pooley and C.W. Anderson suggest that one of the main broken areas of new media scholarship has to do with publication and speed. Our examples are out of date before our articles appear in the journals to which we submitted them. Our books suffer even worse fates. Both authors suggest the problem is the speed with which our objects of study–digital media–change. Both also point to the dilemmas faced by academic authors and presses as the world of academic publishing changes. . . slowly. And both suggest that iterated versions and new digital platforms would be one set of solutions to this problem.

Sterne makes the point that the texts to which we continue to return, and with which we teach, are those that do not solely rely on the examples. While examples are ‘examples of themselves’ (see Dewsbury et al. 2002), they are also (hopefully) illustrative of a broader theory about the world:

Scholars have developed a number of strategies for dealing with the different temporalities of scholarship and life, and that in fact is important for our students to learn about. Take four canonical examples that still frequently appear on media studies syllabi (do a search for these and “media studies syllabus” if you don’t believe me): Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” Raymond Williams’ Television; Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style; and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. All of these were originally published in the 1970s and reference social worlds vastly different from the ones our student inhabit. Two of them refer to the UK, one to the US, and one to France, which means students everywhere else need to make some adjustments. Why are these texts still being taught if they are so out of date? The answer is simple: the ideas in them transcend the examples, and even where the conclusions no longer obtain, the questions they ask might be useful for students to ask today. To be sure, treating them as timeless social science theories would be a disservice: Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model is tied to the inaccessibility of television production in the 1970s; an account of the same politics around news today would have to think very differently about production.

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Dated examples in readings are not a problem. They are unavoidable when the reference is popular culture, current events or new media. They can be used to teach students about the specificity of their (and our) own moment; and they provide an opportunity to teach students that intellectual work is an ongoing process and conversation of which our students can be a part.

Sterne goes on to make a plea against ‘keeping up’ with the acceleration, against ‘keeping [old work] up-to-date’ and that

we must also let scholars walk away from their projects. More than that, we should encourage it. Abandoning work has probably done more to advance scholarly conversation than any other single act by academic writers.

It’s worth reading the whole thing. I would briefly note that it is possible to argue that there is a healthy academic tradition of ‘abandonment’. In philosophy, there have been a number of writers/thinkers that have unapologetically changed their minds or simply shifted the terms of their projects – for example Francois Laruelle has made it a feature of his work as such, and one might argue that Foucault did so too.

Likewise, there have been arguments made for a more contemplative pace of work. For example, Bernard Stiegler has argued that we need to (re)constitute what the Romans called Otium the techniques of the self, of our care for ourselves and for knowledge, such that we allow space and time for attentive thought.

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Clive Barnett on Foucault and Problematisation

On his blog Pop Theory my colleague Clive Barnett highlights a new paper he has out with nonsite.org entitled On Problematization: Elaborations on a theme in “late Foucault”. It’s worth (of course!) taking a look – A funny coincidence is that this appears at the same time as I am revisiting Rabinow’s Anthropos Today which is one of the sources through which Clive reflects on Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘problematisation’ (not least in The Order of Things [Les Mots et les Choses])…

Clive suggests his article is ‘an experiment in seeing how much mileage along the path of developing useable social science concepts you can get out of a few passing remarks from a master-thinker’. In this case, Foucault’s suggestion of problematisation as ‘an interruption of the normal, naturalized, settled flow of events’, which Clive argues, by putting Foucault in conversation with Dewey (as does Rabinow, but to different ends), that:

The notion of problematization might, in short, point towards a mode of descriptive analysis that helps to draw into view the significance of the difficulties and concerns that already animate people’s actions. Rather than underwriting a model of critique in which it is presumed that people’s subjectivities are readily available for re-making under the force of the revelatory exposure of contingency, elaborations of Foucault’s notion of problematization invite us to give more credence to how aspects of people’s subjectivity come to matter so strongly to them, and in turn to ask what price would have to be paid in the pursuit of transformation.

An interesting paper, well worth exploring (for free!), on nonsite.org.

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Gillian Rose previews the 4th Ed. of Visual Methods

Over on her blog Visual/Method/Culture, Prof. Gillian Rose has offered a preview of the changes and additions to the fourth edition of her essential Visual Methodologies book. Gillian lists seven things, here’s an excerpt:

I’ve been working on the fourth edition of Visual Methodologies on and off since January, squeezing it in the gaps between way too many other projects. As a result, it’s rather hard to have an overview of the beast (also because I seem to find it impossible to delete any more than a few sentences and a handful of references from each new edition). But I’m now facing the final run-through of the whole thing, when of course it will be lovingly burnished into a seamless whole, cough cough.

