ABSTRACT

This article considers how the pursuit of problematization advocated by Agre’s concept of critical technical practice has been articulated in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across everyday life. While the ethos of Agre’s work to bridge the split identity of critique and craft can readily be found in reflexive design or software art, these cases are not always situated within broader ecologies of practice that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of interface design. Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a fluid milieu, I provide a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large, namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue, finally, that these modes provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise built to prefigure our experiences of them.

Suggested image, attribution here: https://twitter.com/ShitUserStory

Naomi Waltham-Smith has been awarded a BA/Leverhulme Research Grant for her project exploring how recent French philosophy has conceptualized the imbrication of listening in the idea and practice of democracy and of nationalism. Over the next two years, she will be spending time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine conducting research on unpublished and largely unstudied seminars, texts, and correspondence of Derrida, Foucault, Cixous, and the Groupe d’information sur les prisons.

Abstract:

It is widely claimed that we live in an age of political distrust and disaffection ripe for the resurgence of right populisms. This project proposes a novel analysis by developing a vernacular diagnosis moulded by the commentariat: rich democracies today are undergoing a crisis of listening. While the term is frequently used in contemporary discourse, there is no recognizable concept of listening in the history of political philosophy. Contributing to a larger project that unearths more or less subterranean concepts of listening in European philosophy and its interlocutors, the proposed archival research examines unpublished texts from an especially resonant seam of late twentieth-century French thought that address listening in relation to democracy and nationalism. The chief outputs of this archival research will be two journal articles and it will contribute substantially to a larger monograph project for a major university press, in addition to dissemination across disciplines and beyond academia.

Matt Spencer, University of Warwick

Journal of Cultural Economy 2022

Link to paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2022.2098515

Gaining confidence in the security of technical products is a persistent challenge for cyber security practitioners, and a domain in which government assurance schemes have traditionally played a key role. But the idea that security can be treated as a kind of measurable quality, and assessed and certified, has attracted considerable scepticism in recent years. Driven by this scepticism, assurance thinking has shifted towards the anticipation of products in their contexts of deployment.

This paper examines cyber security assurance discourse in the UK. It develops an analysis of the stories told by practitioners about what is wrong with traditional assurance, and asks what these stories ‘do’, how they enact mistrust and create the conditions for change. The paper focuses on the characters that populate these stories, the deceivers and dopes, box tickers and enlightened critical thinkers, and argues that it is around the characterisation of assurance that future debates in the field are likely to coalesce.

Abstract: This article proposes a rethinking of the operations of surfaces, using the concept of ‘recursion’ to explore surfaces as not only spatial, but also temporal objects engaged in the production of continuity and rupture through time. The text engages with the transformation of a specific high relief at the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, which in the past decade has been subjected to a series of material and semiotic modifications. The analysis of interventions on the relief created between 2011-2018 stimulates an engagement with a set of questions pertaining to the way in which surfaces are engaged in the production of temporal continuity and rupture. To achieve a theoretical intervention in monument, visual and urban studies, the article mobilises cultural topology and media theory, alongside scholarship dealing with Bulgarian post-communist urban space and politics.

Genova, Neda. "Temporal Politics of the Surface: Keeping Pace with the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia." new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, vol. 106, 2022, p. 25-42. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/863660.

CIM teaching fellow Janna Joceli Omena is a contributor to SAGE Research Methods: Doing Research Online. The how-to-guides entries are about application programming interfaces (APIs) and how to make meme collections. The two-part series of guides on Collecting Data Using APIs presents a technicity perspective to understand APIs and navigate API documentation. And learn in practice how to communicate with and access APIs. These guides help us "understand the attitude they need to adopt to become conceptually, technically, and empirically acquainted with APIs and the tools needed to communicate with and request data from them". Part 1 introduces the main characteristics and types of Web APIs, and presents ways of understanding and navigating API documentation, including using data retrieval software and verifying outputs. Part 2 highlights the main requirements to communicate with and access APIs. Moreover, it presents aspects to consider before, during, and after data collection while illustrating key ethical considerations that may arise.

