Encounters on the social web: Everyday life and emotions online

Encounters also happen online nowadays and, yes, they are still difficult to describe, even though it is sometimes easier to observe them-and obtain data about them- than in the past. The internet is crucially 'shaping the interactions people have with one another' (Johns 2010: 499). With the recent explosion and popularity of Web 2.0 services and the social web, such as Facebook (FB), Twitter, and various other types of social media, internet users now have at their disposal an unprecedented collection of tools to interact with others. These modes of online sociability allow users to pursue social encounters with variable levels of involvement, attention, and activity (Papacharissi and Mendelson 2010). For many of us it is now difficult to imagine our social relationships without access to the internet. The social web plays an important role in relationships among internet users (Boyd 2006), with the expression, management and experience of emotions being key to the maintenance of these relationships

Living with difference in hyper-diverse areas: how important are encounters in semi-public spaces?

Urban populations increasingly diversify in their socio-economic, cultural, religious and linguistic profiles as well as in their lifestyles, attitudes and activity patterns. This hyper-diversification can complicate feelings of belonging and community. Since diversity is negotiated at the neighbourhood level, micro spaces are central in building communities. Micro spaces tend to be semi-public and stimulate diverse groups to intermingle, which results in on–off as well as repetitive and structural interactions. Understanding the creation and impact of encounters is central to capturing contemporary notions of belonging and living with difference. This paper compares encounters experienced in two semi-public spaces in the hyper-diverse neighbourhood of Feyenoord in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Although encounters at the library were lighter and shorter than at the community-centre, all positively impact collective life in the neighbourhood. At the community-centre, encounters result in light as well as deeper relationships, making visitors feel more at ‘home’ because they recognize others elsewhere in the neighbourhood. At the library, encounters are lighter but visitors become familiar with diversity, making them feel more at ‘home’ and safe in their neighbourhood as well. The study suggests that fleeting encounters require more serious attention within the context of negotiating diversity

Visualising Migrant Voices: Co-Creative Documentary and the Politics of Listening

This ethnography of media production explores the challenges of literally and figuratively visualising voice. The labour of a shared production and the distribution of the audio-visual documentary essays unfolded within a field of diverse, and at times, conflicting interests. For this reason, judicious attention to what I name ‘encounters’ of ‘political listening’ (Bickford 1996; Dreher 2009) provides one framework for theorising the challenges of researching with marginalised subjects and stories, and the contradictions of developing shared practices within proprietary contexts. These encounters reveal moments of listening and being heard, struggles over ‘veracity’ and ‘evidence,’ and the power relations inherent in the production of media about lives that are most often rendered invisible and inaudible. The research aimed to develop an exploratory and critical practice of inquiry that not only responded to the ethical complexities of research with refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants, but also created opportunities for research subjects to interpret, analyse and document their experiences as newcomers to Ireland. Within this community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991; Wenger 1999), participants produced their own media to explore and document their lives as workers, parents, ‘cultural citizens’ (Coll 2010; El Haj 2009; Rosaldo 1994), and artists simultaneously adapting to and transforming a new environment. By centring participants from diasporic communities as the primary authors and co-producers of their audio-visual narratives, the research sought to extend and deepen the public discourse of migration in Ireland. Through the process, research participants–seven women and six men from African, Asian, Eastern European and Middle Eastern nations–interrogated their daily circumstances negotiating migration policy, and revealed the structural violence of asylum and migrant labour regimes. To develop a ‘shared’ anthropological practice (Pink 2011; Rouch 1974; Rouch & Taylor in Feld 2003; Stoller 1992), the research design introduced an inquiry-based and longitudinal approach to the participatory media genre known as ‘digital storytelling’ (Lambert 2013). Digital storytelling as a research methodology is a relatively new endeavour (Alexandra 2008; Burgess 2006; Brushwood Rose 2009; Gubrium 2009; Gubrium & Turner 2010; Hartley & McWilliams 2009; Hull & Katz 2006; Lundby 2008; Meadows 2003). Due to the research design’s significant adaptations to the standard Center for Digital Storytelling model, ‘co-creative’ (Spurgeon et al. 2009) documentary practice is employed as a term that more accurately describes the labour at hand. The collaboration generated over 250 images and resulted in two series of broadcast-quality, audio-visual stories–Undocumented in Ireland: Our Stories and Living in Direct Provision: 9 Stories. Both series have screened before diverse audiences, at public forums on asylum policy and migrant rights, the Irish Film Institute (IFI), the Guth Gafa International Documentary Film Festival, and at scholarly conferences throughout Europe and the Americas. Eleven of the fourteen digital stories are currently available for viewing on-line. While research findings indicate the method facilitated dynamic opportunities for engaged inquiry into asylum and migrant labour regimes, recognition of storytellers and stories, and sustained encounters of “narrative exchange” (Couldry 2010), the practice raises complex questions about the politics of listening and being heard.

