I have recently been invited to speak at two more talks this summer, in addition to my presentations at the Conditions of Mediation conference in June and the RGS-IBG in August (see this post for more details).

First up is an AHRC funded one day event ‘A Festival of Methods for Studying Perceptions of Time’ on 26th June in Edinburgh, organised by Jen Southern. I will be speaking about my research on Street Fighter IV players and how to develop methodologies to understand and investigate the micro-temporal levels on which their practices operate.

Second is an ESRC event on Architecture and scripting the social, (date TBA) organised by Gillian Rose and Monica Degen in London. This event will be a mixture of architectural practitioners and social scientists. I will be speaking about affective architecture and how digital technologies can be used to anticipate and (attempt) to script social encounters.

What is interesting about both these events is their emphasis on methodology and sharing knowledge amongst different stakeholders. Theoretically, I am really interested in creating concepts, where concepts are understood as kinds of tools or machines for addressing problems or opening up new ways to study empirical phenomena. In this regard it is quite nice to have the opportunity to show how theoretical concepts can have a strong methodological and empirical value. I am also interested to see how, or if, these events will be positioned in terms of ‘impact’ and I am hoping this might help inform my own thinking around impact for future research projects.

The Annual Association of American Geographers conference is taking place in downtown LA this year and is less than a week away. WIth this in mind, I have briefly looked through the programme and highlighted some sessions that look particularly interesting in relation to cultural geography, nonrepresentational theory and continental theory in general. The schedule is so large that I have probably missed some great sessions. If you notice anything that you think I should add, please leave a comment below.

Ludic Geopolitics
Tuesday, 4/9/2013, from 12:40 PM – 2:20 PM
Moroccan, Biltmore, Mezzanine Level
Organisers: Jason Dittmer and Tara Woodyer

This session should be a good opportunity to see current developments in popular geopolitics research. There are also a number of papers on videogames from a range of researchers including Daniel Bos, Samuel Rufat and Joanne Sharp and Ian Shaw. Gaming is a current research area of mine, so this will be an important opportunity to reflect upon emerging debates in this area.

On Peter Sloterdijk: Geography, Spheres, and Beyond I & 2
Wednesday, 4/10/2013, from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM and 10:00 AM – 11:40 AM
Santa Monica A, Westin, Level 3
Organisers: Oliver Belcher

Last year saw the translation of a number of Sloterdijk’s key texts including Bubbles, the first part of his Spheres triology. Sloterdijk’s work has a lot to offer human geography and these two sessions include some great panelists including Stuart Elden, Peter Adey and Pepe Romanillos. The panels should offer a good forum for discussion, as well as a primer to anyone not familiar with Sloterdijk’s work.

Will Power I & 2: creative ontologies for changing difference
Thursday, 4/11/2013, from 2:40 PM – 4:20 PM and 4.40-6.20 PM in Pacific Ballroom Salon 3, The LA Hotel, Level 2
Organisers: JD Dewsbury and David Bissell

This session is organised by JD Dewsbury and David Bissell and promises to offer a range of papers that speak to emerging themes around habit and will that have to come to the forefront of debates around performativity and embodiment in human geography. The papers are given by a range of speakers, many of which are from non-British institutions. This is a welcome sight, given the critique by writers such as Tim Cresswell, that non-representational theory is narrowly British in its practice and influence.

Author Meets Critics – Google and the Culture of Search by Ken Hillis
Friday, 4/12/2013, from 10:00 AM – 11:40 AM in Pacific Ballroom Salon 1, The LA Hotel, Level 2
Organisers: Joseph Palis

This session should be a good opportunity to examine and reflect upon Hillis’s recent book on Google and search engines, surely one of the most important technologies of recent times. There are also some interesting discussants in this session, including Matthew Wilson.

Michel Serres and Geographic Thought
Saturday, 4/13/2013, from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM in Sacramento, Westin, Level 2
Organisers: Elizabeth Johnson

Within geography, Serres’ work has been most often engaged with in relation to his interviews with Bruno Latour. However, his recent work The Five Senses has been largely ignored. Hopefully this session can provide more impetus for an engagement with this thinkers important ideas.

Technology, Memory, and Collective Knowing
Saturday, 4/13/2013, from 10:00 AM – 11:40 AM in Santa Anita A, Westin, Lobby Level
Organisers: Sarah Elwood

This is the session I am speaking in, so I have to mention it here! I am talking alongside Matt Wilson and others on the concept of memory in relation to technical objects and how technical objects can be understood to produce spatio-temporal atmospheres that shape the potential for the transmission of collective knowledge. The paper is fairly theoretical and draws upon ideas from speculative realism, including the work of Graham Harman and Levi Bryant.

