OF SPACES IN-BETWEEN

New book: International Politics and Film: Space, Vision, Power, Sean Carter and Klaus Dodds

International Politics and Film introduces readers to the representational qualities of film but also draws attention to how the relationship between the visual and the spatial is constitutive of international politics. Using four themes – borders, the state of exception, homeland and distant others – the territorial and imaginative dimensions of international affairs in particular are highlighted. But this volume also makes clear that international politics is not just something ‘out there’; film helps us better understand how it is also part of everyday life within the state – affecting individuals and communities in different ways depending on axes of difference such as gender, race, class, age, and ethnicity.

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16971-4/international-politics-and-film

Spaces and Mobilities in
Mediatized Worlds

An Interdisciplinary
International Conference

Karlstad, SWEDEN, 5-8 May 2015

GeoMedia 2015 provides a genuinely interdisciplinary arena for research carried out at the crossroads of Geography, Media and Film Studies. The aim of the conference is to map out the current terrain of communication geographical research, pinpointing its main areas of debate and assessing the prospects of communication geography as a more formalized academic field. GeoMedia 2015 welcomes scholars of all disciplines who address questions pertaining to the space-mobility-media-communication nexus and want to take part in current epistemological discussions regarding communication geography and its future(s).

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Mustafa Dikec – Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Mimi Sheller – Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

John Tomlinson – Nottingham Trent University, UK

Confirmed plenary panel:

Paul C. Adams (chair) – University of Texas at
Austin, USA

Julie Cupples – University of Edinburgh, UK

Dana Diminescu – Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme,
Paris, France

Hille Koskela – University of Turku, Finland

Confirmed films & directors:

“The Forgotten Space” – Noël Burch (director)

“Cosmopolitanism” – Erik Gandini (director)

Abstract submissions:

GeoMedia 2015 welcomes proposals for individual papers as well as thematic panels in English through www.geomedia.se

Individual paper proposals: The author submits an abstract of 200-250 words. Accepted papers are grouped by the organizers into sessions of 5 papers according to thematic area.

Thematic panel proposals: The chair of the panel submits a proposal consisting of 4-5 individual paper abstracts (200-250 words) along with a general panel presentation of 200-250 words.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:–

Communication geographies

– Mobilities and locative media

– Power geometries of/in motion

– “Newsworthy” spaces

– Mobilities, flows and new media

– Material geographies of media

– Policy mobilities and power

– Media ecologies

– Lifestyle and tourism mobilities

– Pervasive media

– Cinematic geographies

– Mobility and governance

– New media and the productions of place/space

– Urban and rural media spaces

– Geographies of media and culture industries

– Art and event spaces

We plan to put together an anthology (not a proceedings) of selected papers and publish it with an established international scholarly press. Information will be provided to conference participants.

Conference Timeline

August 16: Submission system opens

October 10 2014: Deadline for thematic panel proposals

December 1 2014: Deadline for individual paper proposals

December 15: Registration opens

January 16 2015: Notes of acceptance

March 31 2015: Last day of registration

Conference website:

Information about the registration, conference program, venue, social events and practical arrangements, will be posted continuously at the conference website: www.geomedia.se

Contact: you can reach us at info@geomedia.se

Organizers and venue:

GeoMedia 2015 is hosted by the Department of Geography, Media and
Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden.

Mekonnen
Tesfahuney, Conference General

Linda
Ryan Bengtsson, GeoMedia Co-ordinator

André Jansson,
Director of GeoMedia

CONFERENCE STATEMENT

GeoMedia
2015 provides a genuinely interdisciplinary arena for research carried out at the crossroads of Geography, Media and Film Studies. The aim of the conference is to map out the current terrain of communication geographical research, pinpointing its main areas of debate and assessing the prospects of communication geography as a more formalized academic field.