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1) one big change (for me at least) is that I’ve added a fourth site to the framework that structures the book. Editions one, two and three were based on the idea that there are three sites at which the meaning/affects of images are made: the site of the production of the image, the image itself, and its audiencing. The fourth edition adds the site – or, better, routes – of an image’s circulation to that list. This was so discussion could focus on how different methods might approach the online platforms that now host and distribute so many images, and through which so much of social life is mediated and performed.

2) adding the site of circulation to the book also gives a framework for introducing debates about ‘convergence culture’ and whether it deals with questions of power adequately or not. It seems to me that one way that ‘power’ in a largely digital visual culture can be thought through is by asking about the ‘power geometries’ that structure its circulations: what sorts of patterns are there in those circulations and how to they structure certain forms of agency while mitigating against others? The Guardian’s recent report on the languages of the Internet is a great example of mapping those circulations to show their situatedness and partiality.

I recommend reading the whole post!

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Society for Caribbean Studies conference & Stuart Hall Project screening

Next week is a good week to visit Birmingham, if you’re able, with the Society for Caribbean Studies conference taking place from 1-3 July AND a screening of the wonderful ‘The Stuart Hall Project‘ film on 30 June, both at the Drum Intercultural Arts Centre.

You can find out all you need to know over on the Society of Caribbean Studies website.

[Thanks to Pat Noxolo for posting details to Crit-Geog].

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Reblog > Towards a Global Social Theory

Over on her blog Mutable Matter Angela Last has blogged about the Global Social Theory website:

The Global Social Theory website is now live. The project seeks to broaden the university syllabus, which, even outside the US and Europe, can be very Euro-centric. As the website states, it was prompted by the critique of the initiative ‘Why is my curriculum white?‘Edited by Gurminder Bhambra with Lisa Tilley and Lucy Mayblin (with web support from Pat Lockley), the site brings together theorists, concepts and key topics from across the world. Entries are submitted by various contributors and give concise summaries as well as further reading suggestions and useful questions for further discussion. I have contributed three entries so far, and am hoping to write more. If you think someone or something is missing, why not contribute as well?

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Professional web presence

Another post from a train (with very poor connection and so actually uploaded from my office)…

Re-reading the responses by Clive Barnett and Jeremy Crampton  to my post about ‘being a sharing academic‘ reminded me, eventually, about the conversations held on the JiscMail list ‘Crit-Geog-Forum‘ about blogging in March 2011, the session ‘Between freedom and narcissism?‘ at the AAG in 2013, for which Scott Rodgers wrote a really useful blogpost (see below) and the useful publication by Wilson and Starkweather in the Professional Geographer on the ‘web presence of academic geographers‘.

Scott Rodgers reflected upon how he uses his blog, in 2013, and opened his thoughts out to consider how he has drifted away from ‘myopic blog-writing’ to engaging in discussion and sharing across several different kinds/platforms of media. Concluding his blogpost Scott argued, and I can only agree, that:

contemporary social media are becoming less and less tools that academics can opt out of. Rather, they increasingly comprise the basic environments of academic practice, and at a time of shifting priorities in higher education, these are environments academics need to claim.

The conclusions to the paper by Wilson and Starkweather are another useful way of framing some of the issues that arose between the blogposts written by Clive, Jeremy and myself and I think are worth quoting here:

The Web presence of academic geographers can no longer necessarily be described as a static online listing of the accomplishments of an individual scholar. Instead, the Web practices of academic geographers are increasingly marked by … a focus on online interaction and engagement, despite the lack of professionalization along these lines. Early-career geographers are likely not trained in this aspect of academic reproduction and might be flatly discouraged from “wasting their time” by producing online content. Given the continually shifting norms of online practices in society, and in academia itself, however, perhaps serious debate about strategies for using [social media] tools should enter into the training and professionalization of young scholars. The fact that academics would best avoid directing all of their writing energies into their Twitter account is all the more reason for explicit discussions about how to productively manage one’s Web presence.

We do not believe that it is wise to dismiss blogging, microblogging, and online social networking as nothing more than a distraction from the serious work of academic life. Not only are these new patterns of online engagement seemingly here to stay and are likely bound up in broader shifts in performance pressures but they also offer some notable potential scholarly benefits if used with intention.

First, pressures to publish and promote have spilled out into Web practices like blogging and microblogging. The blog can act as a way to claim intellectual territory, just as it can provide a space to share nascent ideas and work out scholarly thought in conversation with far-flung peers.

Second, and relatedly, online social networks and other informal venues for sharing scholarly productions have become important amidst the uncertainty of secure employment alongside the neoliberalization of the university. Junior academics, perhaps more than their senior colleagues, might rely on these Web practices to remain visible and viable among a growing body of recently minted PhDs.

