News Archive

From 7 to 9 November 2018 the city of São Paulo in Brazil has seen the launch of the project ‘Waterproofing Data: Engaging Stakeholders in Sustainable Flood Risk Governance for Urban Resilience’.

Waterproofing Data is an interdisciplinary project with around €1m funding provided by an international association of research councils: ESRC (Economic and Social Sciences Research Council), FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation) and BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) in collaboration with the Belmont Forum, Norface and the International Science Council within the Transformations to Sustainability programme. Professor João Porto de Albuquerque from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies is the Principal Investigator of an international consortium which includes Heidelberg University (Prof Alexander Zipf) and Fundacao Getulio Vargas (Prof Maria Alexandra Cunha), alongside cooperation partners in Brazil (National Disaster Monitoring and Early-Warning Centre/Cemaden, Sao Paulo City Hall, State Secretary for the Environment of Acre, Brazil Geological Survey), Germany (Rhein-Neckar Water Rights Office and Eberbach City Council) and the UK (British Geological Survey, Environment Agency).

WIRL-COFUND Fellow Karol Kurnicki has authored a chapter titled 'Defending modernist architecture in Poland' in Architecture, Democracy and Emotions: The Politics of Feeling since 1945.

This article focuses on the defence of socialist modernist architecture in Poland and explores its entanglement with today’s urban condition. It sees the defence in the context of post-socialist urban transformation, characterized by the rapid privatization of real estate and infrastructure, the influx of foreign investment and a significant reconstruction of the material fabric of cities. Defending architectural socialist modernism poses questions about modernist democratic ideas and ideals in general. The article explores why only selected buildings are deemed worthy of attention and saving, who selects them, and what consequences this has for urban transformation in general.

The emotional element of architecture as realized in practices and actions, in which the buildings partake, is explored in the context of vanishing materiality of socialist welfare state. Currently, democratic activities are mobilized in architecture in the moment when it stops functioning as a backdrop for everyday routines and starts requiring action from people. The social and political value of architecture is strengthened when it becomes engaging, positional, and processual. This makes emotions an essentially political matter, bound closely to power. Instances of protest prove to be occasions for the re-enactment of democratic values and architecture provides an important platform for this to happen.

Link to paper: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-00822-2_8

CIM PhD candidate and IAS early career fellow Craig Gent has a co-authored chapter in the tenth instalment of the Palgrave Macmillan Political Communication series, Political Communication in Britain: Campaigning, Media and Polling in the 2017 General Election (eds. D. Wring, R. Mortimore and S. Atkinson). Featuring practioners' essays from a wide range of political operators, the series has recorded every UK general election for nearly four decades. Craig and his co-author, Michael Walker, are featured as senior editors of Novara Media, a left-leaning multimedia outlet. Craig has worked at Novara Media throughout his PhD at CIM and was invited to lecture on citizen journalism and 'fake news' at Coventry University last year.

The chapter's abstract reads: "Several relatively new digital platforms made a significant contribution to the election, helping generate numerous stories that went viral. The more influential were pro-Labour and included Novara Media, one of the most important of the emerging left websites. Members of the team responsible discuss how they helped promote Jeremy Corbyn and his party’s policies and also defended him and them against their prominent critics within the mainstream media. The piece demonstrates the success of this and other radical websites in reaching a wide audience and highlighting certain issues that otherwise might not have attracted so much attention."

Congratulations to CIM PhD student Silvia Mollicchi who successfully defended their thesis last Friday. The title of the thesis is 'A study of the notion of medium through the philosophy of the American metaphysician Wilfrid Sellars'. The examiners were Dr Luciana Parisi (Goldsmiths) and Dr Beatrice Fazi (Sussex).

CIM Associate Researcher Scott Wark was asked to comment on the recently-released fan remake of Shrek, Shrek Retold, for an article on wired.co.uk. This shot-by-shot remake is a significant piece of fan-created internet culture and a new expression of the perennially-popular Shrek meme.

Commonism (On cohabitation)

Listen to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa speaking at La Biennale di Venezia within the event Commonism (On cohabitation), part of the Swamp School…

The talk

The interview

The PLATIAL'18 Workshop Proceedings on Place-Based Analysis have been published online! It includes short papers on various aspects that are important for better integrating social and cultural dimensions into quantitative analyses of subjectively perceived places. René Westerholt, Assistant Professor at CIM, convened and organised the workshop together with colleagues from Heidelberg in September, and is also the principal editor of the proceedings. The full volume can be found here. As a follow-up to the successful workshop, a special issue on place-based analysis is convened with the esteemed Wiley journal Transactions in GIS. You find the call for papers online, and we are accepting full-paper submissions until 30 March 2019.

Dr Yair Grinberger from GIScience Group of the Institute of Geography, Heidelberg University is visiting CIM this week (29 October to 2 November 2018) and will be giving a seminar within the WISC Seminar Series on Thursday (see details below).

Yair is based in the room B1.13 (Social Science Building) and is discussing collaborations with CIM researchers around the topics of urban analytics, time geography and digital ethnographic methods.

We warmly welcome Yair to CIM and look forward to fruitful conversations.

Emma Uprichard, Reader at CIM, is presenting her work on “Complexity, Big Data and Policy” in Dublin at ISOQOL — the International Society for Quality of Life Research conference, 24-27 October 2018.

We are pleased to announce that Associate Professor João Porto de Albuquerque and Assistant Professors Greg McInerny and Michael Castelle have been named Turing Fellows at the Alan Turing Institute for 2018-2020, and are 3 of 19 new Turing Fellows from the University of Warwick this year. The Turing Fellowship programme is designed to help increase interaction, collaboration, and research across disciplines related to the fields of data science and AI, as well as to deliver public benefit to the UK and beyond.