Rob Shields - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Rob Shields
In the context of globalization and risk management, knowledge and the virtual are key concepts t... more In the context of globalization and risk management, knowledge and the virtual are key concepts that are poorly understood by decision makers and social theorists. This article refutes the OECD’s presumption that knowledge is an intangible, fixed asset, by showing the importance of context, scale and the ‘virtuality’ of knowledge in risk-management, communication, and knowledge management The article examines factors which maintain knowledge in a more fluid state. I begin with an examination of the rise of the notion of the ‘knowledge-based economy’ and assumptions about the nature of knowledge as information as a ‘thing’ which can be accumulated and commodified as an asset This is followed by a discussion of the virtuality of knowledge, as opposed to actuality. Methods such as figure-ground are noted as possible approaches to the contexts of knowledge use. 1 THE CHANGING STATUS OF KNOWLEDGE Overwhelmed with information, we face a crisis of knowledge. Knowing and know-how, the strat...
Strip Appeal (www.strip-appeal.com) was an ideas design competition intended to stimulate and sho... more Strip Appeal (www.strip-appeal.com) was an ideas design competition intended to stimulate and showcase creative design proposals for the adaptive reuse of small-scale strip-malls. It was also a mode of experimentation both for the organizers, Patchett and Shields, and entrants and eventual winners, Davidson and Rafailidis. For the organizers, Strip Appeal offered the opportunity of experimenting with the competition as social research – a method for the generation rather than the mere collection/representation of knowledge, experience and materials relating to a muchmaligned building type. For the entrants/winners it offered the opportunity of experimenting within the competition as practice using a competition “brief” or question as a jumping-off point to explore, develop and test an architectural idea – in this case, the idea of architectural spolia – in a specific design proposal. Following Bruno Latour (1999) the experiment can be understood as a transformative process – for the...
Our paper offers a social semiotics of innovation based on a study of paradoxical discourses on n... more Our paper offers a social semiotics of innovation based on a study of paradoxical discourses on nanotechnology in a “Citizen Summit” that was part of a SSRCC-funded project upon “Nanotechnology and the Alberta Capital Region – A Case Study in Integrating Communities, Innovation and Development” in and around Edmonton, Canada (CRSC 2013; on this method see Stilgoe 2013; Evers and D’Silva 2009; Corner and Pidgeon 2012; Joly and Kaufmann 2008). Algirdas Julien Greimas’ original semiotic model involving six actors or rather actants “subject / object / sender / receiver / helper / opponent” provides a framework for analysing these discourses and considering the portrait that participants draw of the challenges and opportunities facing local actors and institutions engaging with a globalised network of research and commercial development. Our approach utilises early science studies, a field that has tarried with but not systematically followed through on Bruno Latour’s use of the Greimass...
Boundaries and boundary-drawing, a classic geopolitical and urban practice, finds itself in a sta... more Boundaries and boundary-drawing, a classic geopolitical and urban practice, finds itself in a state of crisis. Boundary-marking as both an administrative and cultural exercise is more fraught in contemporary politics. Boundaries as interfaces and social situations challenge the definition and identity of suburbs, creating a situation in which not only does suburbia loose identity but the divisions that distinguish the urban and rural are undermined. Preamble: Defining Borders For the purposes of my argument, the term border (from Portuguese and Spanish via the Old French bordeure ‘edge’) presently denotes territorial or material cases at least in English, the word refers to a state border, the border of a diagram, a flowerbed planted along the edge of a property. In contrast, boundaries mark a border or edge. A marker stone (bourne), a line on a map, or even the result of an equation mark the ‘bounds’ of an area. If borders are material, boundaries are semiotic. They describe a broa...