Third, many junior scholars likely completed the bulk of their advanced degree post-Facebook. These online social networks provide the avenue for keeping informed of others’ engagements (scholarly and otherwise) and nurture the local and translocal collectives that are so important in the professional development of early-career academic geographers.

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As institutions of higher education grapple with new pressures in a knowledge economy, academic geographers should incorporate everyday Web practices alongside the more observed and investigated techniques of a neoliberalizing academe.

(Wilson and Starkweather 2014, p. 79, additional emphasis)

I wonder, not least as a committee member of two RGS-IBG research groups, if the need for integrating the uses of various media into the training and professionalisation of early-career academics might be better-served by professional associations such as the AAG and the RGS-IBG. We could, for example, offer workshops as part of annual conferences and events. If nothing else, we could help one another by more-openly sharing things that have worked for us and  perhaps where we may have slipped-up and how that might be avoided. This is definitely something I think is worth consideration by those involved in our professional associations.

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Curating attention (Being a sharing academic pt. II)

My post from the train yesterday on blogging kept me thinking throughout the day. I wanted to discuss some of the responses (which makes up the majority of this post) and quickly clarify a couple of things. My initial post was, I recognise a little bit hypocritical: 1. My blog wouldn’t meet the ‘regular’ criteria I suggested for the list of blogs; and so, 2. I recognise that I am not, by any means, an exemplar of the sharing to which I aspire.

The blogpost led me to solicit some responses via Twitter (to which I’ll return) and I was really pleased to read posts from Jeremy Crampton and Clive Barnett, whose blogs and wider work I regularly read and admire. Likewise, not least because it is cross-posted there, the blog generated a little bit of discussion on Twitter with some interesting comments from Gillian Rose and Murray Lowe:

I very much welcome further comments and responses, so please do feel free to comment, blog elsewhere or tweet 🙂

Nevertheless, I wanted to collect together the conversation (so far) here (and I’ll return to that idea) and draw out two key points and make some comments.

First, in response to my observation about the use of some of the social plug-ins like ‘re-blog’ Jeremy (who does use it) observed

This works very well within the WordPress ecosystem, but have you noticed how infrequently this option comes up on blogs or news stories etc”¦they all have Instagram (never used it) Reddit (ditto) etc but not reblog.

to which I can only agree and add the corollary that, as I touched on in my earlier post, sharing and developing ideas cannot be platform-dependent, as both Jeremy and Gillian noted:

twitter is where things seemed to be shared most effectively

The ethos of sharing I am trying to invoke has to go where the conversations can best be served. As Martin Weller suggests in the piece in The Chronicle to which I linked previously:

A key aspect of the digital revolution is not the direct replacement of one form of scholarly activity with another, but rather the addition of alternatives to existing forms

We might do this across all sorts of media, from Twitter and Facebook, to Instagram and Reddit (as Jeremy suggests) and further to Tumblr, Pinterest, and Storify. The most important thing for me here is that we are convening a conversation at all and that it brings about the opportunity to share, celebrate,  and disagree about topics that matter to us. So, and to clarify, I am arguing that for me it’s not about the nuts-and-bolts of the platform, it’s about the ethos of sharing.

This leads me on to my second point. In his post about the uses of blogging and his own blog, my colleague Clive Barnett makes an interesting case for the necessity to see the activity as both a personal fulfilment; a ploughing of an individual furrow (i.e. the ‘lone wolf’) and a contribution to collective knowledge production. The way in which I agree with this is in terms of another observation Clive makes:

I can see how a blog can serve as a way in which one can curate one’s own on-going thinking.

While I totally agree with both Jeremy’s and Gillian’s points about Twitter being the medium par excellence  for sharing things, the considered thinking through of what is shared, through comments and responses at length, and the bringing together of multiple sources (like in this post) remains better served by blogs. As Clive says (and so have many others), academic sharing is a form of curation.

Curation certainly can be the ‘micro-broadcasting’ and the ‘construction of anonymous publics’ Clive discusses, through tags, categories, hashtags and so on. It can also be the bringing together of interlocutors both on and off the blog. The curation is never solely located on the blog: the blog is instead a signifier, perhaps a place-holder, for the performance of the curation/conversation. If,  as Clive argues, ‘sharing only makes sense if things are separable‘ then the activities of curation are precisely those means of doing the separating (and assembling).

I want to make a final observation about attention, which Clive raises. If this mode of sharing (blogging and using social media) I’ve been stumbling over suggesting is roughly analogous to care of one’s self (Clive’s ‘Me’) in the form of writing[1] then the mechanisms of that writing can both enable and hamper that care. In publicly curating ideas we are soliciting attention and the platforms are not neutral equipment in that solicitation.

