Troubled Worlds: A Course Syllabus about Information Work and the Anthropocene

The goal of this syllabus is to interrogate the material, and socioeconomic processes which underpin our everyday information work. In particular, we examine the relationships developing between contemporary information practices and what problematically gets configured as “nature”—that messy world of non-human entanglements that often exists beyond the purview of innovation work, whether digital software development or industrial engineering. Much recent work on the environmental conditions of computing has sought to break down technology-nature dualisms in order to expose the implication of information technology in broader social and material ecologies. Library and information professionals and researchers are well poised to deepen this inquiry by presenting alternative nature-technology epistemologies grounded in longstanding analyses of information resources and their consumption. The “Troubled Worlds” syllabus starts with a discussion of concerns most obviously germane to the work of most library and information science professionals: practices at the intersection of structuring information and computing. Building on this attention, we turn to humanistic approaches to thinking through the era of dominant human activities widely known as the “Anthropocene” by introducing poetic, artistic, and activist lenses. We explore how artistic objects representing an increasingly troubled natural world raise awareness of the challenges facing it, as well as how they may incorporate and reshape information for aesthetic ends. We then look to questions of disability justice and how it works in blended built and natural spaces as well as the many different ways in which bodies respond to the toxic environments produced by information technologies. We next consider the newer design approaches to library and information research, specifically asking how design perspectives on digital information objects get inscribed in the Anthropocene. Lastly, we consider paradigms of repair and making and analyze the different valences through which information researchers and professionals categorize and contextualize what is possible with them. This compilation does not provide a comprehensive review of the literature on the environment within the information fields. Instead, it extends this literature to promote experimental research and practice. The modules construct an interdisciplinary and provisional path through the related literature in a form that we hope may be continually adjusted, rearranged, and augmented. Pre-print first published online 03/15/202

The Stranger and the Periphery

Within my work, I have been interested in exploring, through detailed observation of, and collecting artifacts from, my surroundings, the effect that place and memory have on humans and their environment. I explore the various invisible stories impacted by specific places and events, and those things that exist but do not show themselves directly. Recently, using ‘placeness’—which gets its meaning from recognition and experience—as a foundation, my interest has moved towards people and places separated from their pasts due to migration and movement, disconnection and destruction, and thus that do not have this sense of ‘placeness’. While on my doctoral programme, I went beyond simply composing my work from photographs I had taken myself, to researching and collecting a variety of materials. This was my own way of reaching times and places unreachable to me, However, having worked with the medium of photography, I came to realise the limits and difficulties of working outside the current time and beyond places I could approach directly. I believe that my work is one way of telling a story, and is also a process of training myself to communicate with and learn about the world. I am interested in the concerns of contemporary society, as well as the connections I hold with the world, continually questioning what meaning my work has in the present, and what meaning it will come to hold as time passes. Within this process, the present report provided me the opportunity to theorise around the fundamental ‘anxiety’ I felt as a stranger living in a foreign country and to examine my experience from an objective point of view. I searched out information on theories surrounding all types of societal outsiders and marginal men, as well as boundary areas; I was able to reflect on their definitions, and understand that the anxiety I felt was not peculiar to me. The emotional anxiety of the foreigner, and the personal thoughts I could not express, and to which nobody would listen, went beyond a language-based problem to the structural level. The sociological theories and humanities-based definitions I researched for my Doctoral report gave me a more comprehensive understanding of these emotions

Mary Coble: Performance Art and Poltics of an Archive

This dissertation explores the relationships among performance art, the archive and intersubjectivity. Using methods of critical ethnography, visual and textual analysis, I examine the archive of performance art, and the discourses of the body, especially in the work of performance artist Mary Coble. I explore the ways in which performance art disrupts the ideological discourses of the institutional archive, especially those surrounding the body and constructing normative sexual and civic identities. The institutional archive has served as a guardian of memory that makes it the creator of knowledge. Performance artists work within the conceptual space of an archive as a way to make visible the ideological systems of power; this they do through reenactments and re-presentations, in effect creating a counter-archive of political and gendered memorial spaces. I question how performance artists, critiquing the visual hegemony of the white, male dominated art world, confront issues of identity and difference, including ones of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship. I am interested in how "knowledge" is situated in the embodied experiences of the performer, researcher, artist, community and its participants. In this sense the archive is not simply a site of documentation and knowledge retrieval, but also as a locus of the feelings and emotions that produce knowledge and meaning

