Mobile Perceptions
Reúno neste post algumas informações interessantes que recolhi nos últimos dias.
1. Mobile Citizen Project
O programa Mobile Citzen Project pode interessar a instituições brasileiras que queiram realizar projetos com mídias móveis para ajudar contra a pobreza. O Projeto visa financiar projetos de 30 a 100 mil dolares na América Latina. A informação vem do Mobile Active. Vejam pequena descrição abaixo:
“The Mobile Citizen Project, which aims to fund and support mobile initiatives for social change in Latin America, launches today. The program is a project of the Science and Technology Division of the Inter-American Development Bank, with the support of the Italian Trust Fund for Information and Communication Technology for Development. MobileActive.org is a media partner, powering the Program’s “Ideas Box.”
According to the project’s press release, the “Mobile Citizen Program aims to accelerate the development and implementation of mobile services to address acute social and economic problems. We will provide support to develop citizen-centric solutions that target low-income groups in urban and rural areas of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region.”
The program will provide funding in the form of grants ranging from $30,000 to $100,000 USD. These grants will be used to develop and implement a maximum of 8 mobile service projects to tackle concrete and severe problems affecting low-income population in cities and rural areas of LAC.”
2. 7Scenes
Plataforma web para desenvolvimento de jogos utilizando mídias locativas. O 7Scenes é dirigido por Ronald Lenz, coordenador dos projetos com locative media no Waag Society da Holanda. Vejam abaixo a descrição da plataforma.
“Consider the city an extension of your organisation, a fascinating place for you to publish and reach people in a different way. The city with all its (hidden) information is a beautiful stage filled with historic events, personal stories, cultural meaning, demographics, social relationships and much, much more. Something has occurred on every street corner and every brick can claim its own history.
Combining these surroundings, your content and phones that have made internet mobile and location aware (GPS), we can now interact with places in a whole new way! We are all about making these new experiences possible and offer a mobile and online platform that makes it easy to create, play and share GPS-based games and tours.
(…) These scenarios are created by linking locations to content – photos, videos, sounds and notes -, adding challenges and choosing from a range of (game) rules, together shaping what we call a scene. A location-based experience that lets people see their surroundings from a new point-of-view using their mobile phone.”
3. Emotional Geographies
Por último uma resenha de um livro que pode interessar aos que pesquisa a nova cultura da mobilidade, Geografia Emocional (Emotional Geographies. Eds. Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith (2007). Hampshire, GB: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-4375-3). A resenha vem do Space and Culture e é de Cheryl Cowdy Crawford, da York University (post da Anne Galloway).
Coloco alguns trechos para que vocês possam ter uma idéia do livro.
“(…) It is interdisciplinarity at its finest, and the experience reminds me, as Davidson, Bondi and Smith do in their introduction to Emotional Geographies, that emotions have a place in the working lives of academics. Or, to put it more emphatically, “Clearly, our emotions matter” (1). Spatial affect is, in the essays included in the collection, recognised as materially important, not simply to the discipline of geography, but to other fields of academic study as well. Indeed, the editors express a desire to undermine rigid “disciplinary boundaries” (3). Contributors to the collection seek alternative perspectives in our understanding of the spatiality and temporality of emotions that will resonate with scholars as varied as our picket line, particularly those who are interested in the intersections of space, culture, and affect (3). While the editors define theirs as a “spatially-engaged approach to the study of emotions” in their introduction, it is quite evident that the text functions also as an emotionally-engaged approach to the study of space.
(…) Admittedly, not all of the chapters in Emotional Geographies respond to the particularities of my emotional and research demands. As the editors explain, the volume is organised around three core themes: “the location of emotions in bodies and places, the emotional relationality of people and environments, and representations of emotional geographies” (3). In section one, “Locating Emotion,” each chapter explores the corporeality of emotions, including how dying, healing, and aging bodies intersect with place. Most intriguing are the chapters on travel, such as Jennie Germann Molz’s “Guilty Pleasures of the Golden Arches,” a study of emotional responses to McDonald’s restaurants in narratives of travel, and John Urry’s “The Place of Emotions within Place.” I appreciate Molz’s piece for its recognition of emotional ambivalence in our experiences of emotional landscapes, while Urry leaves me wondering if my desire to experience place meaningfully will always be hopelessly unrequited.
It is most obviously the second theme that speaks most to my emotional and spatial experiences of a labour dispute. Chapters in Section Two, “Relating Emotion,” each perform in different ways analyses of distinctive “emotional terrains,” to quote Hester Parr, Chris Philo and Nicola Burns, authors of chapter seven’s study of the emotional geographies of the Scottish Highlands. Something in their recognition of “the realities, processes and consequences of emotional repression as it happens in a distinctive geographical setting” rings true for me, especially now, as I return to this review in the aftermath of the strike at York (99). Their spatialisation of repression encourages readers to consider the ways emotional terrains – whether remote rural regions or the landscapes of educational institutions – may have trouble allowing emotions to matter, particularly when “emotional displays” are disruptive (87). (Repression is the most pragmatic of returns to the business of education, and so the evidence of the ways disruptive emotional displays marked the emotional terrain at York have long been removed, existing now only in photographs like the one above). Other chapters in this section, particularly David Conradson’s “Freedom, Space and Perspective: Moving Encounters with Other Ecologies” pose interesting questions about the nature of the relationship between self and landscape. “What might it mean” Conradson ponders, “to conceptualise the engagement between the self and landscape as a relational encounter”? (103) The essay lucidly draws on notions of affect from psychoanalysis and human geography to inform its analysis of people’s encounters with an English landscape, offering a unique perspective for those interested in eco-criticism.
As a scholar interested in representations of suburban space in literary texts, the latter section, “Representing Emotion,” is also of particular interest to me. Most compelling here are Deborah Thien’s chapter “Intimate Distances: Considering Questions of ‘Us'” and Owain Jones’ “An Ecology of Emotion, Memory, Self and Landscape.” Thien challenges in surprising ways some of my pre-conceived notions about the ethical relationship between intimacy and space, calling upon readers to reconsider the value of distance, difference and alterity when intimacy is examined as a “spatial affair.” I appreciate her work for its political commitment; likewise Jones, who reminds us that “emotions are intensely political, gendered, and spatially articulated” (207).
The collection ends appropriately and effectively with Liz Bondi’s “The Place of Emotions in Research,” which supplements the introduction’s defense of geography’s “emotional turn,” insisting on a more concerted appreciation of emotion in research practice. While she focuses on the necessity of acknowledging the emotional dimensions of scientific research in particular, scholars of all disciplines will certainly benefit from Bondi’s reminder that “our feeling states and our thinking are closely intertwined” (236). What strikes me most is Bondi’s assertion that it is quite possible to acknowledge our emotional and rational responses to research critically, and thus to sidestep participation in a more gratuitous “‘emotionalisation’ of culture” (237). Overall, Emotional Geographies elegantly succeeds in demonstrating just how critical participation in an emotionally- and rationally-engaged collaboration might look. It occurs to me that perhaps I have found something I didn’t know I was looking for during the process of preparing this review, which is a permission of sorts. Permission to recognize the place of my untidy emotions in all the colliding facets of my professional life. For this, I am most appreciative.”