About

Publicly Sited is a repository of various observations on media, politics and cities … though not always all three within a single thought.

The blog name is somewhat accidental – it wasn’t even my idea. It was suggested to me and just sounded right: it expresses in a catchy way that publicness is always sited; or to put it more verbosely, that people and things relate to a public world through the intersection of practices, settings and technologies. Posts here will occasionally be longish and reasonably well thought through. More often, however, they will be short, perhaps based around a photo or short comment. I think copybot is right that that there is often little more value to add than simply pointing to something interesting. But I’ll spare readers infinitesimally small posts, or otherwise relegate them to twitter (see/follow rodgers_scott on twitter – recent tweets are in the right column).

About me: I’m a Canadian expat who has lived most of my life in the Toronto area, yet I’ve spent much of my academic career (the past decade or so) living in England and Wales. I joined Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London in January 2010 as Lecturer in Media Theory. Prior to this, I was at The Open University, first as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography, and then as a Research Associate in the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG). My PhD was completed in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. I also hold an MSc in Cities, Space and Society from the London School of Economics, and a first degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Ryerson University.

I am a research member of Birkbeck’s Centre for Media, Culture and Creative Practice. I also maintain my connections with The Open University through affiliate membership in both the OpenSpace Research Centre and the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance.

Outside of academia proper, I enjoy long walks (cities and countryside alike), travel, photography, dabbling in DJing and electronic/sample-based music, and carrying on babbling intellectual conversations with my baby boy.