Naomi Waltham-Smith is giving a paper entitled “Rhythm in Deconstruction” at the College Art Association annual conference in NYC as part of a panel on “Rhythm, Race and Aesthetics of Being Together” with Kris Cohen, Aria Dean, Christian Nyampeta, and John Ricco.

Abstract

In Mendi and Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station 1 [Furtive Movements], the artists take turns to read a series of numbers excerpted from the logs of self-reported stop-and-frisk data in New York with a dispassionate tone and a machinelike rhythm, the numbers punctuating the electronically generated tones that sonify the data in another way. Connecting this piece with Eric Garner’s pleas of “I can’t breathe,” Soyoung Yoon has suggested that, as it becomes increasingly difficult to recall the difference between the numbers, “difference becomes a matter of spacing, of taking a breath.” I take the Obadike’s installation and Yoon’s reading as an occasion to tease out the significance of rhythm to deconstruction and its central notion of difference as spacing.

Specifically, I trace two intertwined conceptions of rhythm that operate in the thought of Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe and whose proximity the sound installation makes audible. The first is the idea of listening as auscultation, as a rhythmic percussion attuned to the cadence and resonance of breathing. Derrida evokes this figure in a number of places, especially in the essay “Tympan” and his introduction to Lacoue-Larbarthe’s Typography, to capture the subject’s condition of (im)possibility as pulsation. But this beat, as Nancy reminds us, is always syncopated. Reading Derrida’s meditations on rhythm in Glas alongside Numbers Station 1, I show how the pulse tends to become arrhythmic—how the auscultation of black lives tends towards the chokehold and the irregular gasps and splutterings Derrida opposes to the harmonious resonance of a struck bell.

Call for Papers for a Special Issue on Place-Based Analysis

Two months remain to submit contributions for a special issue on place-based analysis, which will be convened by Dr René Westerholt in collaboration with colleagues from Heidelberg, Dresden, Leeds and Winchester. The special issue will be published with the Wiley journal Transactions in GIS and the submission deadline is 30 March. Below you find the detailed Call-for-Papers:

A PLACE FOR PLACE - MODELLING AND ANALYSING PLATIAL REPRESENTATIONS

Places are understood as locations and areas to which anthropogenic meaning is ascribed. As such, places have been of central interest to philosophers and geographers for a long time, and a large stack of mostly discursive and qualitative literature evolved around this topic. Talking about digital and formal representations of places, however, the inherent vagueness of the aforementioned definition has so far hindered significant progress towards a platial notion of GIS. Place as a concept in the field of GIScience is therefore still in its infancy. Some progress has been made recently, but a consistent theory of how to characterise, represent and utilize places in formal ways is still lacking. A place-based account of GIS and analysis is nevertheless important in the light of the plethora of increasingly place-based information that we have available in an increasingly digital world. Digital technologies are nowadays strongly integrated into everyday life. As a result, a large number of especially urban datasets (e.g., geosocial media feeds, online blogs, etc.) mirror to some degree how people utilise places in subjective and idiosyncratic manners. Taking full advantage of these often user-generated datasets requires a thorough understanding of places. It also makes apparent the pressing need for respective models of representation, analytical approaches, and visualisation methods. This demand reflected by recent events like the PLATIAL'18 workshop (see: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1475269) lays out the motivation of convening this special issue.

We are seeking your original contributions on the following topics (and beyond if fitting):

• How can we move forward the integration of platial information with GIS?
• How can we integrate and align GIScience notions of place with existing human-geographic and philosophical notions?
• How is it possible to establish and quantify relationships between adjacent places?
• What might be a suitable strategy for aggregating subjective platial information?
• What roles do uncertainty and fuzziness take in a platial theory of geoinformation?
• In which ways can places be visualised, and how can we do that at multiple scales?
• What can we learn about places from volunteered and ambient geographic information?
• How can platial analysis be integrated with applied research agendas from neighbouring disciplines like sociology, urban planning, or human geography?
• (Further topics are welcome if they fit the overall theme of this workshop.)

IMPORTANT DATES AND ANTICIPATED TIMELINE

30 March 2019 Deadline: Full paper submission
15 June 2019 Anticipated paper acceptance notification
1 July 2019 Camera-ready papers are due
1 August (anticipated) Publication of the special issue

GUEST EDITORS

Rene WESTERHOLT University of Warwick rene.westerholt@warwick.ac.uk
Franz-Benjamin MOCNIK Heidelberg University mocnik@uni-heidelberg.de
Alexis COMBER University of Leeds a.comber@leeds.ac.uk
Clare DAVIES University of Winchester clare.davies@winchester.ac.uk
Dirk BURGHARDT TU Dresden dirk.burghardt@tu-dresden.de
Alexander ZIPF Heidelberg University zipf@uni-heidelberg.de

Celia Lury (Professor, CIM) has published a new paper entitled 'Algorithmic personalization as a mode of individuation' in the journal Theory, Culture and Society and can be found online here.

The abstract of the paper is

Recognizing that many of the modern categories with which we think about people and their activities were put in place through the use of numbers, we ask how numbering practices compose contemporary sociality. Focusing on particular forms of algorithmic personalization, we describe a pathway of a-typical individuation in which repeated and recursive tracking is used to create partial orders in which individuals are always more and less than one. Algorithmic personalization describes a mode of numbering that involves forms of de- and re- aggregating, in which a variety of contexts are continually included and excluded. This pathway of a-typical individuation is important, we suggest, to a variety of domains and, more broadly, to an understanding of contemporary economies of sharing where the politics of collectivities, ownership and use are being reconfigured as a default social.

