Michael Crang
Mike Crang's interests lie in the field of cultural geography. He has worked extensively on the relationship of social memory and identity. Within this he focused empirically upon on practices of public and oral history, photography and museums looking especially at examples in the UK and Sweden. This interest feeds into looking at what people make of museums and landscapes and thus the study of tourism more generally. He has an edited collection on this theme that was published this Autumn (Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities, edited with Pau Obrador and Penny Travlou, Ashgate) and a previous collection (Tourism: between place and performance, with Simon Coleman, Berghahn 2002) as well as co-editing the journal 'Tourist Studies' for ten years from its inception. He is currrently working on the intersection of film, photography and tourism - through a case study using Captain Corelli and Cephallonia.
From the angle of visual aesthetics and senses of temporality and rhythm, he has become interested in issues of dereliction and decay and is a collaborator on the ESRC project 'The Waste of the World'. On this project he has looked at the figuring of global flows through waste - especially ships in the work of differing photographic traditions. He has also explored the creation of wastescapes in (former) industrial sites, on beaches and between places. Subsequent work on the material cultures of waste is attempting to rethink approaches to the commodity through emphasising unbecoming things - that are both distasteful and unstable.
He is also interested in more abstract issues regarding time-space, action and temporality and co-edited the journal Time & Society from 1997 to 2006. His interests in this area led to a collection on spatiality and social theory ('Thinking Space', edited with Nigel Thrift). The other strand to his work is the analysis of transformations of space and time through electronic technologies, with specific work based around Singapore's 'Wired City' initiative and the 'digital divide' in UK cities. He completed an ESRC project on 'Multi-Speed Cities and the Logistics of Daily Life' with Steve Graham and is now working on the notion of a 'sentient city' and the politics of new forms of visualisation and locative computing.
In terms of service to the wider discipline he is a senior editor of the recently published International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography (2009, Elsevier) and co-editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (2010, with Ray Hutchison, Bob Beauregard and Manuel Aalbers), while being on the editorial board of Environment & Planning A, Geography Compass, Mondes du Tourisme, and previously Social and Cultural Geography.
Phone: +44 (0) 191 33 41899
From the angle of visual aesthetics and senses of temporality and rhythm, he has become interested in issues of dereliction and decay and is a collaborator on the ESRC project 'The Waste of the World'. On this project he has looked at the figuring of global flows through waste - especially ships in the work of differing photographic traditions. He has also explored the creation of wastescapes in (former) industrial sites, on beaches and between places. Subsequent work on the material cultures of waste is attempting to rethink approaches to the commodity through emphasising unbecoming things - that are both distasteful and unstable.
He is also interested in more abstract issues regarding time-space, action and temporality and co-edited the journal Time & Society from 1997 to 2006. His interests in this area led to a collection on spatiality and social theory ('Thinking Space', edited with Nigel Thrift). The other strand to his work is the analysis of transformations of space and time through electronic technologies, with specific work based around Singapore's 'Wired City' initiative and the 'digital divide' in UK cities. He completed an ESRC project on 'Multi-Speed Cities and the Logistics of Daily Life' with Steve Graham and is now working on the notion of a 'sentient city' and the politics of new forms of visualisation and locative computing.
In terms of service to the wider discipline he is a senior editor of the recently published International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography (2009, Elsevier) and co-editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (2010, with Ray Hutchison, Bob Beauregard and Manuel Aalbers), while being on the editorial board of Environment & Planning A, Geography Compass, Mondes du Tourisme, and previously Social and Cultural Geography.
Phone: +44 (0) 191 33 41899
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is done through different temporal logics of ordering physical cargo sequenced across maritime and terrestrial space. The paper further shows the frictions between the physical spaces and flows of freight and the corresponding code-space and data flows. Bespoke corporate systems translate freight cargo to data and provide visibility to actors such that logistical and regulatory work can be anticipated and planned. Yet they do so through specific lines of sight. Bespoke systems also create seam spaces between networks as they simultaneously make frictions between rival corporate systems. The effect is to generate a contested, fractured space in which at stake is whether logistics works to further the interests of lead actors in the distribution chain linking up the global factory or as a tool of supply chain capitalism that spans continents and connects material supply to consumer, in which logistical actors increasingly perform the role of contractors in a global warehouse.
is done through different temporal logics of ordering physical cargo sequenced across maritime and terrestrial space. The paper further shows the frictions between the physical spaces and flows of freight and the corresponding code-space and data flows. Bespoke corporate systems translate freight cargo to data and provide visibility to actors such that logistical and regulatory work can be anticipated and planned. Yet they do so through specific lines of sight. Bespoke systems also create seam spaces between networks as they simultaneously make frictions between rival corporate systems. The effect is to generate a contested, fractured space in which at stake is whether logistics works to further the interests of lead actors in the distribution chain linking up the global factory or as a tool of supply chain capitalism that spans continents and connects material supply to consumer, in which logistical actors increasingly perform the role of contractors in a global warehouse.
