Category: popular culture

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‘Britain’s got behaviour’ – Will Davies on the rise of ‘behaviour shows’

Will Davies (author of The Limits of Neoliberalism and The Happiness Industry) has written a nice piece on his blog deconstructing two common trend in British TV programmes: a dynamic of competition and elimination; and an appeal to behaviourism. For Davies, this loosely equates to a kind of Hayek-ian ‘discovery procedure’ ~ no suffering, no discovery. What this constitutes, in the shape of programmes such as Dragons’ Den and Location, Location, Location is a ‘transparent mis-representation of what’s going on in the economy’. On contrast, Davies suggests that an alternative (regressive) move to behaviourism – exemplified by Married at First Sight and The Secret Life of [x] year olds.

The post is well worth a read – find it here.

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Nuance doesn’t sell… @mweller on mature debates concerning technology

On his blog Martin Weller has written a nice piece about what it means to be ‘critical’ in relation to ed-tech and the difficulty of doing so. Martin’s point is (I think) that it is really easy to either proselytise or disparage the uses of (educational) technology in ‘popular’ debate and actually quite hard to offer a nuanced view.

I really like this passage in particular, and feel its worth reproducing:

There is something about throwing technology in the mix that demands people set aside critical faculty. If you want the big keynotes, the money slot on TV or the big book deals then you’d better be coming with a dystopian or utopian vision. Preferably based on sweeping generalisations from your own personal experience. That’s what sells here.

There is profound truth in this statement. A significant proportion of the popular discussion of technology is ‘selling snake oil’. Replace the nouns and adjectives referring to the tech with nouns/adjectives concerning god or magic and that tends to quickly reveal the stakes…

Martin’s blogpost is worth a read.

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Character assassinations? There’s an app for that…

Interesting article on the Washington Post  site, tweeted by David Murakami Wood (above), that talks about a service/app called “Peeple” that seeks to be a “Yelp for people” – to enable us to ‘rate’ and ‘review’ one another… A market-driven death-knell for treating one another like ‘people’ (rendering the name rather ironic) and another attempt to pull a further aspect of ‘ordinary’ life into the attention economy. This is an attempted renegotiation of the ‘normative’, what Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, in their book Blue Jeans, describe as the sense in which “the expectation that actions within a social field are likely to be judged as right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, proper or transgressive”. What if reviewing one another became ‘normal’..?(!!) *sigh*

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Geographies of Popular Culture – a 1st year reading list

As we’re at the beginning of term here in Exeter and I’ve been fiddling with my teaching resources I thought I’d share some of them here, so please find below and in a linked PDF the suggested reading list I offer our first year students for a section of the module Geographies of Place, Identity and Culture concerning ‘Popular Culture’.

GEO1105 Geographies of Place, Identity and Culture

Geographies of Popular Culture: Reading List

 

In addition to Introducing Human Geographies, there are a few very good textbooks that may support further study, especially if you pursue cultural geographies in the second and third years:

Crang, Mike. 1998 Cultural Geography, London, Routledge.

Horton, John and Kraftl, Peter. 2014 Cultural Geographies. An Introduction, London, Routledge.

Storey, John. 2012 Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction, 6th Edition, London, Pearson.

Lecture 1: Popular Culture

This lecture will introduce the theme of popular culture, revisiting key concepts and motifs that have emerged throughout the module and open out, as a context for further study, the pursuits and activities of popular culture.

 

Anderson et al. 2002 “A Rough Guide” in Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S., and Thrift, N. eds. Handbook of Cultural Geography, London, Sage, pp. 1-9

Storey, J 2012 ‘What is popular culture?’ in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction, London, Pearson, pp. 1-16

Wider reading

Bryman, A. 2004 The Disneyization of Society, London, Sage. –In library 306.3 BRY

du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. 1997 Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London, Sage.

Harvey, D. 1989 The condition of postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell.

Klein, N. 1999 No logo, New York, Picador.

Mitchell, D. 1995 “There’s no such thing as culture: towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20: pp. 102-116.

Skelton, T. and Valentine, G. 1998 Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, London, Routledge.

Turner, G. 2003 British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 3rd Edition, London, Routledge.

 

Lecture 2: Geographies of Music

Music is the focus of the second lecture, situated both as forms of performance and a means of expression. We will look at the ways in which music is performed and how its audiences are convened. We will also explore how music is key medium for the expression of identity and the enactment of place.

 

Fraser, A. 2012 “The Spaces, Politics, and Cultural Economies of Electronic Dance Music”, Geography Compass 6(8): pp. 500-511.

Rogers, A. 2012 “Geographies of the Performing Arts: Landscapes, Places and Cities”, Geography Compass 6(2): pp. 60-75.