The entry on making meme collections is a piece written in collaboration with Giulia Giorge and Richard Rogers. This how-to-guide teaches the making of meme collections. It provides guidance to query and extract memes from memes database (Know Your Meme) and generator (Imgur), social media and Google Image search engine. Finally, the guide empirically explains how the online environment affects the conceptualisation and composition of a meme collection.

What are the barriers to cycling amongst ethnic minority groups? What are the policy challenges in achieving cycling equity? The newest CIM research project “Ethnic inequalities in cycling – advocacy and policy in London” aims to answer these questions using a mixed methods design. The project is funded by the Institute of Advanced Study research grant, secured by Dr Zofia Bednarowska-Michaiel (CIM).

May was a particularly busy time at CIM with regular academic events, such as a Research Away Day or Grant Sprint. This year we also organised a Writing Retreat for Early Career Researchers (ECRs).

The retreat was a three-day log event where junior members of academic staff gathered to work simultaneously on their writing projects. On top of the packed agenda of writing sessions, the retreat was an opportunity to meet in person for the first time since Covid-19.

The group of ECRs at CIM includes Research and Teaching Fellows. The group was established to create a space for peer collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange, on top of daily research projects and teaching duties that ECRs are engaged within. The Writing Retreat was designed collaboratively, and the organisation was led by Dr Chiara Poletti and Dr Zofia Bednarowska-Michaiel, with a great support of professional staff at CIM. We implemented an open-ended form of collaboration for writing, peer-led discussion, and exchange so that the retreat can take place in an iterative way and in a collegial environment.

Image description/Alt-text:

CIM Early Career Researchers working on their writing projects. Author: Dr Daniele Pizio

A new special issue of Revista Dígitos has just been released. The issue is edited by Janna Joceli Omena (University of Warwick, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies), Beatrice Gobbo (Politecnico di Milano, Density Design Lab), Lorena Cano-Orón (Universitat de València) and Ana Marta M. Flores (NOVA University of Lisbon). The monograph section reunites articles addressing research experiments, protocols and knowledge creation through data sprints. It explores and unpacks sprints as an interdisciplinary collaborative space while presenting data sprints' purpose, advantages and concrete results for different fields of study. This collection builds on research developed for, in and after data sprints. The articles expose the potentials and challenges of data sprints for teaching-learning digital methods research and as reflective devices for producing scientific knowledge yet for methods and tools creation. See the articles below.

Social (Airy) Distances is an experimental installation that explores the physical and affective consequences of social distancing imposed as a coping mechanism in pandemic times. The aerial ecosystem, which used to be considered “emptiness”, has been recently occupied by the COVID-19 virus, rules, fear, respect, wind, forms of speech and other elements that have created invisible walls that have limited our access to other human bodies. We have formed social bubbles, rehearsed social distance, and added contextual complexities (ventilation system, masks, direction of speech, etc) to calibrate “safety”. 1m, 1.5m, 2m… These dimensions have fluctuated over time and across jurisdictions, responding to scientific research findings and negotiations with workers’ unions, hospitality managers and a wide range of industries and public institutions. Through these dimensions, health, social and economic risk has been managed across the world. Which kinds of bodily and affective separations has it unravelled, and which kinds of reliefs and autonomy have they generated.

Social (Airy) Distances, designed by Calvillo and her team as C+ arquitectas, is a commission for Vulnerable Critters, an exhibition curated by Andrea Bagnato and Iván L. Munuera that looks critically at modernity’s obsession with preventing contamination. It has been produced with the support of the Participatory Research Fund, Research England.

27 May-18 September 2022

La Casa Encendida (https://www.lacasaencendida.es/en/exhibitions/vulnerable-critters-13607)

We are pleased to announce a new job opportunity. We are recruiting for a Teaching Fellow. Deadline for applications: 17 July. For details of the position please follow this link:

https://atsv7.wcn.co.uk/search_engine/jobs.cgi?owner=5062452&ownertype=fair&jcode=1885882&vt_template=1457&adminview=1