I am pleased to announce, that myself, Matt Wilson and Sam Kinsley will be running a session at this years IBG conference on Bernard Stiegler’s idea of ‘Economies of Contribution’. The session has been sponsored by the History and Philosophy of Geography research group and we have some great speakers lined up. The rationale for the session and list of talks is below.

Economies of Contribution, Paper Session

‘Rather, a pathway to genuine growth must be refound, a growth running counter to the mis-growth [mécroissance] that consumerism has become, and a growth which would consist in a renaissance of desire. Such a rebirth would be achieved by implementing an economy of contribution, an economy for which “to economize” means “to take care,” and an economy within which care cultivates associated milieus.’ Stiegler 2010, For A New Critique of Political Economy, p. 108, original emphasis

How might growth be re-imagined as a ‘taking care’? What are the particular spaces and spacings in which such economizations are already occurring? How are re-imaginings of value, consumption, contribution and production re-configured through networked and spaced activities, communities, and infrastructures? We invite papers and other provocations exploring emerging social, political, cultural, economic and biophysical geographies with a particular focus on shifting conceptualizations of technological-mediated consumptions and productions.

Taking an impetus from the work of Bernard Stiegler, this session concerns the rapid changes brought about by networked technologies within economic arenas and how such changes demand broadened and/or revised understandings of consumption, production and value. Of course, a number of economic commentators and theorists have raised the advent of the internet, and particularly the world wide web, as a socio-technical phenomenon that demands that we rethink our understandings of economics. The conjunction of consumption and production, the distribution of the means of production, and the growth of positive externalities have all been raised as benefits of a new technically enabled economy (Benckler, Lessig, Shirky). Equally, the effectively infinite reproducibility of digital media has troubled the economic models of established creative industries, from newspapers to record producers and film studios (Leadbeater, Lessig, Zittrain). New modes of technical interaction between consumers, service providers and industry also ask questions about the bases of value and cost of products and services (Beller, Marazzi, Stiegler).

Novel forms of economic model and activity are active in a range of settings, but it is also important to note these economic paradigms, practices and social theoretical accounts do not always or easily gel. By inviting a range of positions to be collected together in this session we aim to interrogate their geographies and promote not so much a revision of economic geography, but rather a sense of opportunity for an expansive and inclusive engagement with the political economy.

Papers:

Enforced Flexibility: The Opportunities and Challenges of Changing Models of Distribution and Contribution Daniel Cockayne (University of Kentucky)

New economies of residential energy demand reduction Heather Lovell (University of Edinburgh), Martin Pullinger (Lancaster University / ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group / ARCC-Water Project), Nigel Goddard (University of Edinburgh)

Contributing urban space: a genealogy of the High Line Ate Poorthuis (University of Kentucky)

Online Artmaking and Community Building Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield)

This year saw the Royal Geographical Society’s annual Institute of British Geographers conference take a break from its usual location at the RGS in London. Instead the conference took place in Scotland, Edinburgh. The conference also took place a few months earlier than its usual date in August.

One of the best parts of the annual conference, to my mind, is the ability to get a feel for the intellectual and theoretical trajectories that are taking place in the discipline at any one moment. These trajectories are registered through both the actual papers given as well as the formal and informal conversations that occur amongst colleagues during the event.

Bearing in mind that my work falls most readily into the cultural geography sub-discipline and draws upon ideas from continental philosophy, a number of broader points and trends seemed to emerge that were pertinent to how the theoretical landscape within cultural geography is shifting. Of course, my comments are limited to the sessions I attended and so I cannot claim to speak for the conference or sub-discipline as a whole.

Firstly I was surprised by a lack of engagement (in the sessions I attended) with what can broadly be termed ‘speculative realism’ or ‘object orientated philosophy’. To my mind, a return to objects offers geographers exciting new ways to think about the relationship between space and ‘stuff’, both ontologically, politically and empirically. Far more prevalent in the discussions I observed were old favorites such as Foucualt, Deleuze, Benjamin and Derrida. A concern and emphasis upon  pre-existing theorists also goes against Nikolas Rose’s recent critique of the social sciences and humanities, which he argues often rush to discover and utilize ‘new’ (or newly translated) philosophers. There was certainly little rush that I could see, with almost no mention of writers such as Bernard Stiegler or Jean-Luc Marion (amongst others) in the sessions I attended.