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) intended as digital forms of mapping struggle to represent... more Geographical Information Systems (GIS) intended as digital forms of mapping struggle to represent time, change and temporality. The assumption of a static Cartesian, metric space of two or three dimensions only and defined by coordinates makes it difficult to create GIS and Historical GIS (HGIS) interfaces and representations that include the dynamics Bergson and later Deleuze describe. They argue that temporal memory is the basis of attention in encounters and perception of situations. This “affiliation” of the past enlivens the present perceptual life of experience. Video gaming and the combination of Google Earth and Street View are explored as limited alternatives that draw on embodied, kinaesthetic experiences of movement in space to open up or “uncurl” extra dimensions that allow more nuance in digital representations of spatiotemporal encounters, and the many modes and rhythms of duration found in the environment.
We characterize Paul Virilio as a «clinical» thinker who diagnoses systemic problems of modernity... more We characterize Paul Virilio as a «clinical» thinker who diagnoses systemic problems of modernity in accidents and unusual incidents. Virilio’s method of clinical theoretical diagnosis is illustrated through an examination of common elements in his writing, including the German ‘Atlantic Wall’ fortifications of the Second World War, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, consumers’ widespread use of household products emitting volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and the global leisure tourism industry. All illustrate an apocalyptic thinking and a legacy of catastrophe that Virilio refers to as an expansive ‘war machine’ that colonizes all places and flattens difference in the name of normative governance.
Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research
Focus groups on nanoscience, walking tours and a Citizen Summit demonstrate the Edmonton Canada c... more Focus groups on nanoscience, walking tours and a Citizen Summit demonstrate the Edmonton Canada community acting as both a sounding board and also as a collective think tank that mediates across ne...
Space and Culture
Introduction to Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine. This special issue assembles a set of short in... more Introduction to Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine. This special issue assembles a set of short interventions selected by internal blind review from submissions in response to a call for papers. The contributors document the first phase of the pandemic from February to May 2020, reflect on and respond to the first few months of the global spread of COVID-19, its arrival in communities and its personal impacts and effects on the public realm, from travel to retail to work and civil society. They encompass many continents, from Latin America to Asia. Staying six feet apart provides a rubric for the spatial experience and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban life, our understanding of public interaction, crowd practice, and everyday life at home under self-isolation and lockdown. Time changed to a before and after of COVID-19. The temporality of pandemics is noted in its present and historical popular forms such as nursery rhymes (Ring around the Rosie). Place ballets of avoidance, ...
Canadian Journal of Sociology
In response to the global mythology spawned by visual representations of Fort McMurray, Canada, t... more In response to the global mythology spawned by visual representations of Fort McMurray, Canada, this article examines a critical, collaborative youth project that sought oblique entry points to prevailing storylines of “community” and to what it might mean to live in the shadow of one of the world’s largest resource extraction complexes. Building on visual methodologies where participants are encouraged to produce representations of home and place, we explore the two-way dynamic of the camera as a catalyst for assembling a temporary research collective and, by the same token, as a tool for composing and assaying the contours of “community.” The project under consideration encouraged participants to learn skills of photography and to dynamically engage with other participants, researchers, and the place(s) of Fort McMurray around the creation and public display of images in both on-line and off-line spaces. Where possibilities of “community” are polarized, occluded, and/or overdeterm...
Space and Culture
This article considers the ethical implications of a stance toward or relation with the natural e... more This article considers the ethical implications of a stance toward or relation with the natural environment that could be characterized as dominant across many sectors of not only the economy but consumption patterns generally. Despite popular perception or denial of climate change over the past decades, this is an implicit relation toward the collateral risks and damages to ecosystems by human activity. Not only are livelihoods sustained on the basis of natural resources but the direct costs of hydrocarbon development are borne locally in the environment. For some, this is understood to be without a personal cost despite the fears expressed. The article quotes from interviews with residents. It stages a broader, continuing conversation about the ambivalence of being dependent on hydrocarbons. This article explores the difficulty of developing an ethical engagement with the nonhuman and natural ecosystems when they are relegated to the status of what will be referred to as “bare nat...
