Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Maria Sourbati, exploring age and mobility in the AI era.
Details
In this presentation we reflect on ongoing (2025-) and completed fieldwork (2022-23) in Munich, Germany and Brighton, UK, on how digital tracking technologies are used in mobility contexts –often with the intention of being able to track own movements or the movements of others. In this paper we conceptualise smart mobility as an ‘ecosystem’ comprising mobility practices, data, digital networks, material/physical geographies, and digital devices and access (Loos, Sourbati & Behrend, 2023). We draw on rich empirical examples of firstly young people who are monitored at a distance when walking home from school or when at home in Munich, and secondly, older adults who use smart mobility apps when taking public transport (buses, bicycle, ride sharing) or track their own movements in Brighton. We will critically reflect on the marginalisation of younger and older people in media technology research and policy contexts. Age discrimination has remained largely unchallenged in research infrastructures (tools, funding), material mobility infrastructures, including AI/tech design, and institutional regulatory frameworks. As with other areas of digital communications, the social justice implications of older and younger people’ media use remain largely unchallenged in a research and funding culture that places too much emphasis on age related vulnerability and/or decline. We discuss our findings on how both younger and older users use digital platforms to track their exercise activities, to find information about bus or train timetables or share where they are in real time to notify family members about their whereabouts, but also on their critical reflections on data tracking.
Biography
Dr Claire Elisabeth Dungey is a Research Fellow at the University of Brighton. She has a PhD in anthropology from Aarhus University. Her research mainly focuses on everyday mobility patterns, such as children’s school journeys, as well as themes such as surveillance, care relations and future aspirations based on fieldwork in both rural and urban areas in Africa and Europe. In Claire’s current project she is doing ethnographic fieldwork in the UK on older people’s experiences of mobility and digital technologies. Forthcoming publication: Peacock V, Bruun K, Dungey C and Shapiro M (eds) (May 2025). Rhythm and Vigilance: Ethnographies of Surveillance and Time. Bristol University Press.
Dr Maria Sourbati is Senior Lecturer in the school of Art & Media at the University of Brighton. Her current research explores social and policy implications of emerging technologies with a focus on mobility, age and data. Maria is the UK lead in the AgeAI study which critically investigates discourses and practices surrounding the deployment of AI systems in five European countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK) with a focus on ageing populations
- Image Credit: Joudy Bourghli & The Bigger Picture / Better Images of AI / The Omnipresent Tapestry / CC-BY 4.0 https://betterimagesofai.org/
Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Rachel O’Neill and Dr Simidele Dosekun, exploring the online mediation of money-focused feminisms – in the context of International Workers’ Day.
Details
In this talk, we introduce and begin to conceptualise a new transnational phenomenon that we call ‘popular financial feminisms.’ Popular financial feminisms are highly mediated projects in which women claiming to have insight and expertise in financial matters – whether pertaining to everyday money management, the workings of complex financial instruments and investments, or anything in between – move to ‘empower’ other women with it, to share what they know as a kind of feminist act. Such texts and actors represent a culture of contemporary popular feminist solutionism applied to a generalised situation and sense of economic precarity, thereby engendering a novel form and site of financial self-help. While such projects represent a pragmatic response to the binds many women find themselves in, we argue that aspects thereof are pernicious in terms of what they bind women as well as feminism to. Our argument is developed with reference to two illustrative cases from disparate national and cultural contexts, demonstrating from the outset that these new money-focused feminisms span various forms of ‘difference’. In line with our May Day thematic, we conclude by discussing how left and socialist feminisms might variously contest and engage this terrain, in the interests of building assemblies directed towards a ‘red feminist horizon’ (Women’s Strike Assembly 2019).
Biographies
Dr Rachel O’Neill is a feminist media and cultural studies scholar specialising in gender and sexuality. Her research centers questions of subjectivity and inequality, primarily in the contemporary UK context but with attention to transnational circulations of culture and capital. She is the author of Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy, published by Polity in 2018. Her work has appeared in journals including Feminist Theory, Television and New Media, and European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Dr Simidele Dosekun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where she also serves as Programme Director for the MSc Global Media and Communications (LSE and Fudan) and MSc Global Media and Communications (LSE and UCT). Dr Dosekun’s research centres African women to explore questions of gender, race, subjectivity, and power in a global context. She is the author of Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture, and co-editor of African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics. Her work has appeared in the journals Feminist Media Studies, Feminism and Psychology, Qualitative Inquiry, and Feminist Africa, among others.
The Communication and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster welcomes you to this talk on Media Geographies with Prof. David Morley and Dr. Mike Duggan.
In order to understand how the media exercise their power, we also need to contextualise media and commutations studies themselves, by considering how they have been shaped by the specific circumstances of their development in the period of the post WWII economic boom in the affluent democracies of the world’s Northwestern ‘temperate zone’. In an era in which mobility is now becoming a key dimension of inequality, the study of communications must also involve questions of both geography and demography – in particular, the degrees of mobility (or immobilisation) of different categories of persons, technologies and commodities. We should perhaps be sceptical about the myths of digital media’s weightlessness, immateriality and lack of friction and especially its claims to enable us to transcend geography. In a world of heavily policed borders, with the rise of economic protectionism leading to tariff wars and increasing conflict over control of international trade routes, media and communications cannot be understood outside the context of these geo-political issues. In this context, as Foucault argued, we need theories and models which will enable us to understand both the ‘grand strategies of geopolitics’ and the ‘little tactics of the habitat’.
This event will open with a provocation from Prof. David Morley on the intersection between media and geography, followed by a response from Dr Mike Duggan, and what is sure to be a lively and highly informative discussion. The evening will be rounded off with a wine reception and the chance to continue conversations with friends old and new.
Prof. David Morley
David Morley is Emeritus Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Following his early work on media audiences and the household uses of information and communication technology, he has worked in the field of cultural geography for many years now. His publications include ‘Spaces of identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries’ (with Kevin Robins, Routledge 1997); ‘Home Territories ‘ (Routledge 2001); ‘Media, Modernity and Technology: the Geography of the New’ (2005) and ‘Communications and Mobility: the Migrant, the Mobile Phone and the Container Box (Wiley Blackwell, 2016). He also edited ‘Stuart Hall : Selected Essays Vols 1 and 2’ (Duke University Press 2019). His work has been translated into 22 languages.
Dr Mike Duggan (Kings College)
Mike Duggan holds a PhD in Cultural Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, working in partnership with the Ordnance Survey on studying everyday digital mapping practices. Mike is primarily interested in the intersections between technology, culture and everyday life. He has studied everyday mapping practices, the lived experiences of the sharing economy and video conferencing platforms. He a director of the Livingmaps Network and the editor-in-chief of the Livingmaps Review, a bi-annual journal for radical and critical cartography, which welcomes a range of submission styles from academics, artists, activists and others interested in maps and mapping practices. His latest book is All Mapped Out, is published by Reaktion Books (2024).
This event is hosted by Prof. Tarik Sabry and Dr Doug Specht.