The [urban interfaces] graduate seminar 2018-2019

February – March 2019 | Utrecht University
In the graduate seminar series The Right to the City & Urban Commons , students participate in three seminar sessions and a 2-day ‘pressure cooker’ workshop. The first seminar will focus on conceptualizing the notions of ‘the right to the city’ and the ‘urban commons’. What are today’s urban commons and how can people claim their right to the city in contemporary shifting urban conditions? The second session is dedicated to current urban common practices, and the imagining of new ones, from the perspective of media, art and performance projects. Several case studies will be discussed and analyzed. The third seminar prepares participants for the two-day pressure cooker workshop, where students will learn how to put their theoretical knowledge into practice through the use of a ‘critical making’ approach.

RMeS Workshop Appnography: Researching the apps of life and the life of apps

1 April 2019 | University of Groningen
This workshop explores how we can study mobile application software, popularly known as ‘apps’, discussing and applying methods from digital ethnography and user interface analysis. For most people who own a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet, apps are part and parcel of everyday life. Whether people cook, play, jog, or date, they increasingly use apps to aid them in these activities and practices. At the same time, apps – or at least their developers – use us to gather user data, often for commercial purposes, or to refine their proprietary algorithms.

RMeS Masterclass: Spatiotemporal Interface perturbations with James Ash (Newcastle University)

18 January 2019 | University of Amsterdam
This masterclass engages with this dual nature of interface as an encounter between designers and users in daily lives. Specifically, it explores such interfaces from the combined perspectives of media theory and post-phenomenological geography, as interfaces emit subtle influence over how users experience the rhythms of the world, shaped by the interest of those who design them.

RMeS Winter School & Graduate Symposium 2018-19

31 January | Leiden University
PhD’s are kindly asked to submit an abstract of their paper presentation. This may regard a chapter of your dissertation, a draft for an article, or a write-up of research results, which you would like to discuss with your peers. We will group your abstracts into panels, selecting panels on the basis of your theme/subject, approach and your level of advancement in the PhD track.