Secondly I was sure that a number of people would be discussing the work of Peter Sloterdijk, especially after the excellent Environment and Planning D special issue on Sloterdijk and Stuart Eldon’s recent edited collection Sloterdijk Now. This didn’t seem to be the case, although Paul Harrison did draw upon Sloterdijk’s critique of psychoanalysis in his own very good paper.

Thirdly there was a clear emphasis on the empirical in the papers and sessions I attended. Indeed there seemed to be a renewed concern with the empirical as a way of grounding and developing theoretical ideas. This is something I feel great affinity for. For me, the best kinds of theory begin with and are discerned through structures of experience. This was certainly the case in myself and Paul Simpson’s session on Post-phenomenology. My own sense is that this is a response to what is perceived to be the sometimes abstract nature of recent theory in cultural geography, particularly around ideas of the non-representational. A concern with the empirical may also have something to do with the changing landscape of higher education and the impact agenda of the REF, which encourages problem based research, rather than just interest based work.

Last week I spoke at the British International Studies Association, in a session organised by Martin Coward on Battle Space. The abstract and list of speakers for the session was as follows:

Contemporary Battle Spaces: Militaries, Mobilities & Materialities

This panel examines the manner in which military assemblages are being constituted on a global scale. These assemblages bring the military and
civilian together around logistical networks, scopic regimes and transport infrastructures. These assemblages become the battlespace in which the conflicts associated with the war on terror are fought.

Examining this battlespace is thus central to IR’s task of responding to ‘global challenges’. Such an examination requires grasping the heterogeneous elements, mobilities and materialities that comprise contemporary battlespace from a number of interdisciplinary perspectives. In so doing these papers seek to examine the manner in which mobilities and materialities are militarised by theirincorporation into contemporary battlespace.

The speakers were: Myself, Martin Coward, Debbie Lisle and Marieke de Goede.

I had never spoken at, or been to, this conference before and after finding out it was on the last day and in the last session, I was worried that the audience would be very small. It turns out this worry was misplaced. Not only was the room nearly full, the audience were very attentive and interested in issues surrounding the technological networks of contemporary warfare.

My talk was based on my latest research into the social networking tools and applications associated with online videogames. In particular I spoke about the Call of Duty Elite application: a statistics tracking package for the Call of Duty series of games. Some good questions were raised, specifically around the ways in which these games encourage small group dynamics, and the similarity of these dynamics to those cultivated by real battle field training.

Carolin Kaltofen, a PhD student at Aberystwyth also made a good point about the ways in which these games are set up to create an unactualisable form of desire, which I will definitely take on board as I move forward with the research.

Tomorrow I will be attending and speaking at a one day workshop entitled: ‘The Subject of Affect: Politics and the failure and forming of collective subjectivities’ held at Newcastle University. The event is being organised by Matt Davies and Nick Morgan and they kindly invited me to give a paper.

The blurb for the event reads as follows:

“From the attachments formed by a public or an audience to the immersion of a gamer into a game; from the role of care in a service economy to the role of fear of and in unemployment; from the acquisitive desires of the “London rioters” to the anger of “los Indignados”: the “feeling of what happens” (Antonio Damasio) or “structures of feeling” (Raymond Williams) indicate pathways to potential politics as well as the means by which politics can be suspended. In the wake of the demise of the “subjects of history”, scholarship in the Humanities and the Social Sciences has turned in various ways to the question of affect and its role in subjectification. Diverse bodies of research examine the emergence, or failure to emerge, of new collective political subjects. The notion of affect ties together highly abstract notions of subjectivity (as identity, as movement or “multitude”) and highly concrete, embodied notions (affect as the potential for bodies to act). What are the possibilities for, and limits to, affect as an analytical concept? What becomes of our understanding of autonomy in (or of) subjectivity when we introduce affect into our analysis? Does affect change the ways we can locate the space of and for politics? What are the methodological implications of “affect” for cultural and political analyses? This one-day workshop addresses these questions through consideration of a variety of themes that bring together ideas, concepts, and modes of scholarship.”

The event has some great participants including Wendy Larner and Ben Anderson and looks to be very interesting. I will be speaking about social networking and statistic systems associated with online videogames such as Call of Duty’s Elite service and Battlefield’s Battle log system.