On the fallacy of the zoom

Notes from Bruno Latour’s closing keynote at Paris CHI. I Latour’s opening provocation set the agenda: ‘There are no collective phenomena’. Rather, collectives contain the work of collecting (as we will see, contain can have several senses here: to hold, to include, to limit). There are many collecting devices which generate collected data. There is [...]

Transmissions and entanglements

This month the ISTC-Social hosted Nina Wakeford and Kat Jungickel from Goldsmiths College, London for a discussion called Transmissions and Entanglements: Uses of inventive methods. Both Nina and Kat are interested in presenting research in non-textual forms, and creating methods that are crafted to the problem under consideration. Kat’s phrase to capture this epistemology – [...]

Working for Nothing

Notes from Andrew Ross’ keynote at the International Labour Process conference last week. These are just the sections on virtual labour. One of the founding principles of the labor movement was that the bosses needed the workers. Now we may be reaching a point where bosses have worked out how to get by without workers. [...]

From here to there

Just before Christmas I went public with the news that I’ve been hired as a Researcher in Residence at the new Intel Centre for Social Computing based at UC Irvine. This is the last of a series of centres Intel is funding across the US and internationally. It’s a massive investment. This latest centre is [...]

Is anyone thinking of going to this?

Call for Submissions Interdisciplinary Conference HDEA – TCS ICTs and Work: the United States at the Origin of the Dissemination of Digital Capitalism Université Paris Sorbonne, 29-30 May 2013 Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have revolutionized work practices: the acquisition, processing and storage of data thanks to hardware, software, and networks have changed the face [...]

Everything will be better in Chicago

I’m in Chicago this week and next to speak as part of this wonderful series organised by Lauren Berlant and colleagues. My paper is an overview of ideas coming out of the intimacy course I’ve been teaching for the past few years at Sydney – and will also draw on some ongoing projects that consider [...]

A reassuring presence (no bullshit)

My first encounter with Graeme Turner, which he is unlikely to remember, was in 1999, as an Honours student working at the University of Tasmania. After a year of turbulence, in which the main priority was to get out of small town Hobart, Graeme was one of the people I contacted in the hope of [...]

Building Australian Cultural Studies: The work of Graeme Turner

This month, my first proper boss will be retiring from his position as Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. This event in his honour will be a historic day and I hope many people will be there to recognise Graeme’s immense contribution to media and cultural studies [...]

Life, Labour and Information

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND THE ARTS Communication studies seminar VU City campus Flinders Street Level 11, room 11.05 30 May 2012 2pm – 3.30pm PANEL TITLE: LIFE, LABOUR, AND INFORMATION PANEL OVERVIEW: There is a key conjuncture of bodies and technology which underlies all three papers: our unprecedented ability to process and circulate [...]

At Sydney Uni this week

Starting with an assembly in Eastern Avenue – one of the many campus locations to have been “enhanced” in recent years at major expense – Wednesday’s No Job Cuts rally moved to the iconic sandstone quadrangle, to the office of the absent Vice Chancellor, Michael Spence. A section of the protest group then stormed the [...]

keep looking »