If you’ve emailed me since August, you may have noticed in my auto-reply some exciting career-related developments. For my sabbatical year, I am a Science & Technology Policy Fellow (that’s me in that page’s photo, 4th row back near...
Eliot Tretter and I are looking for a graduate student at the MA or PhD level to join our team on the Digitizing Carbon Capitalism project. This project, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant,...
I’m delighted to announce that my Open Panel has been accepted to the 2021 4S conference being held in Toronto and digitally. The panel, co-organized with the brilliant Morgan Mouton, takes a sort of processual ontological look at...
Below, I’ve pasted a call for papers for the 2021 AAG meeting. The session will be synergistic with a paper I’m currently writing (see the working paper version here), and is basically trying to home in on how space...
Where and how do you learn? Are you consciously learning while you navigate the blocks between your transport and your office or classroom? When you dig into books, are your notes meticulous and spontaneous, only to recede into the cavern...
For those of you wondering how/why I missed your email over the last couple weeks, let me first apologize, and then give you a sense of what my summer has been like so far. In addition to radical personal changes,...
I don’t typically post my talks to my website, but I quite liked how this one turned out. I’m providing the slides here, and find the text of the talk in the notes section. I welcome feedback, particularly as it...
And… more from the good news department: the special issue I helped co-organize with Jim Thatcher and Craig Dalton is now live at Professional Geographer! The issue features pieces written by Jim, David O’Sullivan, and Received word this morning that my article has been accepted to the 2018 Annals of the AAG special issue on social justice! I want to thank Reuben Rose-Redwood, Ian Schulte, and Kristian Bredemeyer for their feedback on early drafts, and... Over the last few years my love of making new years resolutions has been supplanted by a sheer survival instinct: running long distances was my means of self-preservation, not a hobby, and reading fiction essential to reading students’ exams. Enjoyable... With my first semester at Temple wrapping up, I am now able to reflect on where I started, where I’ve arrived, and the journey between. This semester was intensely difficult in many ways. The extension of capitalist relations into higher... Jesse McClelland, Cristina Temenos and I have put together a fun panel. We’re pretty excited to see where this goes! #Hipster Geographies: Socio-spatial practices, politics, and economies of one of culture’s most maligned figure.# AAG 2016, San Francisco,... This is a session Nick Lally and I are organizing for the 2016 AAG in San Francisco. Toward a geographical software studies A series of sessions for the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San... I defended my dissertation a couple weeks ago, and in the defense my committee raised some concerns that had already crossed my mind. (Before defenses of all sorts the candidate entertains every possible - even unlikely - scenario, question, and... Incredible - it’s been a year since I’ve posted a substantive piece here, and over six months since I’ve posted anything at all. It’s almost like I’ve been, well, writing a dissertation while applying for jobs! Well, the good news... Recently my research interests have leaned more heavily on my long-term fascination with “critical technology studies”. My thinking has mostly oriented around the ways technology broadly speaking - data structures, lines of code, representational capacities, hardware and gadgets, etc -... This Friday, May 30th, I will be presenting my research at the Department of Geography’s colloquium. It will hopefully be my last research presentation before my defense, so I’m welcoming you all out! See below for the publicity materials and... Admittedly, this post is less about “how to write” than “where we write matters.” Let me start with a few vignettes. (1)At my talk last week at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, my colleague... 2013 recap Conducted the bulk of my formal fieldwork for my dissertation. Visited NYC for fieldwork. Returned to CA from DC via the annual conference of geographers (AAG) in Los Angeles. Oxford... I’m writing a paper at the moment in which I explore the relationship between the promises of Big Data and how it actually plays out in a digital humanitarian context. My goal is to use the outcomes of my research... I just got back last night from my 2 weeks at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme in Toronto. Even though I’m still recovering (in the best sense of the word!), I’m compelled to update everyone who helped me... A couple weeks ago I was admitted to the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme in Toronto. As thrilled and honored as I am to attend the program, I found out that I don’t qualify for any funds from... A couple weeks ago UW shut down my web hosting because I am on research leave. They shut it down despite the fact that your website serves as a public “face” for people you’ve only contacted through email, so it’s... Here’s the living document (read: not even close to finalized!) of where you can find me at the AAG next week. Out of these I organized the panels “Critical Interventions into Gender & the Geoweb” and “Whither Small... I have a few thoughts to semi-coherently dump into a post while they’re on my mind. First, the background. One component of my fieldwork so far has involved trying to become a member of the crisis mapping community. Someone the... Every now and then I need to consciously and deliberately sit back and reflect on how far I’ve come in the last few years. Academic work, for all of its deep, beautiful rewards, can at times be excruciatingly unrewarding. Especially... I wasn’t going to post a list this year because I didn’t put too much effort into staying up-to-date with the scene. This is