The profound digital transformation of our lives has led to the creation of new datasets that together form a kind of "digital skin of our earth". One of these types of datasets that have emerged recently is geosocial media, i.e. social media posts that contain geographic content and are annotated by GPS coordinates. Geographers and cognate scholars have at their disposal a rich, but technically sophisticated source of information that partly reflects the everyday life of ordinary people. In this talk, methodological aspects will be discussed that are relevant for the spatial analysis of geosocial media data. The focus will thereby be on spatial autocorrelation. This characteristic is fundamental for geographical structure and pattern recognition and thus ensures a broad relevance of the results presented. The talk discusses how the spatial characteristics of geosocial media contributions and the limitations of the information contained in them influence the underlying assumptions of conventional analytical frameworks. It is demonstrated how this infringement of assumptions leads to the disclosure of false patterns and misleading assessments of the strength and nature of spatial associations. The discussion also includes scale issues, which are of particular importance in the geographic context. All these results have been obtained based on two different Twitter datasets, as well as using idealised synthetic data allowing to control spatial characteristics. The talk will conclude with an outlook on possible future directions of spatial analysis (with regard to the analysis of user-generated information), and with establishing a link to the related field of place-based analysis.

The People Like You project is running its first online competition. Win cash prizes for submitting entries (image/text/numeric) on the theme 'People Like You' https://competitions.peoplelikeyou.ac.uk/who-are-people-like-you/ … #PLYcomp #personalisation (Deadline: 30 April)” @personalisePLY

Nerea Calvillo gives the talk “The air as the end of the city?”

as part of THE WORLD/S AT THE ENDS OF THE CITY, EXPLORATIONS IN URBAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY Lecture Series, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, HU Berlin

23 April 2019

The air tends to be absent from urban politics, design, and imaginaries. Usually conceived as that what defines the end of the city, it is actually a structural component of urban environments. Today, its pollution is drawing attention to its agencies. And yet, the only legitimate ways of knowing and responding to air quality are technological “solutions” that are proving not to be enough. One of the reasons, I argue, is because the air’s materiality is not considered in its complexity. So to think about the air as an organic, inorganic, geological, chemical, technological and biological force, challenges our understanding of the city and of the air. To shape an urban cosmopolitics with the air, from a framework at the intersection of science and technologies studies, feminist technoscience and urban political ecologies, I suggest to use the heuristic of a city to identify Madrid’s urban assemblage. Madrid, as a very polluted but average European city, allows to think about the urban air of the every-day, the one that is invisible and mostly imperceptible. The heuristic of the city, as a speculative project, allows to spatialize the air, and makes visible its political and social implications. How can this approach contribute to new framings of the air and the urban?

What does it mean to be with/in the digital? Who (and what) participates with/in the digital? What practices, subjectivities, and materialities emerge through participating with/in the digital? What are the modes of participation with/in the digital? What exclusions/inclusions are enacted with/in the digital? How does power flow with/in the digital? What kinds of research do we do with/in the digital?

Under the topic of With/In Digital, we are going to hold a postgraduate conference in CIM in June 27th, 2019 in PS1. 28, University of Warwick.

Further details here: https://easychair.org/cfp/CIM-PG-2019

Naomi Waltham-Smith is giving an invited talk at a public symposium on Deconstruction in Conversation: Conversation in Deconstruction at the University of Winchester on 11 April 2019, and also participating in a workshop with other Derrida scholars sharing a chapter of her forthcoming book, The Sound of Biopolitics.

Paper Title: “Cor((p)s)don; Or, Listening Telephonidiomatically”

Abstract: Taking the “endless conversation” between Cixous and Derrida as a point of departure, this short presentation shows how the aural quality of their writings paradoxically tests the limits of the concept of conversation. It puts the question of (se) donner le mot into constellation with the themes of the telephone and the vocable as they arise in their calls, lectures, and written texts, discerning a tension between conversation and the password of conversion.

Naomi Waltham-Smith is giving an invited talk at a conference on Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity: Derrida’s Geschlecht III at Goldsmiths on 8–9 April 2019 to celebrate the publication of this newly discovered text.

