Precarious Times: Precarious Spaces

Beyond the edges of the map: The ghost city of Ordos Kangbashi - Christina Lee, Senior Lecturer, Curtin University The ghost city phenomenon in China first came to international attention in 2009 in an Al Jazeera report. A combination of different factors, including the ways in which state planning works and the global financial crisis, … Continue reading Precarious Times: Precarious Spaces →

Precarious Times: Banal Precarity

The symposium opened with a panel on Banal Precariousness. Anne Allison, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, spoke on "Cleaning up dead remains in times of living/dying all alone: social singlification in Japan", building on her book, Precarious Japan. As demographic changes happen in Japan, many older people have become worried about dying alone rather … Continue reading Precarious Times: Banal Precarity →

Intersectional feminism and online harassment

Thinking Beyond ‘Free Speech’ in Responding to Online Harassment just came out in issue 10 of Ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology. This article is an attempt to consider what it might mean to take the possibilities and challenges of intersectionality seriously in our approaches to online harassment/abuse. In particular, I argue … Continue reading Intersectional feminism and online harassment →

Overlapping edges

Over the last few days, I've been thinking more about the idea of 'belonging' in academia, following on from my reflections post-AoIR. The converse of not having a single place that feels, unproblematically and fully, like my academic home, and the place where I belong, is that I get to have many spaces where I … Continue reading Overlapping edges →

AoIR2016: on not finding home

A lot of people attending talk about having found their academic 'home', or about having found their 'people'. This is understandable: AoIR is an eclectic space, full of amazing, interesting people who are tackling important new problems (and often having to create new methodologies in order to do so). It's not my home, though. Except … Continue reading AoIR2016: on not finding home →