Tuesday, Mar. 26, 2019
3 p.m. - 5 p.m.

Energy Environment Experiential Learning Building Room 161
University of Calgary
750 Campus Dr NW, Calgary, AB T2N 4H9

Unable to attend? Watch the live video stream of this talk on Mar. 26:
arts.ucalgary.ca/labs/global-urban-research/

Digital technologies of various kinds are now the means through which many cities are made visible and their spatialities negotiated. From casual snaps shared on Instagram to elaborate photo‐realistic visualisations, digital technologies for making, distributing and viewing cities are more and more pervasive. This talk will explore some of the implications of that digital mediation for the bodies assembled in digitally mediated urban spaces. What forms of embodiment are being made visible in these digitally mediated cities, and how? Through what configuration of urban temporality, spatiality and sociality? And how should that picturing be theorised? Drawing on recent work on the visualisation of so‐called 'smart cities', the lecture will suggest the scale and pervasiveness of digital imagery now means that notions of 'representation' have to be rethought. Cities and their inhabitants are increasingly mediated through a febrile cloud of streaming image files; as well as representing cities, this cloud also operationalises particular ways of being urban. The lecture will explore some of the implications of this shift for both theory and method as well as critique.

BIOGRAPHY
Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993), Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010) and Visual Methodologies (Sage, fourth edition 2016), as well as a many papers on images, visualising technologies and ways of seeing in urban, domestic and archival spaces. She is leading the ESRC‐funded project Smart Cities in the Making: Learning from Milton Keynes; her particular interest is how digital visualisations of many kinds operationalise smart cities (SCiM‐MK.org). She also curates the digital | visual | cultural series of events (dvcultural.org). Gillian’s webpage is at www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/grose.html; she blogs at visual/method/culture and can be found on Twitter @ProfGillian.

HOST
Dr. Rose's visit to Calgary is organized by the Social Justice and the Smart City Interdisciplinary Working Group at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. To find out more about the group and to contact the conveners about participating in their research activities, please visit their website.