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory
ABSTRACT This paper surveys discussions of abstraction in the sociological and political economic... more ABSTRACT This paper surveys discussions of abstraction in the sociological and political economic literature that tie it a relation to the material. This is developed from the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Under the rubric of the liminal, the diachronic interchange between these poles will be examined to better understand how the Abstract saturates the material. This entails not only the purely Abstract but involves Virtualities that are intangible, Ideal-Real. This lends reality an air of added dimensions, expanding the Real beyond the merely material into a non-Euclidean, ‘abstract space’. This spatialization of abstraction is introduced within the work of Sohn-Rethel but has not been remarked upon. While this multidimensional topological space appears to have magical qualities, Turner’s understanding of liminality is drawn upon to understand the dynamic quality of abstraction as a relation and process between the Abstract and Material. Liminality mobilizes the Virtual or ideal-real. Liminal rituals are epistemic ‘sociotechniques’ (cf. Krämer, Siegert) involving abstraction and the management of abstraction through simple ritual action. Abstraction does not pull away from as much as extend and configure the Real (Lyotard).
Space and Culture
There is a problem with North American research that refers to their studies of the Global Urban ... more There is a problem with North American research that refers to their studies of the Global Urban South. This generalization bundles together the hutongs and new downtowns of Jinan with the beseiged blocks of Ramallah and the migrant barrios of Bogotá. In an attempt to overcome a selection bias toward cities most accessible to researchers on the East and West coasts of the United States, a new reification could easily result. This special issue focuses more specifically on urban changes in a set of Chinese cities. For over a decade, China has been at the center of a rapid urbanization of the largest population on earth. Although the media and more recently researchers on globalization, planning, and urban studies have turned their attention to this development, there is much more to be understood about this epochal change in the habitat of humanity. In June 2016, Prof. Zhou Xian, Dean of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanjing University, brought together Chinese and international scholars in a workshop on Spatial Culture in Contemporary China. This special issue presents a small selection of papers presented at the workshop to give a sense of the depth and vibrancy of urban research in China. The outstanding quality of the workshop was to engage urban political economic and sociological research (such as Hu Daping and Zhou Shangyi) with a broader field represented by analysts of urban form such as Tang Keyang, Yao Yifeng, and Tong Qiang or architects such as Lu Andong, with the translators of urban texts who are also deeply engaged in literary studies such as Yan Jian, and theorists reinterpreting European and North American urban theory such as Liu Huaiyu and Zhao Chen, and with students of visual culture such as Zhang Jie. David Harvey offers an important overview of the implications of Chinese urbanization for global economies and also material cultures in the form of the consumption of concrete on an unprecedented scale to accomplish this construction. His article also presents a call to the analysis of the conditions of exchange amid a ‘realization crisis’ by which the profits from locally produced goods are realized overseas by distributors, marketers and brand enterprises (the example of the iPhone “Made in China Designed in California,” comes to mind). Harvey challenges both orthodox Marxist analysis of value and the managerialist culture of planning and municipal development. This article marks an important shift in Marxist analyses of value and inequality. Despite being in such a dynamic period, this ambitious field struggles to attract global notice and to add its experience to international understandings. The process has created wealth, advantage and status as well as new forms of inequality, alienation, and loss of empathy. It has threatened not only individual identity but made community precarious. The landscape has changed so much that access to historical elements of cities and the continuity of community have been disrupted. In China, methodological debates around quantitative and qualitative, descriptive and
TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies
Current Sociology
This article argues that C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination has changed, as evident in ... more This article argues that C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination has changed, as evident in sociologies that think beyond national societies and analyse globalization. This ‘imagination’ has in effect been ‘expanded’, moving from one-dimensional (linear) analyses based on historical vectors of force and teleologies to a more contextualized, relativized spatial analysis with more dimensions. There were always outliers. However, at least for mainstream North American sociology, this represents a change in the spatialization of social science, a change in its presuppositions about space, not the becoming spatial of a non-spatial sociology. Borders and mobilities across and along borders are examined in relation to what is needed to confront them critically in a new spatial regime – a new ‘spatialization’ of the social. A hypothesis is developed that understands borderlines relationally as institutions and social technologies that introduce difference and inequalities into an other...
