Research Projects

 

RIGHTS TO KNOWLEDGE AND SPACE IN THE SMART CITY
YOUTH, SOCIAL (RE)PRODUCTION, AND ‘NEW’ MEDIA
JITP5: MEDIA AND METHODS FOR OPENING EDUCATION
PPS READER: PEOPLE, PLACE, AND MEDIA IN THE CONTEMPORARY CITY
THE MYDIGITALFOOTPRINT.ORG PROJECT
BROOKLYN’S PUBLIC SCHOLARS
PRIVATE GOVERNANCE IN CO-OPS AND GATED COMMUNITIES IN NEW YORK CITY

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RIGHTS TO KNOWLEDGE AND SPACE IN THE SMART CITY

5913-thumbPROJECT ROLE: Principal Investigator

This project critically interrogates the production entailed in people’s everyday engagements with proprietary media and urban privatization. Participatory Action Research and practical cryptography are drawn on as consciousness-raising methods for reimagining and redesigning the daily production of space and knowledge in the contemporary city. Epistemological (i.e. ‘right to research’) and ontological (i.e. ‘right to the city’) calls for social justice in a gobalizing and urbanizing society are here considered in the context of smart urbanism.

Presentations

  • 2014. “Dataveillance and Everyday Consciousness in the ‘Smart’ City.” #TA3M. New America Foundation, New York. [VIDEO]
  • 2014. “Participation, Proprietary Media, and Dataveillance in the Smart City.” Perspectives on Place and Power Lecture Series, Sarah Lawrence College.
  • 2014. “Configuring a ‘Right to the City’ with a ‘Right to Research’: Towards a Participatory Smart Urbanism. Accepted to Association of American Geographers, Tampa.
  • 2012. “Affording the ‘Right to Research’: Doing Critical PAR with Open Source Technologies.” Representing the City: Technology, Action, and Change Symposium, Rutgers University. (with Maria Torre)

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YOUTH, SOCIAL (RE)PRODUCTION, AND ‘NEW’ MEDIA

new-mediaPROJECT ROLE: Principal Investigator

This project considers the social and material production of new media while situating its ‘newness’ as a social context and intimate experience rather than an ahistorical ontology for contemporary media. My specific aim is to trace the historical geographies of enclosure, privatization, and social inequality produced and reproduced through young people’s ‘new’ media experiences.

Publications

Presentations

  • 2013. “#LivedData: Two Cases of Participatory Action Research with Media.” Allied Media Conference, Detroit.
  • 2012. “The Informational is Spatial: Understanding the Geoeconomics of Cybersecurity in Youth Environments.” Association of American Geographers, New York.
  • 2008. “Digital Youth and Internet Governance.” European Summer School on Internet Governance, Meissen, Germany.
  • 2007. “n3w $0Ci4l rE@l1+Y: Young People, Political Engagement and the Semantic Web.” Young People, New Technology and Political Engagement Conference, University of Surrey, UK.

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JITP5: MEDIA AND METHODS FOR OPENING EDUCATION

Intro-Issue5-1PROJECT ROLE: Co-Editor (w/ Suzanne Tamang)

Issue 5 of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy brings together scholarship that challenges traditional educational environments through more democratic and diverse modes of teaching, learning, and research. As the first themed issue of JITP, Suzanne and I sought contributions that explicitly considered both media and methods for opening up educational places and practices. Our hope was to facilitate a scholarly discussion around what it takes to redraw educational boundaries as well as why certain boundaries should be redrawn. The resulting issue brings together an interdisciplinary grouping of artists and academics to explore how digital media and critical methods can help expand access to the classroom (see Daniels et al. 2014; Gieseking 2014), the laboratory (see Edwards et al. 2014), the urban neighborhood (see Mayorga 2014), and the global economy (see Literat 2014).

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THE MYDIGITALFOOTPRINT.ORG PROJECT

MyDF-SlidePROJECT ROLE: Principal Investigator

This participatory action design research (PADR) project with NYC youth sought to understand and engage young people’s everyday experiences growing up with proprietary media. The methods and media developed during this project serve as the empirical core of MyDigitalFootprint.ORG: Young People and the Proprietary Ecology of Everyday Data.

