Nina is exhibiting piece of work at Lewisham Arthouse with fellow fine art students from Goldsmiths in an group exhibition. Go see it. It’s good. It closes soon.
[btw - the dog isn't part of the work but it was interesting to see the extra attraction of Nina's work to small children and dogs who wanted to stamp on it or eat it - it is made of icing, eggs, ash and glitter - which added an further layer of fragility and temporality to it].
UNHOMELY
Dates: 14 – 25 May 2008
Private View: Wednesday 14 May, 7-9pm
Aliceson Carter, Dorothea Magonet, Victoria Scott, Nina Wakeford
Despite the proliferation of virtual worlds, and the simulated realities of computer games, the home, and the capacity to be settled or at ease in a place of one’s own choosing, remains one of the most culturally important experiences of our time. In a period of migration and constant mobility, the home appears to provide a respite from the global forces as well as the local stresses that intrude on our intimate, private spaces. And yet the starting point of the four artists in this show is the need to reconsider experiences that, even though they make emerge from our domestic experiences, are distinctly unhomely.
Beginning with the literal translation of Freud’s concept of ‘Das Unheimliche’ as ‘The Unhomely’ the work in this show begins to comment on the lack of coherence of the contemporary home, either as a literal architectural space, or as a symbolic realm of promise and disappointment.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written of the ‘vicious bacteria of domesticity’, a phrase which recalls the capacity of the home to be colonised by destructive forces. The phrase might well suggest that the only way to respond would be an equally ferocious cleansing. Yet the artists in this show use a range of strategies to explore the energies and experiences of the contemporary unhomely, including a restaging of the mundane domestic object or process, or an overlooked emotional experience. The work also questions the boundaries of the home, as work looks to architectures beyond the four walls of the conventional structure.
By acknowledging the contradictions within contemporary formations of the domestic, the show is far from a sullen treatise on the unhomely. New narratives are explored, and new emotional horizons suggested.
All four artists are currently studying fine art at Goldsmiths.
May 21st, 2008
A Workshop, 14 – 15th of December 2007, was a two day event organized by Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford (Sociology and INCITE, Goldsmiths), sponsored by Intel Research, CSISP and the Sociology Methods Lab.
… just a note to comment how much I enjoyed the two days of presentations – nicely alphabetically grouped in headings such as ‘Event’, ‘Experiment’, ‘Panic’, ‘Performance’. It was great to see speakers from such different disciplines come together – including cultural studies, (visual) art, sociology, anthropology and design. What seemed to me more like a mini conference then a workshop, took us through a rather unusual and exciting mix of presentation formats – from theoretical thought-excursions (Mariam Fraser, Luciana Parisi) to visual indulgences into old film footage (Rachel Moore), online curiosities (Goetz Bachmann), photography (Jennifer Bajorek, Vikki Bell), beautiful objects (Bill Gaver) and some excellent performances (Jackie Orr)…
“Contemporary social theory proposes that the social world is changing in complex ways. The nature and significance of such changes are widely disputed. This workshop is not intended to contribute directly to debates ‘for’ or ‘against’ the existence of the changes to the social world identified in theories of, for example, risk, globalisation, information and complexity. Instead, the workshop aims to explore a series of orientation devices by which researchers may be attuned to the empirical study of change. The devices include: event, archive, sound, panic, experiment, performance, network, pattern, probe, profile, list, anecdote, and population.
The term device is important here: it has multiple meanings, including an object, a method and a bomb (Cambridge University Dictionary). To describe an event, an archive or a biography as a device is thus to make explicit how the object and method of social research are linked to each other and with what potentially explosive effects. And the aim of the workshop will be to describe the possibilities and implications of selected devices for the conduct of social research without separating out method from object and in doing so, to act as a series of small bombs in the sociological imagination.
This is not to claim these devices are new; on the contrary, devices such as the experiment, the archive and the population have long and complex histories. Nor is there intended to be any necessary privileging of either quantitative or qualitative approaches. Network analysis, for example, may and does make use of both. Furthermore many of these terms have been developed across disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences and sometimes the natural sciences. An exploration of interdisciplinarity will thus be an essential part of the workshop.
While the devices are not new, the hope of the workshop is that the devices chosen for discussion have a particular relevance in relation to the investigation of the contemporary social world. The aim is to explore how these devices enable the happening of the social – that is, its ongoingness, relationality, sensuousness and multi-dimensionality – to be investigated.”
December 23rd, 2007
Found these old school pics in a recent back-up frenzy.
November 17th, 2007
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
Kate OJ and I are running a workshop called The problem of methodology this weekend in Bournemouth as part of the annual UniS MSc Social Research Weekend Conference. The theme this year – Doing it for Ourselves’: Revisions & renewals in social science methodology.
This is the blurb for our session on saturday:
Drawing on the conference theme of revisions and renewals in social science methodology this session will explore ways in which methodologies are challenged, reformulated and regenerated in the process of social research.
The first part of the session will reflect on the revisions and renewals in social science methodology prompted by new information and communication technologies and will discuss the ways in which using the internet, as both a research tool and a fieldsite, provides new ‘tools of the trade’ which pose particular methodological pitfalls and potentials for the researcher. Part two of the session will present a current case study of the challenges and rewards of methodological innovation. 73UrbanJourneys.com, an INCITE research project, looks at the relationship between technology use and senses of place through the lens of the bus. Using a website and weblog to gather, collate, analyse and present data presents many challenges to traditional ethnographic research such as new ways to consider the role of the researcher, interventions in the field, issues of transparency and representation. Part three of the session, taking a reflexive turn, will use vignettes developed from the experiences of past MSc students, now working in a variety of research settings, to form a basis for a more general discussion about the revisions and renewals in methodological strategies demanded by ‘real world’ research. Participants will be encouraged to draw on their own experiences in an exploration of ‘methodology’ as a dynamic, provocative part of the research process.
Nina, Vicky and I will also be running a workshop on sunday – When sociologists work with others: the challenges of an INCITE/RCA experiment – in which we will reflect on the interdisciplinary collaboration we were all involved in earlier this year. For a week in May seven sociologists from INCITE, UniS and Goldsmiths College were paired with seven Interaction Design students from the RCA. The original project webpage is here. Here is our abstract.
Social researchers often work in interdisciplinary teams. Learning the skills to work confidently and effectively in such situations is crucial, particularly as often you have to explain the nature of your methodologies to those who might be trained in completely different traditions. Yet through such collaborations renewals in sociological methodologies are possible. Furthermore, they are not only challenging but can be very enjoyable! In this session we will present a record of a collaboration between the Department of Sociology (through INCITE) and the Royal College of Art. For a week this Spring members from the Dept, both graduates and post-doctoral researchers, teamed up with interaction designers from the MA in Interaction Design. Much was explored about the nature of ‘translations’ necessary for sociological work to move outside its usual textual format. We will talk about what we learned and show you some of the prototypes which were developed directly out of ongoing social research projects.
I’ve never been to Bournemouth before. I’ve heard lots of things, both good and bad about it. But it’s near the sea, what can be bad about that, right?
November 16th, 2005