Current research
My research addresses the nature of urban social and political life in an increasingly mediated world. This focus, at the junction of urban and media studies, has led me to connect to debates across several disciplines, including urban sociology, human geography, media and cultural theory, science and technology studies, and political theory. My most developed area of research is on the ways in which urban life has been a longstanding focus for, as well as a milieu of, professional and amateur journalism. I am currently working on a book that explores these themes, focused on the transmuting relationship of the newspaper and the city. A related project explores recent experiments in city-focused or ‘hyperlocal’ journalism practices, which deploy networked and mobile media to document, map, portray or engage urban public life.
In addition, I am developing two collaborative projects with Dr Susan Moore at the UCL Bartlett School on the implications of new media for urban economies and built environments. The first of these looks at how media increasingly, yet unevenly, shape the practical knowledge of producers and consumers of housing, through for example geospatial house search tools, or DIY television programming. The second project focuses on emerging uses of various social media tools and platforms in controversies around urban change, such as those focused around local planning decisions.
Another way to describe my work is to list some recurrent theoretical fixations. In this respect, my work tends to be crosscut by three more general themes: (1) an interest in the idea of a specifically ‘urban’ politics or public culture, and especially its constitution through media and processes of mediation; (2) the potential for critical dialogues between spatial and media theory; and (3) a theoretical and methodical focus on social practices and their material settings and technologies, 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, Garfinkel and others.
In June 2008, I co-organized an international workshop exploring some of the above themes, entitled Mediapolis: Media Practices and the Political Spaces of Cities.