Publications

  • 2014. “Opening Proprietary Ecologies: Participatory Action Design Research with Young People” in Methodological Challenges When Exploring Digital Learning Spaces in Education (eds. G.B. Gudmundsdottir and K.B. Vasbø). Sense.
  • 2014. “iLearn: Engaging (In)Formal Learning in Young People’s Mediated Environments” in Informal Education, Childhood and Youth: Histories, Geographies, Practices (eds. S. Mills and P. Kraftl). Palgrave Macmillan.

Presentations (Selected)

  • 2013. “MyDigitalFootprint.ORG: Young People and the Proprietary Ecology of Everyday Data.” Introductory Presentation at Dissertation Defense. CUNY Graduate Center. [VIDEO]
  • 2012. ”Doing Participatory Research and Pedagogy in Proprietary Educational Environments.” InfoSocial Conference, Northwestern University. (w/ Kiersten Greene)
  • 2012. “(In)Formation: Understanding and Engaging Informational Youth in Urban Educational Research.” Faculty of Educational Sciences. University of Oslo, Norway.
  • 2011. “MyDigitalFootprint.ORG: Cyberspace, Surveillance, and Participatory Action Research with Young People.” Growing Up Policed: Surveilling Racialized Sexualities, New York. [VIDEO]
  • 2011. “Untangling the Semantic Web: A PAR Approach to Cyberempowerment in Youth Environments.” Association of Internet Researchers, Seattle.
  • 2011. “iLearn: Space, Time, and Social (Re)Production in Young People’s Informational Environments.” Association of American Geographers, Seattle.
  • 2010. “Two Cases of Digital Governance: MyDigitalFootprint.org and OpenCUNY.org.” The Norwegian eGovernment Delegation to the USA. The Roosevelt Hotel, New York.
  • 2010. “Cyberdominance and the Digital Footprint: Young People as Objects of Domination and Subjects of Power in the Cybercity.” Association of American Geographers, Washington, D.C.
  • 2009. “Towards a Topography of Young People’s informational Geographies.” 2nd International Conference on Geographies of Children, Youth and Families. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

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PPS READER: PEOPLE, PLACE, AND MEDIA IN THE CONTEMPORARY CITY

PPSreaderPROJECT ROLE: Reading List Contributor

I composed a short essay with thirty recommended readings on the topic of “People, Place, and Media in the Contemporary City” for the online companion to the People, Place, and Space Reader (Routledge, 2014). The digitization and privatization of human experience from the global to the intimate has become so pronounced in capitalist societies that it is now difficult and perhaps unnecessary to disentangle the production of media from that of place. Indeed, the reciprocal production of geography and technology entailed in globalization has led to a re-theorization of the urban form over the past two decades. Hybrid constructions of the “Informational City” (see Castells 1992), “Cybercity” (see Boyer 1992 and Graham 2004), “Networked City” (see Mitchell 2003), and more recently the “Real-Time City” (see Hollands 2008 and Kitchin 2014) suggest a growing interest and inquiry into the political ecology of a supposedly “smart” urbanism. Collectively, these readings help demystify and critically analyze informational capitalism while also pointing toward democratic methods for producing more meaningful and just cities.

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BROOKLYN’S PUBLIC SCHOLARS

bps bannerPROJECT ROLE: Director of Digital Media

Brooklyn’s Public Scholars is a partnership between the CUNY Graduate Center’s Public Science Project and Kingsborough Community College. Through social media, collaborative online mapping tools, interactive learning modules, and participatory action research the BPS Platform supports community-based teaching and engaged scholarship around critical urban issues facing students and communities in Brooklyn.

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PRIVATE GOVERNANCE IN CO-OPS AND GATED COMMUNITIES IN NEW YORK CITY

PROJECT ROLE: Co-Principal Investigator (w/ Setha M. Low)

Building on earlier work on urban fear, this research involved 25 interviews with owners of housing co-ops within New York City about their experiences of safety, social isolation, racism, and rules and regulations in regards to the physical and social space of the co-ops and, in particular, their co-op boards. The outcomes of this research are being compared to the outcomes of the Urban Fear research on gated communities. We took special care to analyze the co-op research in regards to issues of legal consciousness (Low), participation and representation (Donovan), and laissez-faire racism and homophobia (Gieseking).

Publications

Presentations

  • 2007. “Shoestring Democracy: Private Governance in Co-ops and Gated Communities in New York City.” 4th International Conference of the Private Urban Governance & Gated Communities Research Network, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France. (co-authors in absentia: Setha M. Low and Jen Jack Gieseking)

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