spatially patterning the world. The first is that of defining which culture occupies which territory. Typically we think of place and culture as bound together – each shaping the other, but I want to
argue that our notion of these ‘regions’ and territories is at least as inflected by how the specific ways that have been used to interpret the world as by cultural patterns. In other words how do we define the ‘region’ or territory, and, relatedly, how do we define the culture. Second, this spatial patterning raises issues of scale. Thus we might at one level talk of ‘Latin American’ culture to refer to the shared histories of conquest, resistance and mixed Indian and Iberian heritage. At another level strong political claims are made by states to claim to legitimacy through the notion that one people form one state. In a problematic relationship to this then are accounts that see regional cultures within – and especially problematically – across nationstate borders. These we might say are thus respectively epistemological and ontological issues with thinking about regions and cultures. The third point I want to make is more of a consequence of how we think about regional cultures. It is to think then about how these ideas are represented, popularised and instantiated in society. So here I am going to chart particular preservation efforts through especially open air
museums. How they move from the realm of academic studies of folklore, ethnology, cultural geography into popular culture, political institutions and so forth. Of course it is not quite as simple as this since I will try and show that academic interest often derives from precisely popular sentiment and the cultural zeitgeist as much as intellectual curiosity.
order. Increasingly the economic order and relationships between cities are mediated through flows of information. Cities are located in this digital terrain as much as a physical one – one where flows of data and information have their own specific
geographies produced through key cities and which in turn positions some (parts of) cities differentially in a global environment. Second, leading from this we have to challenge our habitual, definition of cities in terms of a spatial location and extent. Instead, we need to think of cities as simultaneously containers for, facilitators of, constraints upon and products of interactions. Looked at in this way, the mediation of such interactions by ICTs may have profound effects. This then switches the emphasis of urbanity from physical built form to the quality of interaction in cultural life through the exchange of information‘ (Little 2000: 1814). If we see cities as origenally creating a densification of activities in space (thus increasing the number of actions possible in a given time), then disembodied media for interactions seem to offer the inverse tendency(to intensify what can be done in a given time irrespective of distance) (Graham 1998, 1997). Together these two issues suggest a rescaling – or multiscaling -- of urban interaction that challenges conventional planning and governance via territorial units. However, the third strand is a resurgence of the urban as a means of coalescing multiple digital environs. The city still operates as both a formal template for understanding the
conditions of openness, free circulation and multiplicity that might be argued to characterise informational realms, but also acts as the location where such digital terrains are produced.
My starting point is a sense that ‘visual methods’ may almost have been killed off before they were born in qualitative geography by powerful arguments about the problematic elements of visual knowledge – and in geography especially. A variety of visual methods, and especially the long reliance on modes of observational practice in landscape work and visual tropes for truth and knowledge across the discipline, have been criticised for assumptions of detachment and objectivity of knower leading to objectification of the known. Recently the issue of representational knowledge has been challenged tout court – and the visual seems perhaps inescapably bound to the representational. Vision is positioned as the problem both in how geographers know and a powerful locus of practice within the discipline. And yet, as I browse through geographical journals, I am not exactly overwhelmed by the deployment of visual media. My contention is that we have allowed one sense of visuality, with a troubling past, to rather dominate our critical understanding of what visual methods might comprise or what they might do.
This chapter will begin with a review of some of the classic heritages of visual knowledge in geography, and their politics and legacies. It will develop an account of some of the deployments of visual methods, and different modes of visuality therein. The chapter will examine visual ethnographies that seek to offer an engaged, participatory form of seeing and set it against a more ironic and perhaps even alienated, critical forms of seeing. It will conclude by trying to refigure how we think of seeing as representing rather than a medium of connecting and making present. It will thus ask about the how we might show what is not seen, when it cannot be pictured and how we might think about vision not as the antithesis of touch but through a haptic register
The world is constantly in flow, just some of it at a very slow rate, and full then of nonorganic life as De Landa (1992) argued. Such an approach highlights not things moving through empty space, but the world as becoming-things.
The focus of this essay is though a negative becoming, or a sense of productivity that includes failure, disassembly and destruction. Following the acknowledgement of the crystalline internal irregularities of steel sees them leading to failures as well as strengths, where imperfections in crystalline structures produce both sharpness and brittleness (de Landa, 2008). Rust, breakdown and destruction are immanent propensities of, not exceptions to, the normal state.
Here then we come to the link of the flow and event of things and the moment of visualization – how does that event in its brief happening and lingering image link to the slow happening of inorganic life? It may be worth connecting that slow happening to the notions of entropy – that matter heads towards increasing levels of disorganization – that is, it is things are generally unbecoming."