To post and share on social media is not only to share with readers but also with those who own/run the platform for the purposes of marketing. Likewise, when and how we ‘pay attention’, as users, is also surveilled in order to serve adverts. Attention then, is commodified (as Patrick Crogan and I highlighted in a 2012 theme issue of Culture Machine).

I whole-heartedly agree that Twitter, in particular, has been brilliantly useful for sharing –like Jeremy I joined in 2009 and it has very much enriched my academic life. Nevertheless, those conversations are only really easily accessible in the moment (which is fine, up to a point) but it is non-trivial to retrieve them from Twitter’s archive (if you want). What you post to Twitter and other social media platforms, as data, is a commodity – and it has a monetary value.

So, as with traditional forms of publication (in the guise of journal articles [behind the paywall] or monographs [in expensive hardcover only editions]) we have to remain mindful about access: who has it, who the gatekeepers are, and how we accordingly curate our forms of sharing. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that such sharing is vital. To misquote Beckett (again): “share again, share better“.

Notes

1. And thus a form of hypomnesis (riffing on Jeremy’s allusion to his work on Foucault and hypomnemata) ~ worth reading Stiegler on this, see: this Ars Industrialis vocabulary entry.

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Reflecting on the field trip to Kilburn

Montage of Kilburn High Road using pictures taken by the author

At the end of October 2014, I accompanied 140 students in their first year of studying geography at the University of Exeter on a field trip to London to put into practise some of what they have learned so far on the BA Geography course. While many of the activities were located in central London locations, including Hyde Park and the V&A museum, all 140 students also visited Kilburn. You may ask: Why? Obvious answers would include that ‘it’s a diverse area’, with which you may or may not agree. Then again, as Zadie Smith argued, at the launch of her novel “NW”: “But that is only the dullest thing that can be said about Kilburn, that’s it’s so ‘diverse’.”

We took the students to Kilburn for a number of reasons: that it is precisely not ‘central London’ but still has carries the attributes of being situated within a ‘world city’ like London; that immigration has helped shape Kilburn in interesting ways; that the High Road marks a boundary, between Brent and Camden; and, significantly for me at least, because Kilburn has previously been an inspiration to the geographer Doreen Massey.

In her 1991 article “A Global Sense of Place”, Massey uses the narrative of a walk down Kilburn High Road to illustrate the various ways we can understand feelings of place not as territories encompassed by boundaries but instead as ‘articulated moments in networks of social relations’. It is the vitality and the various movements, the comings and goings of shoppers, families, locals and visitors alike, the businesses opening and closing: all of these connections through space AND time that come to make up our sense of place. This is the shared ‘Kilburnosity’ about which Zadie Smith writes. For Massey, places – and Kilburn in particular – are not solely local. The global threads through the local (producing those movements of people, money and goods) and, in the same way, the local builds the global.

The students enjoyed their brief exposure to ‘Kilburnosity’ and I enjoyed the questions Kilburn prompted them to begin to ask of themselves in the process: of how ‘places’ get continually made and of our various roles in that process. I think we all began to see why Zadie Smith boldly stated: “I’d rather walk down Kilburn High Road than the King’s Road – than any road in London. For selfish reasons: there’s so much more to see, and hear.”

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To Kilburn

Written on the train, earlier today…

I am heading to London to scout a fieldtrip exercise that will address Massey’s ‘Global Sense of Place’ and the sense in which we (the students and the lecturers) might think about the different ways in which normative scales appear or are transgressed in Kilburn (an area in London, a ‘global city’) – just as Massey had done for her 1991 paper.

Interesting then that in a moment of reflecting upon relations, movement and communication across space, I experience a snapshot of such ‘power geometries’. I am sitting on a train, pulling out of Didcot Parkway Station, within view of a power station, owned by Npower who are in turn owned by a German energy company RWE, watching shipping containers from Maersk, P&O and other global freight companies trundle by on a heavy goods train, listening to another passenger discuss a lovely meal at the River Cafe (in London) two days ago and planning the creation/installation of onshore and offshore energy generation facilities in Norwegian territory with someone clearly not currently in the UK. As I reflect on this, I write on a laptop proudly labelled as ‘Designed… in California. Assembled in China’.

Kilburn is now very different from Massey’s description. Gone are all traces of Irish dissidence and now Halal butchers and shops selling cheap mobile phone SIM cards for international calls vie for space. There remains a cosmopolitan range of ethnic diversity to the shops and restaurants but the credit crunch clearly bit hard here…

UPDATE: This isn’t supposed to be read as some kind of updated commentary following Massey (1991), just a reflection on travelling up to scout the field trip. Sorry for any misunderstanding the post has provoked…