495 research outputs found
The discomforting rise of ' public geographies': a 'public' conversation.
In this innovative and provocative intervention, the authors explore the burgeoning ‘public turn’ visible across the social sciences to espouse the need to radically challenge and reshape dominant and orthodox visions of ‘the academy’, academic life, and the role and purpose of the academic
The Image of the City Out of the Underlying Scaling of City Artifacts or Locations
Two fundamental issues surrounding research on the image of the city
respectively focus on the city's external and internal representations. The
external representation in the context of this paper refers to the city itself,
external to human minds, while the internal representation concerns how the
city is represented in human minds internally. This paper deals with the first
issue, i.e., what trait the city has that make it imageable? We develop an
argument that the image of the city arises from the underlying scaling of city
artifacts or locations. This scaling refers to the fact that, in an imageable
city (a city that can easily be imaged in human minds), small city artifacts
are far more common than large ones; or alternatively low dense locations are
far more common than high dense locations. The sizes of city artifacts in a
rank-size plot exhibit a heavy tailed distribution consisting of the head,
which is composed of a minority of unique artifacts (vital and very important),
and the tail, which is composed of redundant other artifacts (trivial and less
important). Eventually, those extremely unique and vital artifacts in the top
head, i.e., what Lynch called city elements, make up the image of the city. We
argue that the ever-increasing amount of geographic information on cities, in
particular obtained from social media such as Flickr and Twitter, can turn
research on the image of the city, or cognitive mapping in general, into a
quantitative manner. The scaling property might be formulated as a law of
geography.
Keywords: Scaling of geographic space, face of the city, cognitive maps,
power law, and heavy tailed distributions.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, 2 table
Disability activism and the politics of scale
In this paper, we examine the role of spatial scale in
mediating and shaping political struggles between
disabled people and the state. Specifically, we draw
on recent theoretical developments concerning the
social construction of spatial scale to interpret two
case studies of disability activism within Canada and
Ireland. In particular, we provide an analysis of how
successful the disability movement in each locale has
been at 'jumping scale' and enacting change, as well
as examining what the consequences of such
scaling-up have been for the movement itself. We
demonstrate that the political structures operating
in each country markedly affect the scaled nature of
disability issues and the effectiveness of political
mobilization at different scales
‘Media events’ reconsidered: from ritual theory to simulation and performativity
This paper re-examines the long-established notion of ‘media events’ by contrasting and critically appraising three distinct approaches to the question of media events. These are: ritual theory associated with Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, secondly, Jean Baudrillard’s approach rooted in his notions of simulation and ‘non-events’ and, finally, the more recent performative approaches to media and mediation. I take Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska’s reading of media events presented in Life After New Media (2012) as exemplary of the performative approach. An argument is made that the accounts of media events offered by performative approaches add very little, and, indeed, lack the critical insightfulness of the earlier approaches. Both ritual theory and Baudrillard’s thought are briefly reappraised and, against Nick Couldry, I try to show that these accounts are not characterised by binary and reductive thinking. The major misunderstandings concern the nature of the sacred and profane dualism and the further dualisms developed in Baudrillard’s thought, particularly the figures of implosion and reversibility. Finally, Baudrillard’s position on technology is addressed and the paper concludes with the suggestion that his account is not solely negative, since technological developments are not only at the mercy of ironic reversals they may also enable new rituals of disappearance
Digital education governance:Data visualization, predictive analytics, and ‘real-time’ policy instruments
Educational institutions and governing practices are increasingly augmented with digital database technologies that function as new kinds of policy instruments. This article surveys and maps the landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education and provides two detailed case studies of new digital data systems. The Learning Curve is a massive online data bank, produced by Pearson Education, which deploys highly sophisticated digital interactive data visualizations to construct knowledge about education systems. The second case considers ‘learning analytics’ platforms that enable the tracking and predicting of students’ performances through their digital data traces. These digital policy instruments are evidence of how digital database instruments and infrastructures are now at the centre of efforts to know, govern and manage education both nationally and globally. The governing of education, augmented by techniques of digital education governance, is being distributed and displaced to new digitized ‘centres of calculation’, such as Pearson and Knewton, with the technical expertise to calculate and visualize the data, plus the predictive analytics capacities to anticipate and pre-empt educational futures. As part of a data-driven style of governing, these emerging digital policy instruments prefigure the emergence of ‘real-time’ and ‘future-tense’ techniques of digital education governance
