We are pleased to announce that that Dr Federico Cugurullo will be delivering the second Programmable City Seminar for the 2016/17 academic year on October 26th, 3.30pm, in room 1.31 of the Iontas Building, Maynooth University.
Dr Cugurullo recently joined the Department of Geography at Trinity College Dublin as Assistant Professor in Smart and Sustainable Urbanism. He previously worked as a lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester University. His research is positioned at the intersection of urban geography and political philosophy, and explores how ideas of sustainability are cultivated and implemented across geographical spaces and scales, with a focus on projects for eco-cities.
The seminar will explore the smart city through the example of Hong Kong.
Dr. Rachel O’Dwyer presented here on the 9th December (see poster), talking about the history of the blockchain and its relevance to governance. She talked about the relationship between peer-to-peer systems such as the blockchain in relation to our concepts of ‘governance’, ‘trust’ and ‘democracy’, stimulating an interesting discussion on how these concepts are reconceived in relation to this new form of digital infrastructure.
Along with our previous seminars from 2015, you can see the presentation below:
On May 27th 2015, Cathal Gurrin and Rami Albatal visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on lifelogging, covering the history of creating lifelogs, technological developments in the field, the current state of the practice and future possibilities for comprehensive personal data.
The talk was extremely well received, and this video of the event should be of interest to anone interested in lifelogging, the quantified self, personal or wearable technologies or the emergence and possibilities of personal data.
We are delighted to welcome Mark Maguire to The Programmable City project on Wednesday 25th February, 4-6pm in room 2.31, Iontas Building, Maynooth University. This is the fourth of our Programmable City seminars this academic year. Mark is a lecturer in Anthropology at Maynooth University. His research focuses on the areas of migration and security. He is concerned with exploring international migration through ethnographic research on everyday lives and the technologies and processes of securitization, especially counter-terrorism, biometric security, affective computing and the detection of abnormal behaviour and ‘malintent’. Mark is author of Differently Irish (Woodfield Press 2004), which explores the lives of Vietnamese refugees and their families, and, with co-author Fiona Murphy, Integration in Ireland: the everyday lives of African migrants (Manchester 2012). Mark is co-Editor of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.
We are delighted to welcome Ben Williamson to Maynooth on Wednesday 28th January for the third of our Programmable City seminars this academic year. Ben Williamson is a Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Sterling. His current research focuses on learning analytics, policy labs, and the emergence of new forms of digital education governance and digital policy instruments. His presentation at Maynooth will draw on the ESRC-funded Code Acts in Education project that Ben is currently leading.
The fifth Programmable City seminar will take place on May 7th. Based on some detailed ethnographic work, the paper will focus on the workings of control rooms in governing events.
Events and Urban Control Ben Anderson and Rachel Gordon
Time: 16:00 – 18:00, Wednesday, 7 May, 2014 Venue: Room 2.31, 2nd Floor Iontas Building, North Campus NUI Maynooth (Map)
Abstract
How do control rooms enable today’s networked urban life? And how are events grasped and handled from within control rooms as cities become known in new ways? The paper will hone in on how the events that interrupt urban life in the global north – the traffic accident, the delayed train, the power outage – are governed through control rooms; control rooms that are increasingly integrating an array of ‘smart’ technologies. Control rooms are sites for detecting and diagnosing events, where action to manage events is initiated in the midst multiple forms of ambiguity and uncertainty. By focusing on the work of control rooms, the paper will ask what counts as an event of interruption or disruption and trace how forms of control are enacted.
About the speakers
Dr Ben Anderson is a Reader in Human Geography at Durham University. Recently, he has become fascinated by how emergencies are governed and how emergencies govern. He currently leads a Leverhulme Trust International Network on the theme of ‘Governing Emergencies’, and is conducting a geneaology of the government of and by emergency supported by a 2012 Philip Leverhulme Prize. Previous research has explored the implications of theories of affect and emotion for contemporary human geography. This work will be published in a monograph in 2014: Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Ashgate, Aldershot). He is also co-editor (with Dr Paul Harrison) of Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography (2010, Ashgate, Aldershot).
Dr Rachel Gordon completed a ESRC-Funded PhD on the situated work of control rooms, with particular reference to transport systems and to how control rooms deal with complex urban systems. She currently coordinates an Leverhulme Trust international network on Governing Emergencies, after completing an EPSRC funded project on the relation between control rooms and smart technologies.