Archival Vagabonds: 20th-Century American Fiction and the Archive in Novelistic Practice

My research explores the interplay between the archival and aesthetic sensibilities of novelists not typically associated with archival practices--Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac. In juxtaposing their dual roles as public novelists and private archivists, I expose how their literary practices echo with core concepts in archival theory and position the novel as an alternative and superior site of historical preservation. Drawing on my experience as an archivist, I argue that the twentieth-century American novel's concern with inclusivity, preservation and posterity parallels archival science's changing approach to ephemera, arrangement, and diversity. The role of the archive in my work is both methodological and thematic: first, my own research incorporates these authors' cache of research materials, correspondence, drafts, diaries, and aborted or unpublished pieces, obtained during my visits to their various repositories. Second, I extricate the role of the archival in their fictions, and trace how their research, documentation, and classification practices inform their experiments with the novel form. I propose that all these vagabond masters of novelistic craft throw into relief the archive's positivist fallibility while also stressing its creative mutability

University for the Creative Arts staff research 2011

This publication brings together a selection of the University’s current research. The contributions foreground areas of research strength including still and moving image research, applied arts and crafts, as well as emerging fields of investigations such as design and architecture. It also maps thematic concerns across disciplinary areas that focus on models and processes of creative practice, value formations and processes of identification through art and artefacts as well as cross-cultural connectivity. Dr. Seymour Roworth-Stoke

The People Inside

Our collection begins with an example of computer vision that cuts through time and bureaucratic opacity to help us meet real people from the past. Buried in thousands of files in the National Archives of Australia is evidence of the exclusionary “White Australia” policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were intended to limit and discourage immigration by non-Europeans. Tim Sherratt and Kate Bagnall decided to see what would happen if they used a form of face-detection software made ubiquitous by modern surveillance systems and applied it to a security system of a century ago. What we get is a new way to see the government documents, not as a source of statistics but, Sherratt and Bagnall argue, as powerful evidence of the people affected by racism

Keepers of the Port: Visualising Place and Identity in a Dublin Dock Community

This practice-based thesis responds to the absence of documentary film or photographic studies and scholarship that embrace the contrasting experiences of different dock working constituencies in the transforming early twenty-first century space of Dublin Port. It is a filmic investigation into how the experiences and memories of this community of workers in Dublin’s surviving port space shape their urban identity and sense of place, undertaken with regard to the sensuous, haptic qualities of documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. In the ever-shifting world of neoliberalism, its narratives – in relation to labour practices – prioritise faceless markets over the humanity of working life. Therefore, in an attempt to interrogate the lived experiences and memories of working life and how these are central to the shaping of identity, the research is framed within the context of contrasting constituencies within the port community – dockers, crane drivers, stevedores, marine operatives and port managers

Place Name Restoration in Haudenosaunee Territory: Frameworks for Language and Landscape

In place name restoration, especially in indigenous territory, layers of place and language are actively complex; as place names survive, evolve, and resist forces of colonialist erasure, violence, and distortion, elements of place name restoration become critically obscured. By engaging with existing literatures and contextual knowledges, it is possible to understand place name restoration as a reparative act. This thesis explores place name restoration within the Haudenosaunee territory of upstate New York and the surrounding landscape; the thesis works to explore the terrain of place restoration in this territory, and to understand the positioning of researcher within this terrain. This work argues for the importance of holistic and reflexive place name restoration: to resist forces of settler colonialist suppression, and to [re]imagine place. This research proposes an innovative theoretical framework that clarifies elements of place name restoration and charts their possible relationships, for geolinguistic projects on large and continuing scales