Where we care (new essay in Mediapolis)

Over at Mediapolis Journal, I have published a new essay on what I think might some emergent interdependences between platforms (specifically social media) and local care during the COVID-19 pandemic. One possible reaction to this news might be, “Not another take on Covid!” As the below passage I’ve excepted from the essay indicates, I’m well … Continue Reading

City Maps: Ben Fraser on ‘Urban cultural studies: getting oriented, getting published’

Workshop 5 was the concluding workshop of the CHASE City Maps series, and was led by Ben Fraser (University of Arizona). It had two aims. On the one hand, it offered reflections on the emerging field of Urban Cultural Studies and its interdisciplinary approach, bridging the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences. On the … Continue Reading

City Maps: Shannon Mattern and Rebecca Ross on ‘Mapping urban media infrastructures’

In Workshop 4 of the CHASE City Maps series, Shannon Mattern (The New School) and Rebecca Ross (Central Saint Martins) examined methods for exploring, excavating, observing, testing, and notating urban media infrastructures, broadly defined. Participants developed a shared infrastructural question and cartographic strategy, before heading out to Bloomsbury’s Russell Square and environs to make observations. … Continue Reading

City Maps: Clancy Wilmott on ‘Urban spaces and scalar traces’

In Workshop 3 of the CHASE City Maps series, Clancy Wilmott from the University of Manchester (now at University of California Berkeley) began with an outline of her own work on mobile mapping, and the emerging relationships between space, cartography and digital technologies. These themes were connected with the research projects of workshop participants, who … Continue Reading

City Maps: Iain Borden on ‘The transdisciplinarity of urban experience’

In Workshop 1 of the CHASE City Maps series, Iain Borden from University College London focused on ‘experience’ as a transdisciplinary urban concept. As depicted in the film from the workshop, his introduction to the concept of experience was both via his own work – on topics ranging from skateboarding to automobile driving – as … Continue Reading

Data Materiality Episode 1: Vicki Mayer on Data Centres, Media Aura and Jobs

At very long last, the first episode of Data Materiality is out. Data Materiality is a podcast series I co-host with Joel McKim, and is related to our three-year research project running under the same name, co-sponsored by Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture and the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology. … Continue Reading

CFP AAG 2020: Building Platform Urbanism

Susan Moore and I have begun advertising a CFP for the 2020 AAG conference in Denver, USA. The paper session we are proposing focuses on the theme of ‘Building Platform Urbanism’: the ways in which digital platform companies, or agents anticipating their interests, are increasingly involved in designing and constructing particular built forms and new … Continue Reading