Securing the Anthropocene? International Policy Experiments in Digital Hacktivism: A Case Study of Jakarta
This article analyses security discourses that are beginning to self-consciously take on board the shift towards the Anthropocene. Firstly, it sets out the developing episteme of the Anthropocene, highlighting the limits of instrumentalist cause-and-effect approaches to security, increasingly becoming displaced by discursive framings of securing as a process, generated through new forms of mediation and agency, capable of grasping inter-relations in a fluid context. This approach is the methodology of hacking: creatively composing and repurposing already existing forms of agency. It elaborates on hacking as a set of experimental practices and imaginaries of securing the Anthropocene, using as a case study the field of digital policy activism with the focus on community empowerment through social-technical assemblages being developed and applied in ‘the City of the Anthropocene’: Jakarta, Indonesia. The article concludes that policy interventions today cannot readily be grasped in modernist frameworks of ‘problem solving’ but should be seen more in terms of evolving and adaptive ‘life hacks’
Temporary techno-social gatherings? A (hacked) discussion about open practices
This paper is rooted in an experimental inquiry of issue-oriented temporary techno-social gatherings or TTGs, which are typically referred to as hackathons, workshops or pop-ups and employ rapid design and development practices to tackle technical challenges while engaging with social issues. Based on a collaboration between three digital practitioners (a producer, a researcher and a designer), qualitative and creative data was gathered across five different kinds of TTG events in London and in Tartu which were held in partnership with large institutions, including Art:Work at Tate Exchange within Tate Modern, the Mozilla Festival at Ravensbourne College and the 2017 Association of Internet Researchers conference hosted in Tartu. By analysing data using an open and discursive approach manifested in both text and visual formats, we reflect on the dynamic and generative characteristics of TTG gatherings while also arriving at our own conclusions as situated researchers and practitioners who are ourselves engaged in increasingly messy webs where new worlds of theory and practice are built
Lit up and left dark: Failures of imagination in urban broadband networks
The design and deployment of urban broadband infrastructures inscribe particular imaginations of Internet access onto city streets. The different manifestations and locations of these networks, their uses, and access points often expose material excesses of urban broadband networks, as well as failures of Internet service providers, urban planners, and public officials to imagine the diverse ways that people incorporate Internet connection into their everyday lives. We approach the study of urban broadband networks through the juxtaposition of invisible networks that are buried under the streets and have always been “turned off” (dark fiber) versus hypervisible that are “turned on” and prominently displayed on city streets (LinkNYC). In our analysis of these two case studies, we critique themes of visibility and invisibility as indexes of power and access. Our findings are meant to provide a critical analysis of urban technology policy as well as theories of infrastructure, visibility, and access
Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City
This paper provides an introduction to the smart city and engages with its idea and ideals
from a critical social science perspective. After setting out in brief the emergence of smart
cities and current key debates, we note a number of practical, political and normative
questions relating to citizenship, justice, and the public good that warrant examination. The
remainder of the paper provides an initial framing for engaging with these questions. The first
section details the dominant neoliberal conception and enactment of smart cities and how this
works to promote the interests of capital and state power and reshape governmentality. We
then detail some of the ethical issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives.
Having set out some of the more troubling aspects of how social relations are produced
within smart cities, we then examine how citizens and citizenship have been conceived and
operationalised in the smart city to date. We then follow this with a discussion of social
justice and the smart city. In the final section, we explore the notion of the ‘right to the smart
city’ and how this might be used to recast the smart city in emancipatory and empowering
ways
Feminist geographies of digital work
Feminist thought challenges essentialist and normative categorizations of ‘work’. Therefore, feminism provides a critical lens on ‘working space’ as a theoretical and empirical focus for digital geographies. Digital technologies extend and intensify working activity, rendering the boundaries of the workplace emergent. Such emergence heightens the ambivalence of working experience: the possibilities for affirmation and/or negation through work. A digital geography is put forward through feminist theorizations of the ambivalence of intimacy. The emergent properties of working with digital technologies create space through the intimacies of postwork places where bodies and machines feel the possibilities of being ‘at’ work
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