The affective intensities of datafied space

The concept of datafication - which refers to the idea that many aspects of life can be rendered into digital data which can subsequently be analysed and used to understand, predict and guide interventions in society - has been both enthusiastically engaged with and critically deconstructed in recent literatures. In this article, we explore the relevance of datification for understanding the spatiality of everyday life. In doing so, we argue for a refigured concept of datafication through theoretical and empirical scholarship focused on affect. We suggest that a renewed concept of datafication - that is, of datafied space - offers a framework for how we dwell in and move through a world where digital data about humans have an increasing presence. To make our arguments, we offer an account of a recent study of cycle-commuting and self-tracking in Melbourne and Canberra, Australia. We used helmet-mounted action cameras and video interviews in a ‘digital sensory ethnography’ to explore the entanglement of bodies, bicycles, digital devices, data and affect that shape how people move through and make sense of what we call ‘datafied space’.     

Exploring Gender in South-Asian Cultural Memory Through Artistic Process

Abstract

My artistic inquiries draw from gender and sexuality in public space and use performance as process. In inspiration, the works emerge as aesthetic responses to post-colonial, gendered public identities and as negotiations with the cultural politics of modernity. Dwelling on the interaction of Indian modernity with cultural memory through myth, ritual, traditions and colonial histories, I hope to touch upon multiple influences of the Indian public sphere. Through a fragmented contemplation on guiding impulses, this discussion propositions the production of works as potentials to re-eroticise the public sphere.     

Language as potential space for relational positioning: Exploring language use as a manifestation of leadership anxiety dynamics

This exploratory study considered language use as a manifestation of anxiety in work and everyday settings. Respondents were seven psychology practitioners from across the discipline (following a psychodynamic approach), who reflected on the dynamics of language use associated with their social and occupational roles. Hermeneutic phenomenological analysis revealed the way in which participants characterised their language use in managing the language of titles and defining potential space for relational, regressive and defensive purposes.     

Russian-language neurosemantics: Clustering of word meaning and sense from oral narratives

This article is a part of a large-scale brain mapping project aimed at finding the relations among semantic categories in oral Russian-language texts and brain activity as measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The goal of present study in particular is to examine the nature of lexical semantic relations and find an appropriate lexical space, homeomorphic to the activation patterns in the brain. Participants were presented with oral narratives, which described significant social issues from the first-person perspective. Stimuli were annotated using a dictionary and a vector approach. Results show that fMRI signal and clusters of related words have similar patterns of brain activation across participants. Results also show that annotation by a list of features more strongly contributes to prediction of the observed activation patterns. Findings confirm the hypothesis of situational semantic representation in the brain.     

Religion in urban assemblages: space,law, and power

ABSTRACT

This contribution explores how religious diversity is governed at the urban level and seeks to explain patterns of regulatory practice. It does so by developing the notion of the urban religious diversity assemblage, by which I mean heterogeneous regulatory apparatuses that are territorially ambiguous and fluid, change over time, and operate as enabling and constraining conditions for religious expressions in diverse cities. Made up of human actors (both state and non-state, secular and religious), material elements (infrastructures, technologies, and artefacts), laws, and representational tools (e.g. maps), I argue that these urban assemblages produce and configure religious diversity as an urban social reality. I draw on empirical examples from my fieldwork in Quebec to illustrate the arguments. Based on these theoretical concerns, the contribution identifies and elaborates on fields of regulatory practice and shows how they are shaped by law and judicial contestations.     

Peek-a-who? Exploring the dynamics of early communication with an interactive partner swap paradigm and state space grid visualization

Effective caregiver-infant communication occurs when interactive partners successfully coordinate multiple modalities (e.g., body movements, affect, eye gaze). The complex interplay of multiple modalities during caregiver-infant interactions is difficult to capture, which has made a comprehensive, evidence-based understanding of caregiver-infant communication difficult to achieve. We present a novel methodological approach to address this challenge by combining an Interactive Partner Swap (IPS) paradigm with a longitudinal design, detailed multimodal coding, and data visualization via state space grids (SSGs). We demonstrate the utility of our approach by presenting three sets of SSGs which reveal both dyadic flexibility and stability in caregiver-infant peek-a-boo interactions across three levels: micro (moment-to-moment), meso (interactive context), and macro (infant development). By using SSGs to explore the patterns that hold and others that differ systematically across interactive partner and infant development, our novel approach promises to offer critical first steps to creating a more detailed understanding of the dynamics of early multimodal communication.     

La reprise d’études universitaires : entre continuité et rupture

The presented study pursued the objective to analyze the dialectic break/continuity susceptible to cross the transition of resumption of studies to the university, of the decision-making in the real-life experience of the first one-month of training. For that purpose, two models were summoned, that of motivations Push/Pull, Antipush/Antipull of Mullet, Lunch, Lemaire, Raiff and Barthorpe (2000) and that of the transitional processes proposed by Perret-Clermont and Zittoun (2002), as well as the concept of perceived social support completed of the notion of perceived social brake. The analysis of semi-directive conversations led with 10 adults in resumption of studies in a university of Île-de-France first brought to the foreground four motivational, certain dynamics more marked with the seal of the break (early or consummate), others more registered in a professional continuity (to develop or to install). Then, the analysis identified the most notable upheavals of the experience of the first months of training (identity plan and management of the various spheres of activity). Finally, it appeared that the social supports perceived, although important throughout the transition, vary in nature and function in each of the two periods of transition studied (decision, beginning of training). The results are particularly discussed in terms of Amartya Sen's capability approach.