Researching coethnic migrants: privileges and puzzles of "insiderness"

This article reflects on fieldwork experiences with coethnic migrants in London to challenge understandings of insiderness centred in shared ethnicity, as well as the usefulness of the insider-outsider divide in migration research more generally. Drawing on examples from a study of migrants' social relations, it shows how gender, migrant status, and occupational position sometimes shape research encounters in more important ways than shared ethnicity. Furthermore, whilst shared ethnicity is undoubtedly useful in certain respects, participants' ethnicised discourses and practices may also generate feelings of distance in the coethnic researcher. Whilst supporting the "ethnic bias" critique to migration studies (GLICK SCHILLER, ÇAĞLAR & GULDBRANDSEN, 2006), the analysis thus highlights how both ethnic and non-ethnic factors alternate or interact to create perceptions of insiderness or outsiderness in specific research contexts

QYMSYM: A GPU-Accelerated Hybrid Symplectic Integrator That Permits Close Encounters

We describe a parallel hybrid symplectic integrator for planetary system integration that runs on a graphics processing unit (GPU). The integrator identifies close approaches between particles and switches from symplectic to Hermite algorithms for particles that require higher resolution integrations. The integrator is approximately as accurate as other hybrid symplectic integrators but is GPU accelerated.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure

VR/Urban: spread.gun - design process and challenges in developing a shared encounter for media façades

Designing novel interaction concepts for urban environments is not only a technical challenge in terms of scale, safety, portability and deployment, but also a challenge of designing for social configurations and spatial settings. To outline what it takes to create a consistent and interactive experience in urban space, we describe the concept and multidisciplinary design process of VR/Urban's media intervention tool called Spread.gun, which was created for the Media Façade Festival 2008 in Berlin. Main design aims were the anticipation of urban space, situational system configuration and embodied interaction. This case study also reflects on the specific technical, organizational and infrastructural challenges encountered when developing media façade installations

Cultivating Perception: Phenomenological Encounters with Artworks

Phenomenally strong artworks have the potential to anchor us in reality and to cultivate our perception. For the most part, we barely notice the world around us, as we are too often elsewhere, texting, coordinating schedules, planning ahead, navigating what needs to be done. This is the level of our age that shapes the ways we encounter things and others. In such a world it is no wonder we no longer trust our senses. But as feminists have long argued, thinking grounded in embodied experience can be more open to difference; such embodied thinking helps us to resist the colonization of a singular, only seemingly neutral, perspective that closes down living potentialities

Clinical encounter and the logic of relationality : Reconfiguring bodies and subjectivities in clinical relations

Acknowledgements I would like to thank all the patients and staff for their collaboration in the study and to acknowledge the other members of the team: James N’Dow and Sara MacLennan for their helpful guidance. I am grateful to Zoë Skea and Vikki Entwistle for the early discussions of the paper, to Natasha Mauthner and Lorna McKee for their insightful comments to various drafts, and to two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions, which helped to clarify its argument. Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from the Big Lottery Fund. The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding bodies or any other organisation.Peer reviewedPostprin

Discarded: Exploring material stories and movements through participatory, public art interventions

Drawing on DeCerteau’s (1984) philosophy of tactics, which subvert dominant ways of being through creative appropriations of space and behavior, and New Materialist philosophies that offer vitality and agency to non-human objects (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2004; 2010), this paper explores a three-part series of participatory, public art interventions related to waste, consumption and material relationships. The three installations were distinct but connected, situated in public spaces and corridors as a means of disrupting daily moments while encouraging moments of pause to be with discarded, material objects in playful and creative ways (de Certeau, 1984; Debord, 1956). With these installations we challenged hierarchical perceptions of object matter by encouraging care and attentiveness to these discarded objects through imaginative story-building. This attentiveness to discard objects further invited compassionate ways of being with this matter that may extend to other forms of life matter, in pursuit of more sustainable and socially just practices of being (and becoming). Through a combination of photographs, participant accounts, and materials created during the installations, this article explores the stories of these events and the ways in which such work may open space for arts-based pedagogical encounters (O’Sullivan, 2006)

Imagining biosocial communities: HIV, risk and gay and bisexual men in the North East of England

Many critics have charted an increasing biomedical and individualised approach to HIV prevention among gay and bisexual men, citing a significant shift in HIV policy and practice away from the community-based approaches to HIV prevention which characterised early responses. However, this dichotomous approach to ‘the biomedical or the social’ fails to capture the complex ways in which community-based approaches and sexual practice are already inextricably linked with the biomedical. This article explores how biomedical constructions of risk are embedded in the community-based bodily management and sexual practice of gay and bisexual men in the North East of England. Drawing on Paul Rabinow’s concept of ‘biosociality’, the article proposes the notion of an imagined biosocial community: a community of gay and bisexual men who are affected by and at risk of HIV. Through this lens, the article explores how biomedical and sexual negotiations are situated in a broader history of illness, sexual politics and community. The article considers the importance of the biomedical in managing the body and the on-going significance of memory, community formation and identity in relation to ‘AIDS’. It then explores how the interplay of these elements is deployed or threatened within these imagined community norms of sexual practice, where responsibility to others is critical. In paying attention to an imagined biosocial community, this article demonstrates how perceptions of and adherence to imagined community sexual practice remain critical in addressing risk of HIV in an increasingly biomedicalised context