despite falling in love with nearly everything I heard from 2012. In fact, there were very... Non-academic Books A recent issue of Technology Review asks how technology has “failed us”, noting that “[o]ver a billion people still have no electricity, millions lack clean water, education is inaccessible to many, the climate is changing rapidly, traffic snarls... I’m pleased to announce that for the 2013 AAG in Los Angeles, Monica Stephens and I organized a panel that will address questions about the relationship between gender and the geoweb. This is a topic that hasn’t yet... About a month ago I attended the weeklong International Conference of Crisis Mappers; consider my mind blown. It was an incredibly rich experience and I’ve gathered loads of notes that will probably influence my dissertation work in... Update below heard this song for the first time in a long time, and thought it apropos the election season. but it seems to me to be a song not about voting in the literal sense, but about how one’s daily interjections... News of Neil Smith’s death got me reflecting on how much his work has influenced my own. For those who don’t know, Neil wrote some of the most important articles and books on gentrification, urban development, and uneven development.... Two recent events got me re-thinking some of my work, and if I were much of a blogger I would probably separate these into two posts. But I’m not really, so I’ll pack them into one. The first event was... The past several months I’ve noticed an increased allusion to the tired discourses of “Oh, that’s too academic and theoretical” and “I’m not an academic - I do things”. It’s probably due to many factors: I’m working in the immanently... A call for papers written by a colleague of mine and me. Thought some of the people interested in my previous blog post might like to attend/submit. Whither Small Data?: The limits of “big data” and the value of... The last week has been filled with goodbyes since I’m leaving Seattle this Wednesday(tomorrow. 7/18.). It’s been hard to get work done because I’m trying to soak in every last bit of this wonderful city. Project memories against the cityscape... I’m taking a moment before 4th of July festivities to think about one of the ‘hottest’ topics in geoweb studies right now - the ‘big data’ movement. To be sure, the interest/fascination, institutional frameworks, and social technology capabilities have been... Note: although this post sounds like it’s scolding people, i intend it more as a provocation. I’ve participated in a few conversations recently about “gender and the geoweb”. Since these conversations took place either on social media (FB & Twitter)... This spring quarter (March 26-June 8) will be a big one if I sit back and cruise, but I want it to be even bigger. I managed to have an outstandingly productive winter quarter, and I want to continue that... Where to stalk me… My own presentation is Friday morning, 8 AM in the “Theorizing the Geoweb” session. This weekend I was incredibly productive, despite battling lasting migraine symptoms from Friday. I finished the last fieldwork funding application I’ll submit as a doctoral student, bringing the total amount to $30k. I finished up my round of reviews of... I haven’t been able to write lately, having been under some pretty serious deadlines that require nothing less than days of busywork. How is it that the NSF DDRI Grant requires all that paperwork and then only gives $12k (that’s... in true ryan burns style, i’ve come up with a few new year’s resolutions - almost 2 weeks into the new year. Ordered by importance: among the more quotable quotes from last night’s new year festivities: me: looks like you’re drinking apple cider! In music, 2011 was a lot like that guy or girl at your work, or at your school, who tries so, so hard to be the best but just ends up being just slightly better than average. You feel bad... I’m simultaneously fascinated and extremely challenged by dialectical thinking. For those of you unfamiliar, dialectics is, in a nutshell, the idea that two or more processes confront each other and present contradictions; these contradictions must be resolved, but may internalize... Sometimes I feel silly for such repeated harping on the particularities of academic labor. It seems like every other blog post here is about What-I-Do-As-An-Academic. Partly this is because I have lots of friends and family outside the academic arena... I was asked a question today that I’d been cogitating already. The question was, paraphrased, “how will the West Coast Port Shutdown help workers if the port is shut down?” After all, since truck drivers are classified as “independent contractors”,... As most of you know, I’m in my second year of a certificate program in “public scholarship”, organized by Miriam Bartha of the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and Bruce Burgett of UW-Bothell. The program has... “The task of the critic is not to juxtapose an ideal, eternal standard to the existent, but through a ‘ruthless critique of the existent’ to reveal that what is, already contains within itself what ‘ought’ to be as a possibility. Updates below to read in 2012: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen Let’s test this whole crowdsourcing business here (not that I get a whole hell of a lot of comments, but hey…). At this point I’m open to future academic as well as non-academic jobs, but I’m having a hard time... The inequalities of the geoweb, while always present, emerge quite strongly and clearly in the moment of crisis mapping. Crisis mapping involves four processes that make it an inherently unequal endeavor: the enrollment of power relations, the political economy of... My dissertation research borrows ideas from the poverty & inequality literatures to understand the societal impacts of the geoweb. For this research I will look specifically at the moment of crisis mapping, and how the growth of geoweb modes of... Had a couple deadlines this week. The biggest deadline was a huge grant application due today, but Sarah Elwood, Katharyne Mitchell