In the context of globalization and risk management, knowledge and the virtual are key concepts t... more In the context of globalization and risk management, knowledge and the virtual are key concepts that are poorly understood by decision makers and social theorists. This article refutes the OECD’s presumption that knowledge is an intangible, fixed asset, by showing the importance of context, scale and the ‘virtuality’ of knowledge in risk-management, communication, and knowledge management The article examines factors which maintain knowledge in a more fluid state. I begin with an examination of the rise of the notion of the ‘knowledge-based economy’ and assumptions about the nature of knowledge as information as a ‘thing’ which can be accumulated and commodified as an asset This is followed by a discussion of the virtuality of knowledge, as opposed to actuality. Methods such as figure-ground are noted as possible approaches to the contexts of knowledge use. 1 THE CHANGING STATUS OF KNOWLEDGE Overwhelmed with information, we face a crisis of knowledge. Knowing and know-how, the strat...
Strip Appeal (www.strip-appeal.com) was an ideas design competition intended to stimulate and sho... more Strip Appeal (www.strip-appeal.com) was an ideas design competition intended to stimulate and showcase creative design proposals for the adaptive reuse of small-scale strip-malls. It was also a mode of experimentation both for the organizers, Patchett and Shields, and entrants and eventual winners, Davidson and Rafailidis. For the organizers, Strip Appeal offered the opportunity of experimenting with the competition as social research – a method for the generation rather than the mere collection/representation of knowledge, experience and materials relating to a muchmaligned building type. For the entrants/winners it offered the opportunity of experimenting within the competition as practice using a competition “brief” or question as a jumping-off point to explore, develop and test an architectural idea – in this case, the idea of architectural spolia – in a specific design proposal. Following Bruno Latour (1999) the experiment can be understood as a transformative process – for the...
Our paper offers a social semiotics of innovation based on a study of paradoxical discourses on n... more Our paper offers a social semiotics of innovation based on a study of paradoxical discourses on nanotechnology in a “Citizen Summit” that was part of a SSRCC-funded project upon “Nanotechnology and the Alberta Capital Region – A Case Study in Integrating Communities, Innovation and Development” in and around Edmonton, Canada (CRSC 2013; on this method see Stilgoe 2013; Evers and D’Silva 2009; Corner and Pidgeon 2012; Joly and Kaufmann 2008). Algirdas Julien Greimas’ original semiotic model involving six actors or rather actants “subject / object / sender / receiver / helper / opponent” provides a framework for analysing these discourses and considering the portrait that participants draw of the challenges and opportunities facing local actors and institutions engaging with a globalised network of research and commercial development. Our approach utilises early science studies, a field that has tarried with but not systematically followed through on Bruno Latour’s use of the Greimass...
Boundaries and boundary-drawing, a classic geopolitical and urban practice, finds itself in a sta... more Boundaries and boundary-drawing, a classic geopolitical and urban practice, finds itself in a state of crisis. Boundary-marking as both an administrative and cultural exercise is more fraught in contemporary politics. Boundaries as interfaces and social situations challenge the definition and identity of suburbs, creating a situation in which not only does suburbia loose identity but the divisions that distinguish the urban and rural are undermined. Preamble: Defining Borders For the purposes of my argument, the term border (from Portuguese and Spanish via the Old French bordeure ‘edge’) presently denotes territorial or material cases at least in English, the word refers to a state border, the border of a diagram, a flowerbed planted along the edge of a property. In contrast, boundaries mark a border or edge. A marker stone (bourne), a line on a map, or even the result of an equation mark the ‘bounds’ of an area. If borders are material, boundaries are semiotic. They describe a broa...