As stated by a number of scholars during the last decade, there are obvious reasons as to why such a field has emerged. Notably, recent developments in terms of expanding (trans)media technologies/networks together with intensified forms of mobility (migration, tourism, commuting, etc.) have had ambiguous spatial consequences: they alter the ways in which spaces and places are produced; they create new hybrid and interstitial spaces, and they affect how people establish senses of belonging and understandings of the world. Spatial practices and experiences, whether we look at the mundane level of everyday life or institutionalized processes such as regional governance or cultural production, are thus increasingly mediatized, i.e., saturated by or dependent on various media technologies and symbolic flows. Traditional mass media, and their modes of interpreting and encoding the world, are being supplemented by various forms of privatized media that sometimes have direct geographical impacts on social life; materially (e.g., portable digital devices) and representationally (e.g., geo-tagging).

At the same time, the conditions for communication in general and media practices in particular become more complex in times of intensified mobility and porous (territorial) boundaries: the places and spaces of symbolic circulation are no longer as clear-cut as they used to be, and questions of policies and legislations pertaining to media infrastructures and content circulation become more open-ended. Pre-established centres of mediated and symbolic power are contested.

These on-going transformations account for converging research agendas among geographers and media/film scholars. Communication geography is also an epistemological project that must be open to neighbouring fields such as sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and political science. The mediatized relations between spatial processes and communication can be related to overarching transformations of modern, capitalist societies, and to the enduring significance of economic, cultural and social power structures. Whereas the means and expressions of spatial production (including phenomena ranging from the everyday textures of the domestic sphere to ideologies of urban transformation and place branding) may alter in tandem with media developments, these are still shaped by gender, ethnicity and class relations. Whereas concepts such as communication, place and distance are in need of problematization, as suggested by various epistemological “turns” (e.g. the “spatial turn”, the “mobility turn” and the “cultural turn”), such discussions have to be framed by structural understandings of society as well as micro-oriented accounts of human nature and agency.

‘The Leisure Commons: A
Spatial History of Web 2.0’, by Payal Arora, has just been published by the Routledge
Science, Technology & Society Series

About the book: There is much excitement about Web 2.0 as an
unprecedented, novel, community-building space for experiencing,
producing, and consuming leisure, particularly through social network
sites. What is needed is a perspective that is invested in neither a
utopian or dystopian posture but sees historical continuity to this
cyberleisure geography. This book investigates the digital public sphere
by drawing parallels to another leisure space that shares its rhetoric
of being open, democratic, and free for all: the urban park. It makes
the case that the history and politics of public parks as an urban
commons provides fresh insight into contemporary debates on
corporatization, democratization and privatization of the digital
commons. This book takes the reader on a metaphorical journey through
multiple forms of public parks such as Protest Parks, Walled Gardens,
Corporate Parks, Fantasy Parks, and Global Parks, addressing issues such
as virtual activism, online privacy/surveillance, digital labor,
branding, and globalization of digital networks. Ranging from the 19th
century British factory garden to Tokyo Disneyland, this book offers
numerous spatial metaphors to bring to life aspects of new media spaces.
Readers looking for an interdisciplinary, historical and spatial
approach to staid Web 2.0 discourses will undoubtedly benefit from this
text.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415887113/

New book out by William Atkins: The Moor: Lives Landscape Literature (Faber & Faber, 2014)

Guardian review of book here

On 22 May I presented a paper at a symposium held at LJMU, organised by Yannis Tzioumakis (University of Liverpool) and Lydia Papadimitriou (LJMU) – ‘TV is the New Cinema: Exploring the Erosion of Boundaries between two Media’.

My paper – currently work in progress – is titled: ‘Big Country, Small Screen: Exploring the Hinterlands of the British Procedural Drama’.