 

Wider reading

Anderson, B. 2004 “Time-stilled space-slowed: how boredom matters” Geoforum 35(6): pp. 739-754.

Cresswell, T. 2006 “‘You cannot shake that shimmie here’: producing mobility on the dancefloor”, Cultural Geographies 13: pp. 55-77.

Hudson, R. 2006 “Regions and place: music, identity and place”, Progress in Human Geography 30: pp. 626-634.

 

Kong, L. 1995 Music and cultural politics: ideology and resistance in Singapore. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20: pp. 447–459.

Leyshon, A. 2009 “The software slump? Digital music, the democratisation of technology, and the decline of the recording studio sector within the musical economy”, Environment and Planning A 41(6): pp. 1301-1331.

Mels, T. 2004 “Lineages of a geography of rhythms”, in Mels, T. ed. Reanimating Places: A Geography of Rhythms, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 3-44.

Revill, G. 2000 “Music and the politics of sound: nationalism, citizenship and auditory space”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: pp. 597-613.

Saldanha, A. 2002 “Music, space, identity: geographies of youth culture in Bangalore”, Cultural Studies 16: pp. 337-350.

Simpson, P. 2008 “Chronic everyday life: rhythmanalysing street performance”, Social and Cultural Geography 9(7): pp. 807-829.

Simpson, P. 2012 “Apprehending everyday rhythms: rhythmanalysis, time-lapse photography, and the space-times of street performance”, Cultural Geographies 19(4): pp. 423-445.

Watson, A., Hoyler, M. and Mager, C. 2009 “Spaces and Networks of Musical Creativity in the City”, Geography Compass 3(2): pp. 856-878.

White, B. and Day, F. 1997 “Country music radio and American culture regions”, Journal of Cultural Geography 16: pp. 21-35.

Wood, N., Duffy, M. and Smith, S. J. 2007 “The art of doing (geographies of) music”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25: pp. 867–889.

Wyndham, M. and Read, P. 2003 “Buena Vista Social Club: local meets global and lives happily ever after”, Cultural Geographies 10: pp. 498-503.

 

Lecture 3: Geographies of Life Online

In this lecture the we will explore the growing number of ways in which life is mediated with and through the internet. We will investigate the ways in which the internet reconfigures the performance of identity and our understandings of space and place.

 

Kinsley, S. 2013 “Beyond the screen: Methods for investigating geographies of life ‘online'”, Geography Compass 7(8): pp. 540-555.

Wider reading

Adams, P. C. 1997 “Cyberspace and virtual places”, Geographical Review 87(2): pp. 155-171.

– 2011, “A taxonomy for communication geography”, Progress in Human Geography 35(1): pp. 37-57.

Dodge, M. and Kitchin, R. 2001 Mapping Cyberspace, New York, Routledge.

Graham, S. 1998 “The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualising space, place and information technology” Progress in Human Geography 22(2): pp. 165-185.

Hillis, K. 1998 “On the margins: the invisibility of communications in geography” Progress in Human Geography 22(4): pp. 543-566.

Kellerman, A. 2002 The internet on earth: a geography of information, Hoboken, NJ, Wiley.

Mossberger, K., Tolbert, C. J., and Stansbury, M. 2003 Virtual Inequality: beyond the digital divide, Washington DC, Georgetown University Press.

Thrift, N. 1996 “New Urban Eras and Old Technological Fears: Reconfiguring the Goodwill of Electronic Things”, Urban Studies 33(8): pp. 1463-1493.

Zook, M. 2005 The Geography of the Internet Industry: Venture capital dot-coms, and local knowledge, New York, Blackwell.

Lecture 4: Geographies of Books & Reading

While literature can be considered as ‘high’ culture, in this lecture we will consider the ways in which literature and fiction are a significant source of imaginative geographies and particular types of spatial experience.

 

Hones, S. 2008 “Text as It Happens: Literary Geography”, Geography Compass 2(5): pp. 1301-3117.

Kitchin, R. and Kneale, J. 2001 “Science Fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geographies of the new millennium”, Progress in Human Geography 25: pp. 17-33.

 

Wider reading

Cresswell, T. 1993 “Mobility as resistance: a geographical reading of Kerouac’s On the Road“, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18: pp. 249-262.

DeLyser, D. 2005 Romana memories: tourism and the shaping of Southern California, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press.

Kneale, J. 1999 “The virtual realities of technology and fiction: reading William Gibson;s cyberspace”, in Crang, M., Crang, P., and May, J. eds. Virtual Geographies, London, Routledge, pp. 205-221.

Lando, F. 1996 “Fact and fiction: geography and literature”, GeoJournal 38(1): pp. 3-18.

Livingstone, D. 2005 “Science, text and space: thoughts on the geography of reading”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(4): pp. 91-401.

