BANKS+Delineating+a+Project


 * 1) A "field guide" for working in one's own back yard as an activist academic. Being an activist and an academic will, inevitably, mean that you are involved in local affairs and issues. Even if it isn't your major "site" of research (perhaps you specialize in rural Peruvian farming collectives but are based out of Urban-Champagne) you are bound to sit in on meetings, get roped into a project, or even take on a facilitating or leadership role in a local community project. It is probably difficult, for the self-identified activist academic, to keep their hands out of local politics. That means you have to develop skills that let you sustain professional and personal relationships while also being critical and deconstructive in your analysis and day-to-day thinking. This methodological discussion is wrapped around and is seen through the concept of "technologies of public space." I.e. made artifacts that foster, encourage, and facilitate coming together and collective effervescence. This project is equal parts a methodological experiment in an activist sociological imagination and contribution to STS theory on defining technologies of public space.
 * 2) The project Introduces the term "technologies of public space" and defends, challenges, and qualifies the term across three heterogeneous projects. "Technologies of public space" are meant to compliment existing work that focuses on "popular technologies" (Eubanks 2011), generative technologies (Zittrain 2008) and recursive publics (Kelty 2008 and Eglash & Banks forthcoming in 2013). Technologies of public space might be recursive in their production or maintenance, and might be public technologies as well, but neither are necessary characteristics of technologies of public space. I will rely heavily on feminist and post-modern critiques of the Habermasian public sphere and offer little in the way of contributing to new meanings of "the public." I will, however play with the ideas of "technology" and "space" as contestable categories and dubious unities. In STS we talk about intangible things like language and practice as "technologies" but this is not popularly understood. This project will attempt to popularize this idea amongst its participants and ask that people consider new practices and new technologies as two sides of the same coin when it comes to solving perceived problems. Space will also be critically analyzed in terms of digital technologies. I will further the work of Jurgenson (2012) in stating that making //a priori// distinctions between the physical and the digital lead to poor analysis of social action that involved digital devices and new media.
 * 3) A deliberate "bridging" project between urban studies and Science and Technology Studies. Expanding on the work of Anique Hommels (2005) and Wiejbe Bijker (1997) but not from a SCOT or ANT perspective. Would take a more post-colonial/radical/cyborg/deconstructivist approach that is focused on power relations and liberatory potentials. Technologies of Public Space inscribes the field in which STS and Urban Studies overlap. To write about or practice Technologies of Public Space is to operate within this new trans-disciplinary field. The project is a call for deep collaborative work and new kinds of information sharing practices (beyond conferences and closed journals) that involve heterogeneous groups of people over various lengths of time. Technologies of Public Space is also primarily interested in answering the question, "How can a researcher format a project such that multiple people can come and go and the work still remain in tact and legible?"