News Archive

A new paper from Dr Nathaniel Tkacz:

Link to paper

“What’s on your mind?”

These words, subtly greyed out in an input box on the user interface. Inviting users to write over them, replace them, respond. Pitched somewhere between an inquiring friend and a therapist, such is the gentle nudge fuelling content generation on the Facebook platform. What’s on your mind? Consider it a general declaration of the cognitive orientation of contemporary media. An underwhelming apotheosis when contrasted with the World Brains, augmented intellects or man–machine symbioses of days past...

CIM Academics Noortje Marres and Michael Castelle are at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science  (4S) in New Orleans this week.

On September 5, Professor Marres will speak at the Conference's Opening Plenary on Innovations. The other speakers are Maria Belen Albornoz (FLASCO-Ecuador), Lesley Green (University of Cape Town), Shobita Parthasarathy (University of Michigan). In the words of 4S President Kim Fortun (UC Irvine), the Innovations Plenary addresses the following:

To innovate is to move beyond, out of line, skirting predictable directions and outcomes. This is far from straightforward -- imaginatively, analytically and logistically. To innovate means being outside usual frames, working counter-culturally, against intuition and usual method. In many settings, innovation is a matter of great urgency: lives and prosperity depend on it. All too easily, however, innovation serves and even exacerbates entrenched hierarchies of privilege, creating something new but sustaining old structures (of wealth, authority, and so on). Innovation is subject -- even prone -- to capture -- becoming a carrier rather than critique of capital and empire. Innovation can also become an empty ideal, cover for business as usual. Innovation is pursued and promised in industry, government, education and NGOS -- and in scholarly fields like STS. Scholars need and promise to innovate; indeed, their charge is to create “new knowledge.” Their scholarly organizations -- like 4S -- promise to scaffold and help sustain this, though what this looks like in theory and practice often receives little attention.

When the Name for World is Soil - Chair's Plenary Lecture by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference

 https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/chair-s-theme/

Royal Geographical Society, London, from Thursday 29 August 2019, 1.10pm

When the word for world is soil. Engaging with the troubles of ecological belonging  

What words shall we invoke to write the troubled Earth? How can we nurture the imagination of caring earthly futures amidst a myriad of ongoing eco-social catastrophes? In her short novel The Word for World is Forest Le Guin tells the story of a peaceful community whose intimate belonging to the forest is threatened by the destructive power of the colonisers. In this tale, harmed forests and soils bear the mark of violence, but also of histories and futures of resistance. Commenting on Le Guin’s fictional worlds, and drawing on my research on contemporary human-soil relations, I approach Earth as soil to speculatively explore what thinking with soils can tell us about the possibilities of ecological belonging in troubled technoscientific worlds. Today’s rise in attention to soils unearths and entangles multi-layered significances – scientific, economic, cultural, aesthetic, affective and political. Engaging with the troubles of ecological belonging brought by any attempt to name “Earth as…” will have to start from acknowledging multiple non-assimilable and conflictive meanings. Imaginaries of human-soil belonging do not need to be reactionary prerogatives, they can also nurture insurgent and hopeful ecological futures.

Chaired by Professor Deborah Dixon (University of Glasgow, UK), who will also serve as discussant. Co-sponsored by Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

CIM assistant professor Michael Dieter will deliver a keynote lecture 'Exit Strategies: Dark Patterns, Interface Critique and the Struggle for Separation' at the 4th Interdisciplinary Summerschool on Privacy held in Nijmegen in the Netherlands on September 2nd: https://isp.cs.ru.nl/2019/programme.php

http://platial19.platialscience.net/

Date and location: University of Warwick, Coventry, 5–6 September 2019.

Places being "the geographical units of lived human life " are an extremely diverse subject, which can only be studied in an interdisciplinary and holistic manner. For this reason, this year's symposium (5 to 6 September, at the University of Warwick) from the PLATIAL series has the motto "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Place". The now finalised programme (see http://platial19.platialscience.net/programme) includes contributions from geography, sociology, psychology, cognitive science and cartography. In this way, the symposium will give a broad and stimulating impetus to the Place community, as well as promote and strengthen interdisciplinary cooperation. In addition to the regular contributions, we are particularly proud of two distinguished keynote addresses: Nigel Thrift (University of Oxford) will give a talk on "Big: The Originality Machine and Place"; Thora Tenbrink (Bangor University) will put "The Language of Place" on the agenda. A panel will further address the issue of a stronger and more sustained promotion of an interdisciplinary research agenda on place. The entire event is highly interactive. In this way, participants can expect a maximum of knowledge gain and networking, which will be further strengthened by a conference dinner. Registrations can be made on the symposium website: http://platial19.platialscience.net/participation. We are looking forward to your participation!

Applications are invited for Teaching Fellow in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) with experience in teaching and a background in Digital Anthropology, Digital Sociology, Data Studies, Digital Culture, or Science and Technology Studies appropriate for research-led teaching.

This article explores how readers recognize their personal identities represented through data visualizations. Starting from The Course of Recognition, the last book written by Paul Ricoeur, the act of recognizing is unfolded and illustrated through five steps: digital identity, identification, self-recognition, mutual recognition, and promise.

Reference

Dario Rodighiero and Loup Cellard, « Self-Recognition in Data Visualization. »,

EspacesTemps.net [Online], Travaux, 2019 | URL : https://www.espacestemps.net/articles/self-recognition-in-data-visualization/ ; DOI : 10.26151/espacestemps.net-wztp-cc46

Nerea Calvillo is conducting a workshop on different forms of sensing the air at the Barbican Centre, as part of the program of Life Rewired Hub, a series of talks and events Curated by Cris Salter about the AI: More than Human show. The Life Rewired Hub will play host to debate and discussion among experts from the arts, computer science, philosophy and neuroscience around questions of machine agency and consciousness.

The workshop aims to understand different forms of sensing air the air and air pollution, from technological devices to embodied practices. Structured around two sensing practices, we first offer a hands-on exploration of a DIY air pollution sensor, where we will crack it open and interrogate its insides, will make visible how sensors work (or not) and will pose questions on measurement and accuracy, citizen science and advocacy. The second practice is a sensing Parcour, a 45 minute walking tour around the Barbican Centre, from the tunnels to the conservatory, to attune our bodies to their environments, and expand the ways in which we can collectively sense the air.

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/pollution-walking-tour-sensing-the-air

Applications are invited for an Assistant Professor in Urban Analytics and Visualisation in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM).

This sound and photo installation was created for the 2019 Sommerfest of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, where Naomi Waltham-Smith is a fellow in 2019–2020. The sonic compositions weave together field recordings made at antiracist and antifascist protests and are played through individual headphones from a silent disco kit, with photographs projected onto the walls of the Rocco Schloss. This project explores contemporary modalities of listening that allocate dissent and resistance to either silence or inarticulate noise—which in the end amount to the same thing. Most of the recordings were made in the Parisian banlieue where such listening is symptomatic of a (post)colonial division between insider and outsider. In the broader global context, such listening is apiece with authoritarian variants of neoliberalism which displace economic inequality and crises of democratic representation onto partitions of audibility between heard and unheard. Reflecting on the paradox of the heard unheard or silent noise, the silent disco genre invites participants to experience a certain collective synchronicity in the absence of shared audibility and thus to reflect on the challenges of listening across ever-deepening social divides in the struggle against the resurgent far right.

A teaser trailer for the installation can be found out at https://www.auralflaneur.com/trumpism