果冻传媒

Two urban research projects led by CIM members of staff have received seed funding from the Participatory Research Fund. The aim of the fund is to support the development of pioneering participatory research.

The awarded projects are 鈥�Investigating the effects of street features and sunlight conditions on people鈥檚 perception of walkability through a participatory experiment鈥�, led by Tessio Novack (CIM) in collaboration with Carlos Camara Menoyo (CIM) and James Tripp (果冻传媒, IDG), and 鈥淓xploring hybrid digital-physical prompts for participant engagement on more-than- human data interactions in the smart city", led by Cagatay Turkay (CIM) with collaborators Sara Heitlinger (City, University of London), Rachel Clarke (Newcastle), and Graham McNeill (independent researcher).

RECLAIM (Reclaiming Forgotten Cities) is a new project involving Dr. Calvillo from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (果冻传媒) to support Britain鈥檚 towns and cities as they adapt to the impacts of climate change.

The aim of the RECLAIM (Reclaiming Forgotten Cities) network is to create a multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral network to maximise the social, ecological, urban, and economic positive impacts of green-blue-grey-infrastructure. The network has a central ambition of addressing the levelling up agenda by incorporating both social justice issues and ecological quality into the design of multi-functional grey, green and blue space in cities, to ensure liveable cities which are sustainable and resilient to the future challenges.

The network has been awarded 拢1.5 million from UK Research and Innovation and is led by the University of Surrey in collaboration with the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), as well as the Universities of Bath, Bangor and 果冻传媒. The network already has more than 200 academic, non-academic and industrial partners and is rapidly growing.

To receive updates and get involved join the network here:

Naomi Waltham-Smith is a panellist at Mischon de Reya鈥檚 event on 22 June at 6pm about the Higher Education (Freedom of Expression) Bill and its ramifications for the sector. The panel, chaired by Prof Anthony Julius, includes barrister and ECHR Commissioner Akua Reindorf, Partner Robert Lewis, Senior Associate James Murray, Buckingham VC James Tooley, and President of the Union of Jewish Students Nina Freedman. At 果冻传媒 Dr Waltham-Smith is leading the work of the Senate working group to develop a new Code on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression.

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CIM is delighted to announce the success of our REF2021 submission in three Units of Assessment (UoAs) across three Faculties. All three UoAs placed our research and impact in the top 12 in the UK: Sociology - 10th, Computer Science - 4th, and Music, Drama, and Film and Television Studies - 12th.

CIM鈥檚 mission to drive world-class research by pioneering, testing and promoting interdisciplinary methods and approaches put us in an excellent position to contribute to REF 2021, with its foregrounding of interdisciplinarity. In a little over ten years, CIM has created a truly unique and vibrant academic environment in which researchers with backgrounds in fields as diverse as computer science, media studies, sociology, musicology, anthropology, architecture and ecology share ways of working.

Key to CIM's strategy for research and impact during this REF period has been its focus on advancing a distinctive approach to interdisciplinarity which works across disciplines by focusing on methodological innovation. We design, conduct and study experiments in participation in collaboration with academic colleagues across disciplines and beyond academia, implementing participatory methodologies for knowledge creation and societal engagement. We develop critical, rigorous and reflective approaches to data collection and analytics, making use of inventive methods including crowd-sourced data collection, digital mapping, DIY sensors, apps and art installations.

This strategy has enabled CIM to establish research collaborations with scientists and scholars across a wide range of disciplines and a diverse set of partners and networks connecting across academia, public policy, industry, cultural institutions and activism. The success of CIM鈥檚 transformative interdisciplinary, inter-faculty, research and impact strategy is manifest in our varied sources of funding including the ESRC, AHRC, the Alan Turing Institute, NERC, EPSRC, ERC, Horizon 2020, the Wellcome Trust, the Newton Fund, and the Leverhulme Trust.

We would like to extend our gratitude to all members of staff in CIM who contributed to or supported our REF2021 submission, and to our colleagues in Computer Science, Sociology and the Arts for working with us over the REF2021 cycle.

