Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies

I’ve come back from a few weeks of being (relatively) offline to find that I have a new paper published!  It’s titled ‘Rethinking the geographies of cultural “objects” through digital technologies: interface, network and friction’, and it’s available online from Progress in Human Geography.  Here is its abstract:

This paper addresses how geographers conceptualize cultural artifacts. Many geographical studies of cultural objects continue to depend heavily on an approach developed as part of the ‘new cultural geography’ in the 1980s. That approach examined the cultural politics of representations of place, space and landscape by undertaking close readings of specific cultural objects. Over three decades on, the cultural field (certainly in the Global North) has changed fundamentally, as digital technologies for the creation and dissemination of meaning have become extraordinarily pervasive and diverse. Yet geographical studies of cultural objects have thus far neglected to consider the conceptual and methodological implications of this shift. This paper argues that such studies must begin to map the complexities of digitally-mediated cultural production, circulation and interpretation. It will argue that, to do this, it is necessary to move away from the attentive gaze on stable cultural objects as formulated by some of the new cultural geography, and instead focus on mapping the dynamics of the production, circulation and modification of meaning at digital interfaces and across frictional networks.

The paper benefited a good deal from some very constructive criticism from a number of readers on its way to publication – thankyou again to them.