Event overview
Alex Taylor in the Citizen Sense "Sensing Practices" seminar series
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.
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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?
Citizen Sense: Sensing Practices
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Jan 2015 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
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