Scott Rodgers

Lecturer in Media Theory

Contact details

Department of Media and Cultural Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX
email: s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk

Blog and personal website: http://www.publiclysited.com/ 

Employment history

Scott joined the Department of Media and Cultural Studies in January 2010. His most recent appointments, both at The Open University, were as a Research Associate in the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography.

Scott’s PhD, an organizational ethnography of a major Canadian metropolitan newspaper, was completed in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His prior education includes an MSc in Cities, Space and Society from the London School of Economics, and a first degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Ryerson University.

Current research interests

Scott’s research fuses scholarly work on media and communications together with approaches to cities and urban politics. A major strand of his research explores how urban life has been a long-standing focus for and milieu of professional and amateur journalism. He is currently working on a book that explores the unraveling relationship of newspaper, city and nation, and is developing new projects on recently-proliferating forms of urban ‘place blogging’ and the place of media in making urban housing markets.

This focus is complemented by broader research and teaching interests in the media-cities intersection, including how emerging media practices and technologies raise new questions about the political potential of ‘the urban’ – understood as public sphere, anchor of belonging, and site of citizenship claims – and the ways in which cities are characterized by intensities of media. An expression of these broader interests was the international workshop Scott recently co-organized in June 2008 entitled Mediapolis: Media Practices and the Political Spaces of Cities.

Coming out of an interdisciplinary background that includes geography, urban studies and urban planning, most of Scott’s work continues to be crosscut by three more general themes:

1. the bases for a specifically ‘urban’ politics, and the difference it makes when we look at the politics of urban life through the lenses of media and public action
2. the potential for critical dialogues between spatial and media theory
3. theoretical and methodical concerns at the junction of social practices and materiality, exemplified by interests in broad areas such as ethnomethodology, actor-network theory and phenomenology, as well as specific writers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, McLuhan, Latour, Bourdieu and others.

Recent publications

Journal articles

• Rodgers, S., C. Barnett and A. Cochrane (2009) ‘Mediating urban politics’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 33(1): 246-249.

Book chapters

• Rodgers, S. (2010, in press) ‘Digitizing and visualizing: old media, new media and the pursuit of emerging urban publics’ In Rethinking the public: innovations in research, theory and politics. N. Mahony, J. Newman and C. Barnett (eds). Bristol: Policy Press.
• Rodgers, S. (2010, in press) ‘Mediating new cities of diversity: the Toronto Star and Toronto’s reading publics’ In The contemporary Canadian metropolis. Edited by Ri Dennis, C. Morgan and S. Shaw (eds). London: Institute for the Study of the Americas.
• Rodgers, S. (2009) ‘Urban geography: urban growth machine’ In The international encyclopedia of human geography. R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds). Oxford: Elsevier. Volume 12: 40-45.

Edited Journal Issues

• Rodgers, S., C. Barnett and A. Cochrane (eds) (forthcoming). Special Issue on ‘Where is urban politics?’ Political Geography
• Rodgers, S., C. Barnett and A. Cochrane (eds) (2009). Debate on ‘Re-engaging the intersections of media, politics and cities’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 33(1).

Book reviews

• Review of: Blum, A. (2003) The imaginative structure of the city. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. In: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30(1): 240-241

Conference proceedings

• Rodgers, S. (2007) ‘The politics of researching ‘elite’ media geographies’ Doing postgraduate research on citizenship, identities and governance. Open University: Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance.
• Rodgers, S. (2006) ‘Newspaper journalism and the changing publics of multimedia cities’ Linköping electronic conference proceedings, No. 20 – Cities and media: cultural perspectives on urban identities in a mediatized world. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.