Romanillos, J-L. 2008 “‘Outside, it is snowing’: experience and finitude in the nonrepresentational landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 795-822.

Said, E. 1995 (originally, 1978) “Imaginative geography and its representations: Orientalizing the Oriental”, in Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin, pp. 49-73.

Sharp, J. 2000 “Towards a critical analysis of fictive geographies”, Area 32(3): pp. 327-334.

Shortridge, J. R. 1991 “The concept of the place-defining novel in American popular culture”, Professional Geographer 43(3): pp. 280-291.

 

Lecture 5: Geographies of Cinema and Television

As one of the key media of the 20th and 21st centuries, the moving image is crucial to understanding material cultures, changing ideas about landscape, and identity. In this lecture we will examine the ways in which cinema and television have both reflected and created kinds of spatial experience.

Rosati, C. 2007 “Media Geographies: Uncovering the Spatial Politics of Images”, Geography Compass 1(5): pp. 995-1014.

 Wider reading

Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. 1999 Remediation: understanding new media, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Carter, S. 2007 “Mobilising generosity, framing geopolitics: Narrating crisis in the homeland through diasporic media”, Geoforum 38: pp. 1102-1112.

Carter, S. and McCormack, D. 2006 “Film, Geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention”, Political Geography 25: pp. 228-245.

Couldry, N. and McArthy, A. eds. 2004 MediaSpace: place, scale, and culture in the media age, New York, Routledge.

Lukinbeal, C. 2005 “Cinematic landscapes”, Journal of Cultural Geography 23(1): pp. 3-22.

Morley, D. 1996 “The geography of television: ethnography, communications and community”, in Hay, J., Grossberg, L., and Wartella, E. eds. The audience and its landscapes, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, pp. 317-342.

Rosati, C. 2007 “MTV: 360° of the industrial production of culture”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32(4): pp. 556-575.

 

Lecture 6: Spaces of Games and Play

Fun can be a serious business. In this lecture we will explore the various ways playing and playfulness are important to how we understand the world. We will examine how play allows us to be ‘other’, how structured games are important to how we negotiate individual and collective identity, and the ways playfulness is central to our performance of everyday life.

Woodyer, T. 2012 “Ludic geographies: not merely child’s play”, Geography Compass 6(6): pp. 313-326.

Wider reading

Ash, J. and Gallacher, L. 2011 “Cultural Geography and Videogames”, Geography Compass 5(6): pp. 351-368.

Borden, I. 2001 Skateboarding, space and the city: architecture and the body, Oxford, Berg.

Caillois, R. 1961 Man, play and games, New York, NY, Free Press of Glencoe.

Flusty, S. 2000 “Thrashing downtown: play as resistance to the spatial and representational regulation of Los Angeles”, Cities 17(2): pp. 149–158.

Holloway, S. L. and Valentine, G. 2000 Children’s geographies: playing, living, learning, London, Routledge.

Huizinga, J. 1949 Homo Ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Stevens, Q. 2007 The ludic city: exploring the potential of public spaces, Abingdon & New York, Routledge.

Sutton-Smith, B. 1997 The ambiguity of play, Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press.

Valentine, G. and McKendrick, J. 1997 “Children’s outdoor play: exploring parental concerns about children’s safety and the changing nature of childhood”, Geoforum 28(2): pp. 219–235.

Winnicott, D. W. 1971 Playing and reality, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Waitt, G. 2008 “Urban Festivals: Geographies of Hype, Helplessness and Hope”, Geography Compass 2(2): pp. 513-537.

Lecture 7: Geographies of Consumption

Consuming goods and services lies at the heart of everyday life, for subsistence, work and for leisure. The ways we consume are a significant focus for cultural geographies research. We will explore how consumption relates to identity and place.

Crewe, L. 2000 “Geographies of retailing and consumption”, Progress in Human Geography 24: pp. 275-290.

Clarke, N. 2008 “From ethical consumerism to political consumption”, Geography Compass 2(6): pp. 1870-1884.

 

Wider reading

Anderson, B. 2004 “Time-stilled space-slowed: how boredom matters” Geoforum 35(6): pp. 739-754.

Bell, D. and Valentine, G. 1996 Consuming Geographies: We are what we eat, Routledge London.

Clarke, D., Doel, M. and Housiaux, K (eds) 2003 The Consumption Reader, Routledge London.

Crewe, L. 2001 “The besieged body: geographies of retailing and consumption”, Progress in Human Geography 25: pp. 629–40.

Crewe, L. 2003 “Geographies of retailing and consumption: markets in motion”, Progress in Human Geography 27(3): pp. 352-362.

du Gay, P. 1997 ‘Introduction’, in: du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London, Sage, pp. 1-7. –In library: 301.243 DUG

Lury, C. 1996 Consumer Culture, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Mansvelt, J. 2005 Geographies of Consumption, Sage, London.

