Just a quick pointer to new events and announcements on the INCITE website.
NEW ESRC PROJECT: BEYOND TRANSLATION
Nina has been awarded an ESRC Fellowship for 3 years to develop and write about INCITE’s studio practice and to investigate further how social research is used in the design of new technologies. The project builds on INCITE’s existing industry collaborations and will look at the ways knowledge is created and represented as social research collaborations such as the ones we have undertaken in the last 5 years.
MACS, WIFI & TASA: Talks in Brisbane, Sydney and Perth
Kat was invited by Mel Gregg to speak about ‘Working with industry’ to MACS [Media and Communication Studies] members at the University of Queensland in October. She is also planning a talk for Mel and Gerard Goggin’s Wireless Seminar in December at the University of Sydney and has had a paper accepted for TASA 2006 [the Australian Sociological Association] in December at the University of Western Australia in Perth.
EPIC 2006
Nina presented a paper entitled “Powerpoint and the Crafting of Social Data” at the 2nd annual conference of Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference held at Intel in Portland, Oregon, 25-26th September. The proceedings are published by the American Anthropological Association.
INCITE is moving!
From January 2007 INCITE will be moving to Goldsmiths College, University of London. We will announce new contact details for post, telephone and fax here in late autumn. Meanwhile you can still contact us via the University of Surrey office or at incite@studioincite.com.
more here……
October 8th, 2006
I’ve been a bad blogger because of this…..
That blurry image of a pile of bound paper is my review document (actually three copies of it). 25, 000 words or so that introduces, tells of methodological choices and reviews literature for my proposed study. The snappy title is – The Making of WiFi; A sociological study of the visual culture of volunteer community wireless networks in Australia. For those of you unaware of the University of Surrey PhD process, and vaguely interested, this baby is the culmination of 15 months work of reading, writing and the all pervasive oh-my-god-there-is-no-way-all-the-ideas-in-my-head- can-possibly-take-the-shape-of-some-kind-of-readable-narrative anxiety. At UniS it is a required step somewhere one to one-and-a-half years into the PhD. It is sent to a small panel of specially selected people (mostly in the dept) who read and comment on it and at a pre-selected time will meet and quiz me on it. At that time I will get the opportunity to defend my ideas. It’s meant to be a practice viva of sorts as well as an opportunity to get different types of responses to my work. With Nina’s help I feel like I have passed the first half of the first hurdle. I still need to get through the actual review so I’ll be keeping the champers chilled. But hey, I made a document. Woohoo.
Now for an quick update on other INCITE members and affiliates.
In between teaching and supervising students Nina has been visiting design firms in London, Helsinki and New York, and talking with people for her study into technology use and adoption by designers. Gerard is currently in midst of writing up the many interesting things he has discovered about the developing practices of music use in the home. Steve is soon to be taking his viva, having submitted his PhD earlier this year. Martin Sønderlev Christenson , who visted us earlier in the year from the IT-University of Copenhagen in Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communication, has also recently submitted his PhD. His study is on the emergence of affect, the aesthetics and experience in Human Computer Interaction. We have had a few visits from another researcher from IT-University of Copenhagen, Søren Mørk Petersen, who is doing his PhD under the supervision of T L Taylor. He is interested in moblogging, design and everyday life and we have had some interesting conversations about the many different ways he might approach his research. He starts fieldwork later this year and will hopefully keep in touch by adding some of his ideas to the blog. I also recently saw Jenna Burrell present some of the ideas from a chapter of her thesis on internet fraud and the role of rumours around the internet by youth in Ghana. She is currently in the writing up stage of her PhD at LSE, having spent a year in Ghana undertaking an ethnography of the internet.
June 30th, 2006