Abstract:
It is perhaps something of a truism to observe that the significance of landscape in screen studies of the crime procedural drama is partly a reflection on the geographical situatedness of the crime mise-en-scène. The crime, and the events – the narratives – that are precipitated by the fact of its occurrence, take place in specific spaces and locations. They are, in other words, spatial stories; an observation that draws succour from writer and
filmmaker Chris Petit’s claim that crime reconstruction programmes, such BBC’s Crimewatch, are unique insofar they are all about place (Brown 1995; Roberts 2014). Despite this otherwise elemental spatial underpinning, venture beyond the specifically urban environments of, for example, neo-noir or the detective film, and the critical correlation between screen, crime and landscape is one that is more than likely to equate the expansiveness of geography to that of the screen. As with discussions of place, landscape and the moving image more generally – and as is attested to by the growing body of literature focused on these areas of debate – it is cinema rather than television that is the default medium around which such discussions are seen to coalesce, whether this be the snowbound wilderness of North Dakota in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, or the remote Anatolian steppe of Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. However, in the wake of the much discussed phenomenon of so-called ‘Nordic Noir’ – and, in particular, the dramas The Killing and The Bridge – the significance of Landscape (with a capital L) in relation to the police procedural has had something of a small-screen renaissance. In this paper I discuss this with specific reference to recent productions set and filmed in Britain. Broadchurch (2013) shot in West Dorset, Southcliffe (2013) filmed in and around Faversham and the North Kent marshes, and Hinterland (Y Gwyll) (2013), filmed in and around the Welsh coastal resort of Aberystwyth in Ceredigion, all share something of a ‘post-Nordic-noir’ family resemblance insofar as landscape and location are themselves presented as central characters, prompting reflection on what these narratives reveal about ideas of place and the role of topography and landscape in the cultural imaginary of the British procedural drama.

Guardian article
about free eBook, On the Road for
17527 Miles by
Gregor Weichbrodt, which maps the route of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, with
Google driving instructions.

Read article here

Access eBook here

New book by Alastair Bonnett: Off the Map: Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places and What They Tell Us About the World (Aurum Press Ltd, 2014)

Review of book in The Guardian – read here

Review in The Telegraph – read here

The Geography of Poverty: www.geographyofpoverty.com/

Reblogged from Progressive Geographies

What is Space: a Post-Disciplinary
Workshop on the Return of an Old Debate

Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick.

17 June 2014. Poster here.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces
frightens me (Pascal, Thoughts, 1964)

Space is the everywhere of modern thought. It is
the flesh that flatters the bones of theory. It is an all-purpose nostrum to be
applied whenever things look sticky. (Crang and Thrift, Thinking Space, 2000)

The
question of space has in both the humanities and the social sciences recently
regained prominence on academic agendas. The so-called ‘spatial turn’,
initially set in motion by geographers, has allowed historians, philosophers,
sociologists, anthropologists, artists and others to return to the long
abandoned, albeit fundamental, question of what space is. This reengagement has
resulted in a gradual, ongoing questioning and re-opening of the great debates
that earlier characterised the European Renaissance. Contemporary discussions
and writings about space have led to a multiplication of literal and
metaphorical spatial references ranging from ‘location’, ‘terrain’, ‘site’,
‘region’ among countless others. This intellectual enrichment means however
also that the question of space has become an increasingly messy, ambiguous and
sometimes even incongruous affair.

This workshop invites junior
and senior academics from across the University to explain and demonstrate how
they conceptualise space in their work. We believe that the problem of space is
too important to be left to one discipline. The objective of this one-day
workshop is therefore to deterritorialise and transcend the longstanding
disciplinary academic divisions and to reengage academics from all departments
in an attempt to build bridges over the vast rivers that have come to divide
us. The goal is not so much to arrive at a common consensus, nor to find a
universally acceptable solution to the fundamental problem that space poses to
us, but to openly start questioning and speculating again about the meaning we
give to the concept.

We invite abstracts of no more
than 300 words for papers of approximately 20 minutes in length, accompanied by
a short biographical note. Please email all abstracts and inquiries to the
convenor, Dr Marijn Nieuwehuis. The deadline for the receipt of all abstracts is
the 6th of May 2014. We can discuss the possibilities of combining
the workshop papers into an edited volume.

