I’ve been playing with a Go Pro camera which takes a photo every two seconds. Compiling all of these images (and there are a lot), I am working on a clunky and bumpy time-lapse film of my commute to school- will post shortly.

Her paper is called: How far can we go? Experiments with visual methods

Methodology Institute Seminar Series
Date: Monday 15 March 2010
Time: 5-6.30pm
Venue: B813 Columbia House
Speaker: Nina Wakeford, Reader in Sociology and ESRC Research Fellow, Goldsmiths College, University of London

I’ve been photographing a few of the bike lane signs and am fascinated by the uniqueness of each one. I used to think there was some kind of impossible bike stencil, but it appears in many cases that the street sign writer makes them up on the job.

I also recently came across this – oh, if only…..

It came from here where there are many more weird and wonderful bike related things.

i just found a series of sketches I made during the Domestic Space and Interfaces for Located Mobility project back in 2007. It is interesting to see these sketches all together. I’ve started to collate them here in order to see how they might develop.

This is the side of a house I partly own in Sydney. A friend recently sent me this pic showing new graffiti on one full side of it. I think it’s amazing.

Thanks Al.

The exhibition was opened at the end of the ‘Sociological Imagination’ Conference at Goldsmiths yesterday afternoon. About forty people attended which was impressive considering it was the end of a very interesting, yet very long day (and a Saturday at that) AND we were on route to the pub after the gallery.

Thank you to INCITE and to the Department of Sociology for supporting the exhibition and also to Professor Bev Skeggs for involving it in the conference.

Making mess at home:

Making mess in the gallery:

Accoutrements of installation:

Inside the exhibition:

Enormous thanks to Britt for helping to install the exhibition.

My exhibition preparation is progressing interestingly. First, and most obvious, I am doing it from a distance (Australia) and will have to find a way of transporting bits of it across the world. Second, I lost my notebook somewhere between Sydney and Adelaide a few weeks ago and with growing dread I realise how much vital information was in it (initial ideas, detailed lists, scaled drawings of the gallery space!). Third, I’ve too many ideas and need to narrow them down in order to make any kind of visual sense.

Here is some of the background/ contextual imagery I am putting together.

Two other bits of exhibition news:

I’ve got a title: “Makers”, “Mashers” and “Mods”: Grassroots technology practices in suburban Australia

I’ve had confirmation of a small amount of funding from INCITE and the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths to support the exhibition.

Exciting!

I am currently preparing a second exhibition of my PhD research. The first, in 2007 in the field, revealed my ethnographic work-in-progress in the backyard of a suburban house. Participants, predominantly respondents and family members, interacted with my research by literally entering into it, touching, talking about and eventually taking away objects, field notes, photos and sketches. Feedback was immediate and invaluable to my ongoing analysis. The second iteration will coincide with a conference hosted by the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths for the 50th anniversary of ‘The Sociological Imagination’ (Mills 1959) in October this year. I am very excited about this opportunity to again present my work in a site-specific multi-dimensional manner. Not only does it enable a tactile, visual and sensual engagement with my key findings in a way that differs to that of reading a textual argument or hearing a presentation, it also presents an opportunity to showcase my work to my academic peers.

This is the space I have to work with.

As per the first exhibition, I will fully document the event and explore the way it brings to life the textures, nuances and overlapping multi-dimensional character of encounters with backyard technologists in my fieldwork and subsequent analytic process. I am also very interested in responses to my work and will capture feedback for use in future publications.
Although many researchers seek to expose their findings to as wide an audience as possible, the actual making of knowledge into anything other than text is unusual and an area that remains critically undeveloped (Law 2004; Hine 2007). Producing an exhibition of this nature contributes to the work of those who seek less ordered and linear accounts of sociological knowledge (Pink 2001; Knowles and Sweetman 2004; Hjorth 2005, 2007). As per the DIY nature of my research I will attempt to wherever possible adapt and re-use materials from my previous exhibition in Australia, thereby taking my ‘multi-sited’ ethnography to multi-sites (Marcus 1998).

My aim for the exhibition is to open up for discussion, improvised, hands-on and object-oriented ways of thinking about and through knowledge production.

It’s 06.35. I am jetlagged. I arrived yesterday. I am in Australia, east coast, at a family home, to visit and work on various bits of writing and web projects as I wait for news of my post-doc applications. I am standing outside the house on the concrete driveway, between the vegie patch, water tanks and site of the new chicken coop, surrounded by thick green rain forest. I can hear the whip birds, cocky’s and kookaburras waking up and the rustle of gum leaves and branches in the wind. I watch a pair of rangy bush turkeys ignore me, wander past, pecking at the grass and scratching at twigs. I’m perched on an old upside down fruit crate I found in the shed. I hold my laptop. It’s chilly but the laptop is keeping my knees warm, that is, when I’m not sporadically waving it in the air trying to catch bits of internet that blow down the hill in the wind from a nearby house*.

* I have permission to access their wireless internet but for obvious reasons do not want to subject them to my random now-seems-a-good-time-to-send-some-emails jetlagged mind.