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) intended as digital forms of mapping struggle to represent... more Geographical Information Systems (GIS) intended as digital forms of mapping struggle to represent time, change and temporality. The assumption of a static Cartesian, metric space of two or three dimensions only and defined by coordinates makes it difficult to create GIS and Historical GIS (HGIS) interfaces and representations that include the dynamics Bergson and later Deleuze describe. They argue that temporal memory is the basis of attention in encounters and perception of situations. This “affiliation” of the past enlivens the present perceptual life of experience. Video gaming and the combination of Google Earth and Street View are explored as limited alternatives that draw on embodied, kinaesthetic experiences of movement in space to open up or “uncurl” extra dimensions that allow more nuance in digital representations of spatiotemporal encounters, and the many modes and rhythms of duration found in the environment.
We characterize Paul Virilio as a «clinical» thinker who diagnoses systemic problems of modernity... more We characterize Paul Virilio as a «clinical» thinker who diagnoses systemic problems of modernity in accidents and unusual incidents. Virilio’s method of clinical theoretical diagnosis is illustrated through an examination of common elements in his writing, including the German ‘Atlantic Wall’ fortifications of the Second World War, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, consumers’ widespread use of household products emitting volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and the global leisure tourism industry. All illustrate an apocalyptic thinking and a legacy of catastrophe that Virilio refers to as an expansive ‘war machine’ that colonizes all places and flattens difference in the name of normative governance.
Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research
Focus groups on nanoscience, walking tours and a Citizen Summit demonstrate the Edmonton Canada c... more Focus groups on nanoscience, walking tours and a Citizen Summit demonstrate the Edmonton Canada community acting as both a sounding board and also as a collective think tank that mediates across ne...
Space and Culture
Introduction to Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine. This special issue assembles a set of short in... more Introduction to Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine. This special issue assembles a set of short interventions selected by internal blind review from submissions in response to a call for papers. The contributors document the first phase of the pandemic from February to May 2020, reflect on and respond to the first few months of the global spread of COVID-19, its arrival in communities and its personal impacts and effects on the public realm, from travel to retail to work and civil society. They encompass many continents, from Latin America to Asia. Staying six feet apart provides a rubric for the spatial experience and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban life, our understanding of public interaction, crowd practice, and everyday life at home under self-isolation and lockdown. Time changed to a before and after of COVID-19. The temporality of pandemics is noted in its present and historical popular forms such as nursery rhymes (Ring around the Rosie). Place ballets of avoidance, ...
Canadian Journal of Sociology
In response to the global mythology spawned by visual representations of Fort McMurray, Canada, t... more In response to the global mythology spawned by visual representations of Fort McMurray, Canada, this article examines a critical, collaborative youth project that sought oblique entry points to prevailing storylines of “community” and to what it might mean to live in the shadow of one of the world’s largest resource extraction complexes. Building on visual methodologies where participants are encouraged to produce representations of home and place, we explore the two-way dynamic of the camera as a catalyst for assembling a temporary research collective and, by the same token, as a tool for composing and assaying the contours of “community.” The project under consideration encouraged participants to learn skills of photography and to dynamically engage with other participants, researchers, and the place(s) of Fort McMurray around the creation and public display of images in both on-line and off-line spaces. Where possibilities of “community” are polarized, occluded, and/or overdeterm...
Space and Culture
This article considers the ethical implications of a stance toward or relation with the natural e... more This article considers the ethical implications of a stance toward or relation with the natural environment that could be characterized as dominant across many sectors of not only the economy but consumption patterns generally. Despite popular perception or denial of climate change over the past decades, this is an implicit relation toward the collateral risks and damages to ecosystems by human activity. Not only are livelihoods sustained on the basis of natural resources but the direct costs of hydrocarbon development are borne locally in the environment. For some, this is understood to be without a personal cost despite the fears expressed. The article quotes from interviews with residents. It stages a broader, continuing conversation about the ambivalence of being dependent on hydrocarbons. This article explores the difficulty of developing an ethical engagement with the nonhuman and natural ecosystems when they are relegated to the status of what will be referred to as “bare nat...