Discover our interdisciplinary research: some highlights of our REF2021 submission by UoA here

This article proposes the methodological and conceptual tool of 鈥榬ecursion鈥� as a means of understanding the production of historical continuity and discontinuity between different forms of nationalism in Bulgaria. The recent case of the demolition of the socialist-modernist monument 鈥�1300 Years of Bulgaria鈥� and its replacement with an earlier memorial from the authoritarian period of the 1930s forms the point of departure for this examination. Adopting a media and cultural studies perspective, the text focuses on the symbolic function of lions in both monuments and how they are engaged in the production of nationalist rhetoric and imagery. In line with Ann Laura Stoler鈥檚 (2016) proposition that the method of 鈥榬ecursive analytics鈥� can allow us to overcome the impasse formed by attempts to postulate either continuity or rupture between present and past, I first account for the histories of the erection of both monuments before proposing to read the 鈥楤ulgarian lions鈥�, featuring in both of them, as recursive figures.

Zofia鈥檚 presentation was delivered during the 4^th ERSA Winter School. The event is aimed at young researchers, where they work together with top experts in the field of spatial methods. The 5-day training focused on applied spatial quantitative methods such as spatial econometrics, spatial statistics and spatial machine learning. These are used in regional sciences, economic geography and urban studies.

Zofia鈥檚 study aims to look for spatial dependence between regional inequalities and cycling inequity. Her ERSA presentation focused on the spatial model that shows spatial disparities in cycling among London boroughs. The research results will be presented in the upcoming journal publication.

Check out the collection Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice, co-edited by CIM member Maria Puig de la Bellacasa with colleagues Dimitris Papadopoulos and Natasha Myers, and published with Duke University Press, 2022

The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineering, physics, science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and cultural studies—the contributors examine the relationship between chemistry and ecology, probe the logics that render wind as energy, excavate affective histories of ubiquitous substances such as plastics and radioactive elements, and chart the damage wrought by petrochemical industrialization. Throughout, the volume illuminates how elements become entangled with power and control, coloniality, racism, and extractive productivism while exploring alternative paths to environmental destruction. In so doing, it rethinks the relationship between the elements and the elemental, human and more-than-human worlds, today鈥檚 damaged ecosystems and other ecologies to come

As part of the international App Studies Initiative, Michael Dieter and Nate Tkacz have published the findings of their study of Covid apps, funded by the ESRC. Here is the abstract, published in the :

This article provides an exploratory systematic mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic response apps. After considering policy updates by Google Play鈥檚 and Apple鈥檚 App Store, we analyse all the available response apps in July 2020; their different response types; the apps鈥� developers and geographical distribution; the ecosystem鈥檚 鈥榞enerativity鈥� and developers鈥� responsiveness during the unfolding pandemic; the apps鈥� discursive positioning; and material conditions of their development. Google and Apple are gatekeepers of these app ecosystems and exercise control on different layers, shaping the pandemic app response as well as the relationships between governments, citizens, and other actors. We suggest that this global ecosystem of pandemic responses reflects an exceptional mode of what we call 鈥榩andemic platform governance鈥�, where platforms have negotiated their commercial interests and the public interest in exceptional circumstances.

Towards the end of Wes Anderson鈥檚 film Fantastic Mr. Fox is a much-discussed scene in which the eponymous protagonist, admitting to his phobia of wolves, attempts in vain to herald in various languages a lone wolf, whose lack of clothing marks him as 鈥渨ild.鈥� The scene brings into focus the cunning that appears to make the fox 鈥渕ore human鈥� and less 产锚迟别 than other creatures, including the lion whose brute strength must be combined in Machiavelli鈥檚 prince with foxy know-how in order to frighten off the terroristic and voraciously savage wolves. I interrogate the 鈥渃unning of cunning鈥� signified by the fox—the second-order feigning of the feint and sovereign capacity to efface one鈥檚 tracks supposedly proper to the human and by which Agamben he gets people to believe, if only for a while, that he is the first to know who will have been first. I track—脿 pas de loup—Derrida鈥檚 readings of Machiavelli, Agamben, and Lacan in the third, fourth, and twelfth sessions of the first year of La 产锚迟别 et le souverain in order develop and set out the political stakes of his indictment of Agamben鈥檚 strategic feint—an indictment that extends not only to his theory of biopolitics and of life but to his ontologization of power, potency, and (im)potentiality more generally.

We are pleased to announce a new job opportunity. We are recruiting for an Assistant Professor. Deadline for applications: 21 Feb For details of the position please follow this link: