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

Over the last two years, we have witnessed the ever-fast growth of micro-mobility services (e.g., e-bikes and e-scooters), which brings both challenges and innovations to the traditional urban transportation systems. For example, they provide an opportunity to better address the “last mile” problem due to their convenience, flexibility and zero emission. As such, it is essential to understand why and how urban dwellers use these micro-mobility services across space and time. In this paper, we aim to understand spatiotemporal trip purposes of urban micro-mobility through the lens of dockless e-scooter user behavior. We first develop a spatiotemporal topic modeling method to infer the underlying trip purpose of dockless e-scooter usage. Then, using Washington, D.C. as a case study, we apply the model to a dataset including 83,002 valid user trips together with 19,370 POI venues and land use land cover data to systematically explore the trip purposes of micro-mobility across space and time in the city. The results confirm a set of uncovered 100 Trips Topics as an informative and effective proxy of the spatiotemporal trip purposes of micro-mobility users. The findings in this paper provide important insights for city authorities and dockless e-scooter companies into more sustainable urban transportation planning and more efficient vehicle fleet reallocation in future smart cities.

Link to paper: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1fHJHjFQguwWWLink opens in a new window

Once the rarified stuff of scientists and statisticians, data are now at the heart of our global digital economy, transforming everything from how we perceive the value of a professional athlete to the intelligence gathering activities of governments. We are told that the right data can turn an election, help predict crime, improve our businesses, our health and our capacity to make decisions.

Beginning with a simple question - how do most people encounter and experience data? - Nathaniel Tkacz sets out on a path at odds with much of the contemporary discussion about data. When we encounter data, he contends, it is often in highly routinised ways, through formatted displays and for specific cognitive tasks. What data are and can do is largely a matter of how they are formatted. To understand our 'datafied' societies, we need to turn our attention to data's formats and the powers of formatting. This book offers an account of one such format: the dashboard. From their first appearance with the horse and carriage, Tkacz guides readers on the historical development of this format. Through analyses of car dashboards, early managerial dashboards, and the gradual emergence of dashboards as a computer display technology, Tkacz shows how today's digital dashboards came to be, and how their cultural history conditions the present.

Highly original and wide-ranging, this book will change how you think about data.

Two urban research projects led by CIM members of staff have received seed funding from the Participatory Research Fund. The aim of the fund is to support the development of pioneering participatory research.

The awarded projects are “Investigating the effects of street features and sunlight conditions on people’s perception of walkability through a participatory experiment”, led by Tessio Novack (CIM) in collaboration with Carlos Camara Menoyo (CIM) and James Tripp (Warwick, IDG), and “Exploring hybrid digital-physical prompts for participant engagement on more-than- human data interactions in the smart city", led by Cagatay Turkay (CIM) with collaborators Sara Heitlinger (City, University of London), Rachel Clarke (Newcastle), and Graham McNeill (independent researcher).

RECLAIM (Reclaiming Forgotten Cities) is a new project involving Dr. Calvillo from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (Warwick) to support Britain’s towns and cities as they adapt to the impacts of climate change.

The aim of the RECLAIM (Reclaiming Forgotten Cities) network is to create a multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral network to maximise the social, ecological, urban, and economic positive impacts of green-blue-grey-infrastructure. The network has a central ambition of addressing the levelling up agenda by incorporating both social justice issues and ecological quality into the design of multi-functional grey, green and blue space in cities, to ensure liveable cities which are sustainable and resilient to the future challenges.

The network has been awarded £1.5 million from UK Research and Innovation and is led by the University of Surrey in collaboration with the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), as well as the Universities of Bath, Bangor and Warwick. The network already has more than 200 academic, non-academic and industrial partners and is rapidly growing.

To receive updates and get involved join the network here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSccf7oDVIY6JvHProUgLgNh0RQdTaPtj2WeetJqwUF8mPy_1A/viewform

Naomi Waltham-Smith is a panellist at Mischon de Reya’s event on 22 June at 6pm about the Higher Education (Freedom of Expression) Bill and its ramifications for the sector. The panel, chaired by Prof Anthony Julius, includes barrister and ECHR Commissioner Akua Reindorf, Partner Robert Lewis, Senior Associate James Murray, Buckingham VC James Tooley, and President of the Union of Jewish Students Nina Freedman. At Warwick Dr Waltham-Smith is leading the work of the Senate working group to develop a new Code on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression.

Link:

https://www.taylorvinters.com/freedom-of-speech-event?fbclid=IwAR1RL153GxHakupo_R23F-hD9x41fAW068EWOnBOAyg08OlchiAU0pHDWvY

CIM is delighted to announce the success of our REF2021 submission in three Units of Assessment (UoAs) across three Faculties. All three UoAs placed our research and impact in the top 12 in the UK: Sociology - 10th, Computer Science - 4th, and Music, Drama, and Film and Television Studies - 12th.

CIM’s mission to drive world-class research by pioneering, testing and promoting interdisciplinary methods and approaches put us in an excellent position to contribute to REF 2021, with its foregrounding of interdisciplinarity. In a little over ten years, CIM has created a truly unique and vibrant academic environment in which researchers with backgrounds in fields as diverse as computer science, media studies, sociology, musicology, anthropology, architecture and ecology share ways of working.

Key to CIM's strategy for research and impact during this REF period has been its focus on advancing a distinctive approach to interdisciplinarity which works across disciplines by focusing on methodological innovation. We design, conduct and study experiments in participation in collaboration with academic colleagues across disciplines and beyond academia, implementing participatory methodologies for knowledge creation and societal engagement. We develop critical, rigorous and reflective approaches to data collection and analytics, making use of inventive methods including crowd-sourced data collection, digital mapping, DIY sensors, apps and art installations.

This strategy has enabled CIM to establish research collaborations with scientists and scholars across a wide range of disciplines and a diverse set of partners and networks connecting across academia, public policy, industry, cultural institutions and activism. The success of CIM’s transformative interdisciplinary, inter-faculty, research and impact strategy is manifest in our varied sources of funding including the ESRC, AHRC, the Alan Turing Institute, NERC, EPSRC, ERC, Horizon 2020, the Wellcome Trust, the Newton Fund, and the Leverhulme Trust.

We would like to extend our gratitude to all members of staff in CIM who contributed to or supported our REF2021 submission, and to our colleagues in Computer Science, Sociology and the Arts for working with us over the REF2021 cycle.

Discover our interdisciplinary research: some highlights of our REF2021 submission by UoA here

This article proposes the methodological and conceptual tool of ‘recursion’ as a means of understanding the production of historical continuity and discontinuity between different forms of nationalism in Bulgaria. The recent case of the demolition of the socialist-modernist monument ‘1300 Years of Bulgaria’ and its replacement with an earlier memorial from the authoritarian period of the 1930s forms the point of departure for this examination. Adopting a media and cultural studies perspective, the text focuses on the symbolic function of lions in both monuments and how they are engaged in the production of nationalist rhetoric and imagery. In line with Ann Laura Stoler’s (2016) proposition that the method of ‘recursive analytics’ can allow us to overcome the impasse formed by attempts to postulate either continuity or rupture between present and past, I first account for the histories of the erection of both monuments before proposing to read the ‘Bulgarian lions’, featuring in both of them, as recursive figures.

Zofia’s presentation was delivered during the 4^th ERSA Winter School. The event is aimed at young researchers, where they work together with top experts in the field of spatial methods. The 5-day training focused on applied spatial quantitative methods such as spatial econometrics, spatial statistics and spatial machine learning. These are used in regional sciences, economic geography and urban studies.

Zofia’s study aims to look for spatial dependence between regional inequalities and cycling inequity. Her ERSA presentation focused on the spatial model that shows spatial disparities in cycling among London boroughs. The research results will be presented in the upcoming journal publication.

Check out the collection Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice, co-edited by CIM member Maria Puig de la Bellacasa with colleagues Dimitris Papadopoulos and Natasha Myers, and published with Duke University Press, 2022

The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineering, physics, science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and cultural studies—the contributors examine the relationship between chemistry and ecology, probe the logics that render wind as energy, excavate affective histories of ubiquitous substances such as plastics and radioactive elements, and chart the damage wrought by petrochemical industrialization. Throughout, the volume illuminates how elements become entangled with power and control, coloniality, racism, and extractive productivism while exploring alternative paths to environmental destruction. In so doing, it rethinks the relationship between the elements and the elemental, human and more-than-human worlds, today’s damaged ecosystems and other ecologies to come