Paterson, M. 2006 Consumption and Everyday Life, Routledge, London.

Ritzer, G. 2013 The MacDonaldization of Society, 7th edition, London, Sage. –In library: 306.0973 RIT

Urry, J. 1995 Consuming Places, Routledge, London.

Urry, J. 1990 The Tourist Gaze, Sage, London.

 

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Videos to introduce lectures on geographies of popular culture

I give seven lectures on geographies of popular culture at the end of a 28-lecture torrent of social and cultural geography that is our first-year, first-term module “Geographies of Place, Identity & Culture‘.

We are asked to commence the actual lecture five minutes after the beginning of the session and end five minutes before, thus giving us 50 minutes of time to engage the students.

I have found that it can be rather awkward setting up and just waiting and watching the students pile in, while many of them sort of stare at you… so, I’m going to give them something else to look at!

I did this for one lecture last year and have now found a video for the first five minutes (-ish) of all seven. Here they are:

Introduction to Geographies of Popular Culture, begins with:

Lecture 2, geographies of music, begins with:

Lecture 3, geographies of life online, begins with:

Lecture 4, geographies of books & reading, begins with:

Lecture 5, geographies of cinema and TV, begins with:

Lecture 6, spaces of games and play, begins with:

Lecture 7, geographies of consumption, begins with:

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Museum of Contemporary Commodities

I have meant, and singularly failed, to blog about this fantastic project for a while, so I mean to makes amends now:

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is an artistic, collaborative and activist project cooked up by the excellent Paula Crutchlow – who just so happens to be a PhD student in Exeter Geography Dept. The project is a collaboration with my colleague Ian Cook and several other interesting and exciting people – not least the folk at Furtherfield.

Funnily enough, I learned about MoCC when it was in its larval stages before I joined the department at Exeter – Ian and Paula held a ‘Thinkering Day’ here in Devon and we explored some ideas around what MoCC could be… the event was supported by REACT (hence why I learned about it) – here’s a snazzy video:

You should definitely explore the MoCC website to learn more, but here’s how MoCC is explained on the Furtherfield website:

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is neither a building nor a permanent collection of stuff – it’s an invitation. To consider every shop, online store and warehouse full of stuff as if it were a museum, and all the things in it part of our collective future heritage.

Imagine yourself as this museum’s curator with the power to choose what is displayed and how. To trace and interpret the provenance and value of these things and how they arrived here. To consider the effects this stuff has on people and places close by or far away, and how and why it connects them.

What do we mean by things or stuff? Everything that you can buy in today’s society. The full range of contemporary commodities available to consume.

Please join us on our journey by browsing and adding to our collection, attending an event, and becoming a researcher. We are currently curating connections between trade-place-data-values.

There are further events planned and lots more exciting things to come so keep an eye on both the Furtherfield and the MoCC websites.

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Repost> Call for applications: digital activist residency in Berlin, Oct + Nov 2015

The Tactical Tech collective have a call for applications for a residency later this year which looks great!

Tactical Tech is offering a residency in its offices in Berlin, Germany, for two months starting at the beginning of October 2015.  The residency is designed to support activists from Latin America, Africa, Asia, Central Asia, the Caucasus or the Middle East, who utilise digital technologies extensively in their work.

This is part of a project launched by the Tactical Technology Collective and Reporters without Borders Germany, meant to strengthen Berlin as a hub for a creative community that can inspire change around the world. In parallel, Reporters Without Borders will host a residency for a journalist.

We are looking for an experienced digital activist interested in joining a small team working internationally on issues related to Tactical Tech’s current strategic priorities. This means you should be experienced in working in at least one of the following areas of activity :

  • Understanding and exposing issues; using data, design and technology to help people understand and investigate systemic issues in their own societies. (Primary Tactical Tech project: Exposing the invisible.)
  • The politics of data; understanding what it means to live in a ‘data society’, how we leave digital traces and what this means for the privacy of everyday users in different contexts. (Primary Tactical Tech project: Me and My Shadow)
  • Digital security for human rights defenders and journalists; working practically to sustain freedom of expression in the digital sphere. (Primary Tactical Tech project: Security-in-a-box)

Read the full call for applications.

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Out now > Bernard Stiegler – States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century

Those of you vaguely interested in the work of Bernard Stiegler, and perhaps those of you who are not (yet!) will I hope take note of the publication of an important work by Stiegler: States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century [a translation by Daniel Ross of États de choc:  betise et savoir dans XXIe siecle].

Here’s the blurb from the publisher Polity:

In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions.

New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein’s critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the ‘shock doctrine’. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent ‘state of shock’ has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities.

Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available.

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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.”