[Air-L] Article/literature on "conceptions of space/place" for teaching

Jordan Kraemer jkraemer at uci.edu
Tue Apr 7 10:28:29 PDT 2015


Hi all,

I would add to the list two key anthro works on digital technologies, space, and place, which I found helpful in teaching my undergraduate seminar on ethnographies of emerging media this past fall:

Tom Boellstorff, 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life (argues for the constitution of the digital or virtual as a real space in its own right)
Daniel Miller and Don Slater, 2000 The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (2000) (discusses the embeddedness of the Internet in particular places)

Another piece I've found very helpful is Paul Dourish, Ken Anderson, and Dawn Nafus' 2007 "Cultural Mobilities: Diversity and Agency in Urban Computing"  (Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 4663, 2007, pp 100-113; http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-540-74800-7_8). It's about mobilities and technology but deals with urban space as well.

My work is also at the intersection of digital anthropology and placemaking -- I study social and mobile media in Berlin, in relation to the cultural production of scale. My 2014 article in HCI, "Friend or Freund: Social Media and Transnational Connections in Berlin," discusses scalemaking on social media in Berlin (available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07370024.2013.823821, or email me if you have issues accessing it). I also having a forthcoming piece in a new edited volume, eFieldnotes: Makings of Anthropology in a Digital World (Roger Sanjek and Susan Tratner, eds.), on producing the ethnographic field as a place through media practices, although it won't be available until this fall.

Best,
Jordan Kraemer

----------------------------
Jordan Kraemer | Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for the Humanities | Wesleyan University
jkraemer at wesleyan.edu | www.jordankraemer.com
Editor-in-chief, blog.castac.org

On Apr 3, 2015, at 3:44 PM, Daniel Kunzelmann <kunzelmann.daniel at yahoo.de> wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> Anyone wants to share their *must-read* with me?
> 
> I'm teaching an undergraduate course this upcoming semester in the field of *digital anthropology*. The seminars title: "*Place. Culture. Cybersp_ace.* Cultural and Social Anthropological conceptions of space/place ["Raum"] in the context of digital transformations." (the German title is a bit difficult to translate, because "Raum" seems to have a wider notion).
> 
> Together with my students I want to discuss *how digitalization/digitization changes todays places/spaces and our conceptions of those (physical, social, political, urban, hybrid, etc.)*. By "digitalization/digitization" I mean the empirical - material and symbolic - phenomena, not the concept (e.g. locative media-in-use, digital infrastructures, social media, etc.). Using theoretical texts, I want them to acquire *knowledge on the key concepts of "space" and/or "place".* How can we think space and/or place? And how can we apply such concepts in order to better understand todays digital developments in many spheres of (everday) life?
> 
> My idea would be to teach *two types of concepts*:
> 
> a.) *"new"* Cultural and Social Anthropological concepts and theories of space/place that *explicitly talk about and refer to digital phenomena.*
> b.) *"classical"* ones that do *NOT explicitly talk about these issues*, but that you would consider highly applicable to understand such phenomena.
> 
> I'd be very happy if you would share your knowledge and insights with me and my students :-)
> 
> Wishing you a happy Eastern from stormy Munich,
> Daniel
> 
> *----------------------------------------------------------------**
> **Daniel Kunzelmann, Ph.D.c**
> **Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich**
> **Institute of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology**
> **
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> **
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> 
> 
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