This workshop is funded by the Institute of
Advanced Study, University of Warwick.

New Publication: Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space

Edited by Jennifer M. Bean, Laura Horak, and Anupama Kapse (Indiana University Press, 2014).

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/fi/38400-silent-cinema-and-the-politics-of-space.html

Video: David Harvey and Andy Merrifield in conversation at Birkbeck:

//www.youtube.com/embed/-XxlLydbnCU

Remembering the Nakba: Israeli group puts 1948 Palestine back on the map

Guardian article about an app designed by the Israeli activist organisation Zochrot. The i-Nakba phone app will allow users to locate any Arab village that was abandoned during the 1948 war on an interactive map, learn about its history (including, in many cases, the Jewish presence that replaced it), and add photos, comments and data.

Read more at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/nakba-israel-palestine-zochrot-history

The edited volume Marxism and Urban Culture has now been published by Rowman & Littlefield. The book is edited by Benjamin Fraser [executive editor of Journal of Urban Cultural Studies], and includes a forward by Andy Merrifield.

Further details of the book here

My chapter in the volume is ‘The Archive City: Film as Critical Spatial Practice’.

Chapter abstract: In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre describes film as an ‘incriminated medium’ (Lefebvre 1991; Roberts 2012a) that allows for, at best, only partial understandings of and engagements with the dialectics of urban space. If anything, for Lefebvre, film, like other visual media, distorts and fragments space as it is otherwise lived in the everyday. Insofar as the moving image, in all its phantasmagoric forms, is complicit in the reduction of cities to spectacular and virtual spaces of representation – a process described as the ‘cinematization’ of urban space (Abbas 2003; Roberts 2012a) – Lefebvre’s contention can be clearly evinced. However, at the same time it represents something of a broad-brush and un-nuanced dismissal of the role of film in terms of its capacity to mobilise more critical understandings of the dynamic and multi-layered spatialities of ‘the material and symbolic city’ (Highmore 2005). In this chapter I explore the scope for archive film imagery to prompt re-evaluation and re-imaginings of urban landscapes as spaces of ‘radical nostalgia’ (Bonnett 2009) where past and present are brought into dialogue and tension. As well as demonstrating the ways that archive film can function as a form of spatial critique (Keiller 2005), the chapter also sketches the outlines of ‘cinematic cartography’ (Roberts 2012b) as a hitherto under-developed mode of critical urban practice. Drawing on four years of research conducted in the UK city of Liverpool (Roberts 2012a), and considering archival film practices recently developed by film archivists in Bologna, I argue that by mapping and engaging with the ‘archive city’, film can offer a means by which the representational spaces of the past can be harnessed and mobilised as part of a wider Marxian politics of urban spatial practice.

Useful article in The Guardian on the history and politics of map projections in relation to the African continent (article originally published in Think Africa Press):

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/02/google-maps-gets-africa-wrong

On Thursday 3 April I presented the paper ‘The Bulger Case: a Spatial Story’ as part of the Media and Politics seminar series at the University of Liverpool.

The paper will be published in May in The Cartographic Journal – Les Roberts, ‘The Bulger Case: A Spatial Story’, in Special Issue on ‘Cartography and Narratives’, S. Caquard and W. Cartwright (eds.), The Cartographic Journal, 51 (2).