Paper Title: “Unflappable”

Abstract: Taking off from the Flügelschlag or coup d’aile in Trakl’s poem to which the “Ein” of “Ein Geschlecht” responds with the Grundton of the Gedicht, this paper explores the play of sonorousness and silence in Geschlecht III. I go down two paths, sounding out two sets of echoes. One traces this (noisy) wing-flapping as a metaphor for the force of reading (aloud) in exchanges between Derrida and Cixous in Voiles, Insister, and other texts. The other—following a series of threads between this and the last of the Geschlecht essays, as well as Derrida’s final seminar—teases out how this force is associated, on the one hand, with the Walten and Austrag of ontological difference and, on the other, with the tragen or carrying of the voice of the friend or the lost one.

Web link: https://cpct.uk/2019/02/17/sex-race-nation-humanity-derridas-geschlecht-iii-april-8-9-2019/

Helena Suárez Val is presenting “Affect amplifiers: feminicide, feminist activists and the politics of counting and mapping gender-related killings of women” at the XVII Encuentro de Geógrafos de América Latina in Quito, Ecuador (9-12 April 2019).

Link to programme: https://egal19.puce.edu.ec/cronograma

Abstract: Since 2015, I have been carrying out a digital mapping of cases of feminicide - understood as the violent deaths of women related to gender - where cases are geolocated and information is displayed about each woman killed in Uruguay (feminicidiouruguay.net). In writing about violence against women, I once described the Uruguayan feminist movement as “indignant, sad and fierce” (Suárez Val 2014), and feminist activists have mobilized these and other emotions into online and offline actions, denouncing and protesting against the indifference of society, the erroneous and sexist treatment of cases in the media, and the inaction in the political sphere regarding violence against women. The stark contrast between feminist activists and the indifferent and apathetic atmospheres of society, the media and politics reveals the emotional and affective struggles at play. In this paper I put into dialogue theories of affect and emotions, conceptualizations of feminicide, and feminist scholarship on the use of quantitative and geographic methods, to propose that digital mappings of feminicide act as feminist affect amplifiers: interactive visual artefacts through which data -modulated through feminist emotions and affects- are recirculated to the world to provoke social changes.

Suárez Val, H. (2014). Indignadas, tristes, feroces. No Te Olvides, 18. Available at http://ladelentes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/indignadas-tristes-feroces.html

What does the phrase 'people like you' mean to you, and what are your experiences of personalisation? @PersonalisePLY is hosting a competition to find out - creative entries particularly welcome! Further details here: https://competitions.peoplelikeyou.ac.uk/who-are-people-like-you/

Keynote: The Uselessness of Ears

Naomi Waltham-Smith is giving one of the plenary lectures at the Simpósio Música Analítica in Porto.

Link: http://artes.porto.ucp.pt/pt/Musica-Analitica-2019

Abstract:

Another look at Haydn’s playful (mis)use of cadential formulas and at processes of cadential liquidation in late 18th-century repertoires gives occasion for developing a new theory of musical form that has its roots in philosophical scepticism about notions of property and sovereignty. In order to explain the creative and sometimes aporetic ways in which composers and listeners relate to musical material, I start by tracing the deconstruction of the Adornian dialectic between generic convention and particular expression—between proper and improper, and propriety and impropriety—and then complicate this opposition by way of a secondary distinction, cutting across the first, between musical material and its use. More specifically, I turn to the idea of usure that Derrida develops in his thinking about metaphor to show the negotiation between, on the one hand, the exhaustion or wearing out of musical material and, on the other, the usurious generation of surplus profit or potential for new adventures. In this way, I hope to show the fruitful and deleterious effects of a deconstructive, post-Adornian philosophy of musical form for analytical praxis.

Loup Cellard (PhD Student, CIM) and Anthony Masure (Université de Toulouse) published together an article entitled "Le design de la transparence. Une rhétorique au coeur des interfaces numériques" in a special issue on the tyrannies of transparency, edited by Emmanuel Alloa and Yves Citton, of Multitudes.

Abstract of the paper (in english) :

"Historically, one of design’s objectives was to make the world intelligible by structuring the mediation of the visible. Such an operation of selection necessarily runs against a (transparent) understanding of the real, as fantasized by mathematical computation. Computation spread through digital interfaces which become unavoidable mediators of any form of human activity. As a consequence, design finds itself trapped between three double-binds, which this article attempts to investigate and overcome."

The paper can be downloaded here.