I’ve gone and done something I always wanted to do: write an ethnography of a conference; to be precise, one of the 2016 ICA conference in Fukuoka, Japan. Now, straight away, the proviso I’d make is that I’ve written one that is quite short and modest (UPDATE: and certainly it doesn’t merit the title of … Continue Reading
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Reviews
Geography’s digital turn?
Prompted by receiving – completely unsolicited I’d add – this month’s GIM International (the ‘global magazine for geomatics’), I thought I better get in a thought I had in the wake of this year’s Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Los Angeles; an event for which the sun has definitely set, and soon … Continue Reading
Stuart Hall film: The Unfinished Conversation
I must have been completely sleeping on this, but a film has been made about Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British media and cultural theorist, a key figure in the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, and later, a Professor of Sociology at The Open University (I remember fondly, from my short time there, working in a … Continue Reading
Without irony, city ranking magazine Monocle tells us how media makes a city
London-based travel and lifestyle magazine Monocle has published its annual ranking of what it describes as the top 25 liveable cities around the world. Coming out on top this year is Zurich, and no doubt happy to edge into the 25th spot of this top-flight group is its French Swiss cousin Geneva. If we regionally … Continue Reading
Manovich: visualization, pattern and the objects of the humanities
If the strongest point of the N. Katherine Hayles’ seminar was her superb framing of the theoretical issues, the strongest aspect of Lev Manovich’s talk was that it seemed to gain more and more momentum as time went on. Which is to also say, Manovich got into the swing of things a tad more slowly. … Continue Reading
Hayles: technogenesis, distributed cognition and hyperattention
I thoroughly enjoyed N. Katherine Hayles’ seminar earlier this afternoon at London Southbank University, as part of a double bill with Lev Manovich. Hayles’ talk was rich, and certainly full of more insights than I can recount here. But a couple of basic and I think very interesting ideas were at the core of the … Continue Reading
Remembering Roger Silverstone
Academic events come and go, and are sometimes quite unremarkable occasions; at their worst, there can be an underlying feeling of ‘going through the motions’. Attending ‘The Work of Roger Silverstone’ at the University of Sussex yesterday, I felt very far from one of those mundane academic gatherings. This was Silverstone encapsulated in a very … Continue Reading