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SPECIAL TRACKS: Burd Track on Media & Urban Life | Urban Issues in Asia & the Pacific Rim ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: 43rd Annual Meeting CommitteesUAA Governing BoardUAA Executive Office Staff

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SR

Scott Rodgers

Birkbeck, University of London
Lecturer in Media Theory
London, United Kingdom

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I usually describe my research as a fusion of media theory and urban theory, in that it seeks to address the nature of urban social and political life in an increasingly mediated world. The trajectory I’ve taken to get to this point has been interdisciplinary and full of accidents, taking in media and cultural theory, urban sociology, human geography, science and technology studies, urban planning and political theory. My most developed area of research is on the ways in which urban life has been a longstanding focus for, as well as a milieu of, professional and amateur journalism. I am currently working on a book titled Media and Urban Public Life which explores these themes, using the transmuting relationship of the newspaper and the city as its lens. A related project explores recent experiments in city-focused and ‘hyperlocal’ journalism practices, which deploy networked and mobile media to document, map, portray or engage city life.

I have also tended to return to some recurrent fixations. First, I continue to be interested in the idea of a specifically ‘urban’ politics, and in particular, how media and public action are unique ‘ways in’ for understanding the politics of urban life. Second, I usually look at media theory through the lens of spatial theory, while conversely obsessing about the blind spots geographers tend to have when approaching the subject of media. Finally, I usually do my theoretical and methodical with a focus on social practices and their material settings and technologies, and am especially interested in the interrelationships of media as a field of practices and media as technological forms. This is exemplified by interests in broad areas such as ethnomethodology, actor-network theory and phenomenology, as well as specific writers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, McLuhan, Latour, Bourdieu, Garfinkel and others.