Intra-acting with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, or; how the technosphere may come to matter

This paper contends that a robust concept of the technosphere – indeed one that is truly adequate to the Anthropocene – must be approached using a plurality of methods that do not categorize agencies or rely on hierarchical scalar analysis. In this commentary, we draw from feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad’s philosophy of agential realism, and in particular her concept of ‘intra-action’, to identify the technosphere as emergent from entangled practices, sites and infrastructures, and to trace the technosphere from the ‘meso’ scale to subatomic and cosmological realms of force and energy. We demonstrate the value of a critical, intra-active approach to technical assemblages by thinking the technosphere concept with and within a vast experimental apparatus: the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Making Market Rule(s)

This is the introductory essay for a special issue on the geographies of market construction and market regulation. It argues that in an age of markets, geographers ought to pay more attention to the seemingly mundane, but nevertheless socially constructed, rules that are necessary for any market to operate

Travelling and sticky affects: : Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian- Guattarian lens

In this paper we combine the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1987) with Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2004, 2009) work to follow the rhizomatic becomings of young people’s affective relations in a range of on- and off-line school spaces. In particular we explore how events that may be designated as sexual cyberbullying are constituted and how they are mediated by technology (such as texting or in/through social networking sites). Drawing on findings from two different studies looking at teens’ uses of and experiences with social networking sites, Arto in Denmark, and Bebo in the UK, we use this approach to think about how affects flow, are distributed, and become fixed in assemblages. We map how affects are manoeuvred and potentially disrupted by young people, suggesting that in the incidences discussed affects travel as well as stick in points of fixation. We argue that we need to grasp both affective flow and fixity in order to gain knowledge of how subjectification of the gendered/classed/racialised/sexualised body emerges. A Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian frame helps us to map some of these affective complexities that shape sexualized cyberbully events; and to recognize technologically mediated lines of flight when subjectifications are at least temporarily disrupted and new terms of recognition and intelligibility staked out. Keywords

Revisiting critical literacy in the digital age

In an age of environmental crisis, financial instability, widespread migration, and political extremism, the case for critical literacy is pressing. Navigating criticality in the digital age, however, is challenging, not least because digital media, digital devices, and digital architectures are implicated in broader social, cultural, commercial, and political activity. Critical literacy in this context needs to do more than focus on the significance of texts within networks of humans. The authors developed a model designed to support a relational approach to critical literacy, drawing on a sociomaterial perspective to consider how broader social‐material networks help generate meanings that may amplify, undermine, or contradict the activities of individuals and groups. The authors end with questions that provide a starting point for broadening the scope of critical literacy in education to reflect on relationships among people, texts, and materials across time and spaces

Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this paper we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and 'real' politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined

Ultra-infra: Becoming Skin

This demonstration showcases outcomes from a program of research that seeks to expand the practice of painting through the exploitation of new digital technologies. Through virtual reality and digital painting processes, this research interrogates the nature of materiality by considering the hidden realities of human skin. The demonstration is in the form of a VR-based artwork delivered on a Windows Mixed Reality headset

Inside the research-assemblage: new materialism and the micropolitics of social inquiry

This paper explores social inquiry in terms of the ‘research-assemblages’ that produce knowledge from events. We use the precepts of new materialism (and specifically DeleuzoGuattarian assemblage ontology) to develop understanding of what happens when social events are researched. From this perspective, research is not at root an enterprise undertaken by human actors, but a machine-like assemblage of things, people, ideas, social collectivities and institutions. During social inquiry, the affect economies of an event-assemblage and a research-assemblage hybridise, generating a third assemblage with its own affective flow. This model of the research-assemblage reveals a micropolitics of social research that suggests a means to interrogate and effectively reverse-engineer different social research methodologies and methods, to analyse what they do, how they work and their micropolitical effects. It also suggests a means to forward-engineer research methods and designs to manipulate the kinds of knowledge produced when events are researched

Pedagogies of critique : struggling with what and how to think

No abstract available