and I also launched another iteration of our “Mapping Youth Journeys” project this morning. Needless to say, I’m just... The last decade or so has seen a prominent shift in the ways we communicate geographic information. From Google Maps to geotagged Flickr photos and blog posts to the iPhone, a new suite of technologies is enabling everyday people to... Almost a month after returning from Minneapolis, I finally (fiiiinally!!!) wrote up my field notes from the Imagining America conference. In the notes I wrote a very brief summary of the overarching themes and strengths of the conference before... When I began falling down the rabbit hole of weird, experimental music in 2007, I was quickly surprised at how many widely-known artists had ventured into this territory. Ranging from drone to noise, and ambient to freak folk, these artists... For those of you interested in the special issue of Antipode that I’m planning with David Meek, here is the call for papers we circulated a while back. The deadline has passed and we’re unfortunately not accepting submissions any longer.... danah boyd recently posted on her blog an entry arguing that “real names” policies on social networking sites disproportionately affect marginalized populations adversely. The idea is that people - from any race, gender, class, background, etc. - have many... Via @plsj blog. I don’t know the source of the quote, but it’s a pertinent and insightful one. “Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may... I’m having way too much trouble with a paper I’m writing. Been suffering writer’s block for a couple weeks now, and really need to start pushing stuff out. So I’m going to write the section on qualitative geographic information systems... It’s often hard to keep track of progress through a PhD program - well, for me, at least. Part of the challenge is because there are relatively few measures of such progress, and any kind of measures are unlikely to... fraser - the redistribution-recognition dilemma (coming back soon) A wonderfully-written piece that examines the flip-side of the social justice we normally discuss. Social justice, for Fraser, depends not solely on the redistribution of resources, but also on recognition in... Today again I am hardly myself. It flows through me Verso Books has translated Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History. I’ve obviously never read it, but the description makes it sound essential. Looks very, very good! Thanks to Progressive Geographies for the link! Tomorrow my colleague Joe Eckert and I will chair the panel session we organized. Entitled “Critical Perspectives on Software and Space”, the session aims to bridge any remaining gap between critical geographic theory and the burgeoning field of... Below is my Google Calendar for the week of the AAG (April 11-16) here in Seattle. Of particular interest here is the “Critical Perspectives on Software & Space”, slated for Tuesday 2:40-4:20. My colleague Joe Eckert and I organized... Came across this poem on the Rec.Food.Drink.Tea Google group The first bowl moistens my lips and throat; The second bowl breaks my loneliness; The third bowl searches... This came across the Progressive Geographies blog (original post here): I’ve known and loved these people for more than a decade now, but in the past 18 days they have exceeded all expectations. We can only salute... One of the privileges I’ve had at University of Washington is to take highly interdisciplinary classes. The Certificate in Public Scholarship program, especially, has brought me and a couple other geographers together with landscape architects, english graduate students, and anthropology... Found this paper advertised on another blog yesterday. I haven’t read the whole thing, and much less the responses, but it looks really awesome. Abstract: Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the... In making this list I realized that 2010 was a great year for music. Several follow-up CDs either met or exceeded expectations, many bands settled well into new sounds, and other awesome new bands arose. Below is a list of... EDIT: if any geographers, social theory-heads, or anyone else want a more nuanced theoretically-driven discussion of my work, see my preliminary exam statement under the “dissertation” section of this site. I realized the other day while speaking with Uliana, and... This summer one of my major preoccupations was taking a mapping interface and integrating it into a Django framework. I had developed the former with a MySQL database backend, with PHP scripts accessing that database and serving up a dynamically... This week I gave in and finally started reading some material on critical realism (CR). Specifically, I read an interview with Roy Bhaskar, an article by Sayer (2004), and the intro to A Realist Theory of Science (Bhaskar 2008). I... The new school year is taking off for me next week, and that means I will begin blogging again. During the summer I have fewer things to say, apparently, since I’m not bombarded with new ideas every day. My goal... Last Sunday (8/1) I began training for the upcoming Seattle Marathon (11/28). Every other day I run for a period of time, and that time is increasing steadily week-by-week. For my own progress monitoring I am recording my paths, but...
(I’m already a good way through the previous three, so they should be crossed off pretty quickly)
As you can see, I have installed a new theme plugin package for my personal site. Its aesthetics are terrible (ugh!), but I’ll be tweaking it slightly over the next several weeks in order to make it...
him: yeah, it’s kinda like apple cider. a little stronger and maybe not as sweet. it ‘gets the job done’ quicker.One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia MarquezTo Kill a Mockingbird, Harper LeeCatch-22, Joseph HellerBreakfast of Champions, Kurt VonnegutThe Turn of the Screw, Henry James
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.
like the blue wave.
Green leaves - you may believe this or not -
have once or...
Lu Tong’s Seven Bowls of Tea -Lu Tong (Tang. 790~835)