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory
ABSTRACT This paper surveys discussions of abstraction in the sociological and political economic... more ABSTRACT This paper surveys discussions of abstraction in the sociological and political economic literature that tie it a relation to the material. This is developed from the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Under the rubric of the liminal, the diachronic interchange between these poles will be examined to better understand how the Abstract saturates the material. This entails not only the purely Abstract but involves Virtualities that are intangible, Ideal-Real. This lends reality an air of added dimensions, expanding the Real beyond the merely material into a non-Euclidean, ‘abstract space’. This spatialization of abstraction is introduced within the work of Sohn-Rethel but has not been remarked upon. While this multidimensional topological space appears to have magical qualities, Turner’s understanding of liminality is drawn upon to understand the dynamic quality of abstraction as a relation and process between the Abstract and Material. Liminality mobilizes the Virtual or ideal-real. Liminal rituals are epistemic ‘sociotechniques’ (cf. Krämer, Siegert) involving abstraction and the management of abstraction through simple ritual action. Abstraction does not pull away from as much as extend and configure the Real (Lyotard).
Space and Culture
There is a problem with North American research that refers to their studies of the Global Urban ... more There is a problem with North American research that refers to their studies of the Global Urban South. This generalization bundles together the hutongs and new downtowns of Jinan with the beseiged blocks of Ramallah and the migrant barrios of Bogotá. In an attempt to overcome a selection bias toward cities most accessible to researchers on the East and West coasts of the United States, a new reification could easily result. This special issue focuses more specifically on urban changes in a set of Chinese cities. For over a decade, China has been at the center of a rapid urbanization of the largest population on earth. Although the media and more recently researchers on globalization, planning, and urban studies have turned their attention to this development, there is much more to be understood about this epochal change in the habitat of humanity. In June 2016, Prof. Zhou Xian, Dean of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanjing University, brought together Chinese and international scholars in a workshop on Spatial Culture in Contemporary China. This special issue presents a small selection of papers presented at the workshop to give a sense of the depth and vibrancy of urban research in China. The outstanding quality of the workshop was to engage urban political economic and sociological research (such as Hu Daping and Zhou Shangyi) with a broader field represented by analysts of urban form such as Tang Keyang, Yao Yifeng, and Tong Qiang or architects such as Lu Andong, with the translators of urban texts who are also deeply engaged in literary studies such as Yan Jian, and theorists reinterpreting European and North American urban theory such as Liu Huaiyu and Zhao Chen, and with students of visual culture such as Zhang Jie. David Harvey offers an important overview of the implications of Chinese urbanization for global economies and also material cultures in the form of the consumption of concrete on an unprecedented scale to accomplish this construction. His article also presents a call to the analysis of the conditions of exchange amid a ‘realization crisis’ by which the profits from locally produced goods are realized overseas by distributors, marketers and brand enterprises (the example of the iPhone “Made in China Designed in California,” comes to mind). Harvey challenges both orthodox Marxist analysis of value and the managerialist culture of planning and municipal development. This article marks an important shift in Marxist analyses of value and inequality. Despite being in such a dynamic period, this ambitious field struggles to attract global notice and to add its experience to international understandings. The process has created wealth, advantage and status as well as new forms of inequality, alienation, and loss of empathy. It has threatened not only individual identity but made community precarious. The landscape has changed so much that access to historical elements of cities and the continuity of community have been disrupted. In China, methodological debates around quantitative and qualitative, descriptive and
TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies
Current Sociology
This article argues that C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination has changed, as evident in ... more This article argues that C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination has changed, as evident in sociologies that think beyond national societies and analyse globalization. This ‘imagination’ has in effect been ‘expanded’, moving from one-dimensional (linear) analyses based on historical vectors of force and teleologies to a more contextualized, relativized spatial analysis with more dimensions. There were always outliers. However, at least for mainstream North American sociology, this represents a change in the spatialization of social science, a change in its presuppositions about space, not the becoming spatial of a non-spatial sociology. Borders and mobilities across and along borders are examined in relation to what is needed to confront them critically in a new spatial regime – a new ‘spatialization’ of the social. A hypothesis is developed that understands borderlines relationally as institutions and social technologies that introduce difference and inequalities into an other...