Giovanni Formilan (Research Fellow, CIM) has published a new book chapter entitles 'A Methodological Essay on the Application of Social Sequence Analysis to the Study of Creative Trajectories' in Handbook of Research Methods on Creativity edited by V. Dörfler and M. Stierand. The paper may be found here.

The abstract of the chapter as follows:

In this essay, we present and illustrate a few applications of social sequence analysis (SSA) to the study of creativity. Focusing on complete sequences of events rather than on localized situations, SSA enables the analytical treatment of creativity as a process that unfolds over time, offering a fuller representation of temporal dynamics of creativity than is typically possible with other methods such as event history analysis, repeated measures, or panel design methods. We suggest that SSA holds great promise for research on creative industries, as it is particularly well suited to detect similarities among diverse creative trajectories while at the same time preserving their singularities. To substantiate our suggestions we employ data from the underground electronic music to examine trajectories of stylistic variation and illustrate how to implement sequence methods to augment and/or complement other research designs. Our purpose is to stimulate interest in SSA and encourage its application to the study of creativity at the individual, organizational and industry level.

Formilan G., Ferriani, S. and Cattani, G. (2019). A methodological essay on the application of social sequence analysis to the study of creative trajectories. In Dörfler, V. and Stierand, M. (eds.). Handbook of Research Methods on Creativity, Edward Elgar Publishing.

Following the recent #shameonyouwarwick debate, we want to express our solidarity with the women affected, as well as with our colleagues and students in the departments more directly involved.

We understand there are confidential aspects to this case that can’t be made public, which may limit our capacity to judge this matter.

But it is crucial that we speak out, especially in the current context in which the university has such a vital role to play as an advocate of rights, well-being and diversity.

We join our peers in the Warwick community to urge the University to stand by these values in words as well as deeds.

Noortje Marres

Head of Department, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

University of Warwick

CIM is now accepting applications for the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme, for researchers who have recently completed their doctoral studies. The fellowships are typically for 12 months full-time or 24 months part-time. Applicants will need a mentor within CIM and to be aligned with CIM’s ‘Interdisciplinary Studies’ ESRC pathway. Full information regarding eligibility and how to apply can be found here. If you are interested in applying, please get in touch with CIM’s Director of Postgraduate Research, Dr Nate Tkacz (n.tkacz@warwick.ac.uk). The deadline for Warwick applications is March 10, 2019.

Congratulations to CIM PhD student Craig Gent who successfully defended his thesis last Friday. The title of the thesis is 'The Politics of Algorithmic Management: Class Composition and Everyday Struggle in Distribution Work'. The examiners were Dr Phoebe V. Moore (Leicester) and Dr Michael Dieter (Warwick).

Nerea Calvillo will be giving a paper at the transdisciplinary conference Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices at the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, at Linneaus University, Sweden. 23-25 January.

The paper, co-authored with Martin Savransky, will be on Relaying the Pluriverse Otherwise? Environments, Storytelling, and Speculative Sensing

Abstract

How might we sense and relay our damaged worlds otherwise? Seeking to rise to the multiple challenges posed by climate-change, pollution and the endangerment of species, a host of practices are currently being deployed to measure the manifold devastation of our environments through data gathered by multiple science and citizen-science sensors. While potentially generative of a less rationalistic mode of connecting to our environments, one of the problems with such sensing devices is that they rarely challenge the established types of data on which their sensors feed. Data is “gathered”, but what is gathered is always less than what is concretely given in any environment: what other experiences, purposes, and events may those environments be capable of? For instance, what kinds of responses might become possible were we to relate not only to scientific data on ocean pollution, but to the endangered liveliness and sentience of more-than-humans themselves? What if we re-read the data of coral bleaching, for example, through speculative stories that could make the coral’s own experiences felt? Indeed, what might practices of speculative storytelling do to open up our ways of sensing the pluriverse? In this exploratory paper, we seek to experiment with the importance of such questions by dramatising the possibility that alternative modes and devices of sensing, and other ways of relaying what is sensed, might enable more-than-human worlds to make themselves present otherwise. We wish to explore how they may help us learn how to tell other stories. Stories that may, in turn, contribute to cultivating more generative multispecies relations in this ongoing pluriverse.

Details of the event can be seen here.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa will be speaking at Nottingham Contemporary in the framework of the exhibition Still I Rise. Feminisms, Gender, Resistance

The talk will be on Soils, care and community: re-imagining ecological belonging

Abstract

This talk weaves together moments in scientific practice, community activism and creative art to tell stories in which soils are coming alive, revealing life within them, even a spirit. Re-animated human-soil relations are altering the perception of earth matter as inert resource passive to human use. Instead, they call for a sense of caring interdependency where the carers are not only human. As soils become enlivened a sense of human-soil interdependency is intensified, appealing to renewed ecological affinities, re-animating not only soils but also the humans who care for them. A more than human sense of community and belonging emerges, that depends on embracing the breakdown and recirculation of matter as a mundane eco-ethical obligation that disrupts the fascination with life as magnificent productivity and endurance.