My research focuses on the politics of place in a mediated world. Disciplinarily, I sit somewhere between media studies and human geography, but my interests also connect me with debates across urban studies, cultural theory, sociology, science and technology studies, political theory and philosophy.

I am currently focusing on the apparent convergence between digital platforms, data and the making of contemporary urbanism and locality. Some recent projects in these areas include: an exploration the relationships of social media, political participation and urban planning in East London; a study of the place-named Facebook Groups across Greater London; research on the local data cultures of urban housing policy and sustainability; a small project looking at the interconnections of location-based technologies, hyperlocal media and philanthropic localism in Britain; and an early-stage project considering the blended tech/heritage aesthetics of London’s King’s Cross redevelopment.

You can read more about my publications and research projects.

My previous research focused on the relationships of journalism and the city. That work centred on how journalism – in its places, spaces and circulations – is both of and oriented to the city. For the most part, my work on what I called ‘journalistic urbanity’ drew on an ethnographic, archival and multi-source study of the Toronto Star, from which I never quite realised a long-promised book. But I may yet have one or two things to say about the genealogies, infrastructures, architectures and lived spaces of journalism in and through the city.

Another way to describe my work is to list what can only be described as recurring fixations. The first of these is an interest in the specificity of ‘the urban’, and especially how media practices and technologies might be seen as basic conditions of possibility for an urban politics or urban public culture. Secondly, as a geographer by training, I’m interested in critical dialogues between spatial thinking and media theory. Finally, I tend to think about most of my research as studying the relationships between social practices and material or technological environments. In this respect, I have engaged (and disengaged) with theoretical and methodological areas such as practice theory, ethnomethodology, actor-network theory, phenomenology, object-oriented ontology, new materialist media theories, digital ethnography and mixed (‘quali-quant’) social media research methods.

I am Audio Editor for Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, an experiment in ‘small-gauge’ online scholarship, and am Chair of the ECREA Media, Cities and Space Section. I also helped to co-found and lead the BISR Urban Intersections Working Group, I sit on the Steering Committee for the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology, and am a founding member of Birkbeck’s Media and Democracy Working Group.