The paper is pre-published online:

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1743277413Y.0000000075)

‘Big Ruins: The Aesthetics and Politics of
Supersized Decay’

14 May, 2014. Limited places remaining (for
attendees only)

Attendees are invited to book a place on the
following event. Tickets are limited, and available via Eventbrite: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/big-ruins-the-aesthetics-and-politics-of-supersized-decay-tickets-10733583437?aff=eorg

As global capitalism intensifies its hold on the
planet, so its ruins are scaling up in size: from vast junkyards of jumbo-jets
in Nevada to entire empty cities in China waiting to be inhabited. Meanwhile
the urban ruins of the Cold War era continue to resist appropriation, whether
because of their toxicity, ideological misplacedness, or as a consequence of
intractable ethnic conflicts. Coupled with a recent plethora of
(post)apocalyptic visions of ruined cities in cinema and computer games, the
links between real and imagined ruination are becoming increasingly blurred. If
we are to imagine large-scales sites of decay, how might their possible ruin be
represented in a way that helps us adequately respond to that very possibility?

This event will address that question by focusing
on the wider significance of big ruins in an age of global capitalism. Drawing
from a wide range of sites – both real and imagined – this conference aims to
create a dialogue between big ruins and the culturally-prescient theme of the
imagination of disaster and to open up an emancipatory space that, following
Slavoj Žižek, accepts the universal inevitability of ruin in order to break its
ideological grasp and thus to suggest liberating alternatives.

Confirmed speakers include:

Keynote – Tim Edensor: ‘Ruins are everywhere’

Luke Bennett: ‘The ruins of ruins’

Michael Crang: ‘Mired but alive’: the aesthetic
taming of toxicity

Anca Pusca: ‘Postcommunist ruins: the fine line
between decay vs. rebuilding’

Mark Sanderson: ‘Derelict utopias’

Matthew Philpotts: ‘Rocket-fuelled ruin:
Re-territorialising the traces of German dictatorship’

Emma Fraser: ‘Reading the ruins of Detroit: poetic,
dialectical and phenomenological approaches’

Clare O’Dowd: ‘Gregor Schneider and the ghost
towns’

Paul Dobraszczyk: ‘40 years later: ruin gazing in
Varosha’

Camilla Røstvik: ‘Like sleeping dragons: an
exploration of the ruins of CERN’

Carl Lavery & Lee Hassall: ‘Return to
Battleship Island: Future of Ruins’

William Viney: ‘Futures in ruin’

Andrew Hardman: ‘Where is my apocalypse? Living in
a ruined future’

All welcome. Tickets for the conference can be
booked via Eventbrite: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/big-ruins-the-aesthetics-and-politics-of-supersized-decay-tickets-10733583437?aff=eorg

Other upcoming ruin-related events from CIDRAL are
listed on the 2014 programme: http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/cidral/events/

Re-blogged from Progressive Geographies

Henri Lefebvre recordings – three audio; one video

Three audio recordings of Lefebvre. The first from 1975 is
the most wide-ranging; the second is a brief discussion from 1970 that
discusses La fin de l’histoire; and the third is on space. There is also this video interview.

//www.youtube.com/embed/0kyLooKv6mU

Re-blogged from Progressive Geographies

The People, Place, and Space Reader – open access material

The People, Place, and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack
Gieseking & William Mangold, with Cindi Katz, Setha Low, & Susan
Saegert

The editors of The People, Place, and Space Reader believe
that knowledge should be open to the public and have therefore decided to
publicly share their writing in the form of the book introduction and twelve
section introductions. If open access (OA) selections from the reader are
available, they are hyperlinked on the pages.

On Friday 14th March 2014 I took part in a panel discussion at the Atlantic Sounds: Ships and Sailortowns conference co-organised by Graeme Milne from the Dept of History at University of Liverpool. The panel, which included the Liverpool filmmaker Dave Cotterill, discussed filmmaking as a key means of recording and analysing popular music and its history
in the second half of the twentieth century.

This Liqufruta bottle is a found object which was my contribution to a workshop organised by Hazel Andrews and held at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London on Thursday 13th March 2014.

Participants each brought an object of their choice which formed the basis of a short talk explaining the reasons for their choice, what significance it has and any stories related to or prompted by the object. Each talk was followed by a group discussion.

An edited collection based on the contributions and discussions is currently being planned.

A transcript of my talk can be accessed here.