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Dear Critters,

Please find below an invitation to a talk by Alex Taylor on* Data and Life
on the Street*, as part of the Citizen Sense, "Sensing Practice" seminar
series.

Hope some of you can make it!

Helen

 *Data and Life on the Street*
Alex Taylor <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ast/> in the
Citizen Sense "Sensing Practices
<http://www.citizensense.net/sensors/sensing-practices-seminar-series/>"
seminar series
28 January 2015, 16:00-18:00 <http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=7851>
138 Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, University of London

 What does the pervasive production and use of data mean for our everyday
lives? What relevance might data have in ordinary life—to community,
citizenship, democratic participation, government, etc.—those facets of
social life that are (whether we like it or not) important to us all? The
Tenison Road project is a year-long project aiming to explore precisely
these questions. The goal is to understand data from the perspective of
‘the street’ by working, collectively, with one road in Cambridge and
participating in different forms of data-related activities. In this talk
I’ll present some ways we have been experimenting with collecting,
representing and using data that is locally relevant, and describe how they
are directed at exploring new possibilities for collective participation,
civic engagement, democracy, etc. and ultimately making a difference to
daily life on ‘the street’.

*Bio*
Alex Taylor is a sociologist working at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He
has undertaken investigations into a range of routine and often mundane
aspects of everyday life. For instance, he's developed what some might see
as an unhealthy preoccupation with hoarding, dirt, clutter and similar
seemingly banal subject matter. Most recently, he’s begun obsessing over
computation and wondering what the compulsion for seeing-data-everywhere
might mean for the future of humans and machines.

 *Sensing Practices*
The Citizen Sense research group is hosting a year-long seminar series on
“Sensing Practices.” The series attends to questions about how sensing and
practice emerge, take hold, and form attachments across environmental,
material, political and aesthetic concerns. Rather than take “the senses”
as a fixed starting point, this seminar series instead considers how
sensing-as-practice is differently articulated in relation to technologies
of environmental monitoring, data gathered for evidentiary claims, the
formation of citizens, and more-than-human entanglements. How might these
expanded approaches to sensing practices recast engagements with
experience, and reconfigure explorations of practice-based research?

_______

Helen Pritchard
Researcher on European Research Council project, Citizen Sense
Goldsmiths,  University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
United Kingdom

www.citizensense.net

@citizen_sense
@helen_pritchard
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