Spaces of visibility in the smart city: flagship urban spaces and the smart urban imaginary

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.Smart urbanism is a currently popular and widespread way of conceptualising the future city. At the same time, the smart city is critiqued by several scholars as difficult to define, and as being almost invisible to the naked eye. The paper explores two urban spaces through which the smart city is rendered visible, in two UK cities that are prominent sites for smart urban experimentation and development. Bristol’s Data Dome, and Glasgow’s Operations Centre are analysed in light of their iconic nature. The paper develops a conceptual understanding of these flagship spaces of the actually existing smart cities through three interrelated conceptual lenses. Firstly, they are understood as a videological type of Leibniz’s concept of the windowless monad. Secondly, they are conceptualised as examples of banal and serialised architecture. Thirdly, these spaces and their attendant buildings are understood as totemic assemblages that point to newly emergent forms of elite urban power.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/L015978/2), ‘Smart eco-cities for a green economy: a comparative study of Europe and China (SMART-ECO).

The snowflake effect: the future of mashups and learning

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring web mashups and their potential for educatio

Reconsidering Polar Literature in the Anthropocene:Hope in the Works of Jean McNeil and Barry Lopez

This article examines the capacities of polar literature within an interwoven framework to think through climate crisis and human involvement therein in the midst of the Anthropocene. Ice Diaries (2016) and Arctic Dreams (1986) provide the opportunity to reconsider Earth’s cryosphere in literary form as mediated places that participate in the global network of the planetary imaginary (Clarke). Examining polar literature through a reparative lens (Sedgwick) enables the tutelary aspects of both landscapes to emerge as they provide strategies for investigating present and future trouble (Haraway). Employing theories from Earth System Science and spatial studies, this paper locates the potential for hope in remote regions that are nonetheless embedded within global realities—climatic and political—through the sharing of stories that encourage life to flourish even in what appear to be the harshest of circumstances

Inner sound: Contemporary abstract photography in the wet-plate collodion process

My work is Neo-Romantic in nature. This description implies a rejection of all that is tedious, mundane, and ugly in the modern world, in favor of looking to history, nostalgia, and mystery for inspiration. I intend for the work to be dreamlike and evocative of fantasy, to be poetic rather than prosaic, and to be beautiful rather than purposeful. To this end, I am investigating abstraction in photography through the use of the wet-plate collodion process. The work is intended to reference spirituality and the subconscious, through the use of the abstraction of nature and natural forms, using the inherent aesthetics of the collodion process to convey introspective meditation and Surrealist automatism. Certain aspects of the work, namely the use of nature as metaphor for the psyche and a penchant for gothic aesthetics, have conceptual parallels in 19th century Dark Romanticism and the contemporary Dark Mountain Movement. These references will be discussed and related to the body of work presented here. The work takes the final form of large-scale, colorful abstractions, which evokes a reference to Kandinsky and his investigation into the spiritual in art through the abstracted form. Although Kandinsky is referenced for his authorship of this idea, I supplement this reference with my own views on the creation and perception of art, and the necessity for the spiritual in art in the contemporary environment. Art is a form of transcendent experience in the face of the ordinariness and hostility of the everyday world. This idea resonates greatly with me, as I have always believed this to be the primary purpose of art

Supernatural Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

Reality is always richer than anything one can dream ( Entrevista con Isabel Allende ). The supernatural is the realm beyond nature as it is ordinarily understood. Supernatural experiences often are described as miraculous, metaphysical, paranormal, mystical, transcendental, divine, and unusual. The Greek adjective, mystikos, refers to something that is secret or hidden. The English adjective, mystical, which is derived from the Greek, has been used to describe anything that is mysterious, mystifying, confusing, or occult. Furthermore, supernatural experiences of many kinds have traditionally been explained as the actions of gods, spirits, and demons from this realm (George 271). Certainly, the visible world is but a small part of the true world, and that one does not need to understand in order to believe

Land Of Hope: Charting Development and Children's Lives in Uganda through Education

Abstract Unavailabl

Open utopia : a horizon for left unity

Sectarianism is a consistent hallmark of the Left. In particular, many debates revolve around the question of how to make a successful revolution. This essay seeks to build a stronger, more united idea of the Left by engaging the concepts of revolution and utopia. I have categorised two prominent and seemingly dualistic perspectives within the Left, ones which are also revolutionary. I label these the “strategic” and “prefigurative” camps. Both camps have harboured conceptions of utopia which have served as roadmaps for their respective theories on revolutionary transition, and by charting these conceptual developments in utopian thinking I offer a different roadmap which leads to an open utopia. Open utopia offers the possibility of a methodological synthesis which can bridge the strategic and prefigurative pulses of the Left, where the hard analysis and focus on end goals emphasised by strategic proponents is woven together with the importance of process and alternative institutions (recognized as vital by prefigurative proponents). I name this methodology the radical imagination, and by employing this methodological frame onto Leftist social movement activity I conclude that we can bridge a fractious Left by embracing a revolutionary project aimed at an open utopia.peer-reviewe

Emma’s navel: Dorothea Tanning’s narrative sculpture

In her critical essay, ‘Some Parallels in Words and Pictures’ (1989), the American artist and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) noted a literary dimension to her enigmatic soft sculpture ‘Emma’ (1970). With explicit reference to Gustave Flaubert’s protagonist Madame Bovary (1857), Tanning, a voracious reader, fabricated her own Emma. I use ‘Emma’ to tug at the late surrealist/postminimalist crux in order to reposition Tanning in a more theoretical context. In particular, ‘Emma’ can be read through Mieke Bal’s intertextual notion of the “navel of the text” (2001). Tanning, in turn, can be said to embody Flaubert’s contradictory character as a form of “autotopographical” critique (Bal, 2002). This chapter, therefore, presents a methodological model for art historical and literary analysis, contributing to the growing body of research on underrepresented feminist-surrealist artists. The essay volume, edited by Patricia Allmer, was reviewed favourably by Dr Christine Conley in Racar 42 and mentions this chapter specifically: “Catriona McAra’s criss-cross reading of Dorothea Tanning’s soft sculpture Emma, 1970, with the literary character Emma Bovary positions the sculpture as an intermedial visual object that evokes, in its material specificity, the fetishization of the female character in Gustave Flaubert’s novel and the navel as (maternal) signifier. As an example of Mieke Bal’s “theoretical object” or an art “that thinks,” Tanning’s Emma disrupts modernist and surrealist codes of femininity and art making” (2017, 91)