Infrastructural Lives — new book out now

Add this one to your reading list. Steve Graham and Colin McFarlane have edited a book, which has just come out, Infrastructural Lives (http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415748537/).

Contributors include AbdouMaliq Simone, Maria Kaika, Vyjayanthi Rao, Mariana Cavalcanti, Stephanie Terrani-Brown, Omar Jabary Salamanca, Rob Shaw, Harriet Bulkeley, Vanesa Caston-Broto, Simon Marvin, Mike Hodson, Renu Desai, Steve Graham, and myself. Arjun Appaduria kindly provided a thoughtful foreword for the book.

10 thoughts on “Infrastructural Lives — new book out now”

Is that commonsense that you’re using!? It seems so appealing.

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my pleasure, be interested in what you folks might come up with
somethings got to give and it shouldn’t all be about meeting market-driven demands

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I’ll drop him a line and see what comes of it — thanks

On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Installing (Social) Order wrote:

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thanks that all makes sense, i was thinking more primitively in terms of peer-pressure or other forms of ‘nudging’.
https://twitter.com/cplong might be open to acting on the institutional value of making things public.

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There is only one way, and that will be for Promotion and Tenure standards, which are typically controlled by a University’s senate, to be transformed in also include (I think a total eclipse of the old hierarchy is a bit naive) the possible estimation of “impact” in more ways than simply elitist journals and flawed journal impact ratings (or even citation count, depending upon how persuaded one happens to be by the arguments against peer-review, elitism of pay-for-play journals, paywalls for research conducted at public universities, and so on).

The failure of university-life — and I’m speaking in dangerously vague generalizations here — to recognize the value of public activities that are not peer-reviewed but still research-relevant boggles my mind. Blogging is a good example. Sure, anyone can make their own blog; many people do; but look at some place like “ethnography matters” — that blog is getting daily hits in pretty impressive numbers. Can these sorts of set-ups be rigged and should that “rigging” discourage University’s from recognizing the contribution of blogging or other open forms of scholarship? Well, the publishing game is probably no less rigged, and that hasn’t stopped University’s from counting journal articles and citation rates, so it seems to be a failure of nerve predicated on a perceived “lack of consensus” …

Regarding tenured faculty embracing open-access: there is another way — and old Adam Smith might just be tickled pink by me saying this: the proliferation of peer-reviewed, on-line, or straight-up pay-for-publication journal venues means that NOBODY can really “stay abreast of the literature” no matter how many conferences you attend or how “central” your department is; ergo, a totally legitimate, in my opinion, response to this set of circumstances is good, old-fashioned self-promotion; if you want your papers to be open-access then host them as open through your library or through on-line venues likes academic-facebook academia.edu.

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thanks nich, any thoughts about how we get tenured faculty into embracing open-access?

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Govind, my friend! I was thinking of your work as soon as I saw/heard about it. Should be heaps of fodder for our line of thinking. Surely, we should consider it as we develop the edited book this summer in good old Canada!

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