Exactly one month from today, I will be fortunate enough to give an invited paper to the GeoMedia Research Group at Karlstad University in Sweden, as part of their GeoMedia Speaker Series. Karlstad University is a quite special place for thinking and talking about the relationships of geography and media since, as far as I know, its Institutionen för Geografi, Medier och Kommunikation is one of the few academic departments which bring the two areas into such an explicit inter-disciplinary intersection.

The abstract for my paper is below.

Tentative techlocalities: four ethnographic excursions through the places and spaces of UK hyperlocal media

In 2012, UK charity Nesta announced Destination Local, a new funding programme that set out to “identify the technologies, business models, content opportunities and challenges for a successful hyperlocal media sector in the UK”. In the first round, 10 small, locally focused projects were funded, together embodying an avowed portfolio of experiments specifically tasked with making use of location-based mobile technologies, all running under the somewhat fashionable banner of ‘hyperlocal media’. This paper provides four modest ethnographic accounts relating to these projects, partly making use of a walking-whilst-talking method. I contend that conceptualizing hyperlocal media in the contemporary UK and elsewhere requires thinking about it not only as dependent on, and productive of, configurations of localised place, but at the same time as experienced as a relatively consistent and objectified space. Discussions and debates on contemporary media practices labeled as hyperlocal tend to quickly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, turn to a taken-for-granted notion of local place, where all the action appears to be transpiring. I argue that Nesta’s Destination Local programme is however less about getting specific local media outlets off the ground, and rather about anticipating, convening and animating a larger space of UK hyperlocal media that is technologically layered and geographically dispersed. In other words, as field space that includes not only localised publishers but researchers, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and technologists to whom such publishing – and its emergent technical ecosystem – is of shared concern. In so doing, I not only suggest a new way of thinking about the places and spaces of emergent ‘hyperlocal’ media production practices, but illuminate philanthropic programmes such as Destination Local as one apt lens into the apparent convergence between discourses of localism and the digitization of location.