Research Statement
My project objective is to interrogate the role of navigational applications—particularly
Google Maps—in re/figuring the urban everyday. Situating everyday spatial practices as sites
of knowledge production and resistance, I call for an active reconfiguration of mental maps
through alternate approaches to wayfinding. My proposed project is a research-creation
endeavour: I will think via the speculative design and digital construction of a
counterhegemonic application for cultivating spatial awareness through
destination-disoriented discovery of Vancouver. For a recent and extended articulation of
the aims, objectives, significance, and contribution of my project, please see the September 2025 iteration of
my research proposal (written for SSHRC application).
Overview of Lists
In studying how the city comes to matter through everyday spatial practices, I want to
foreground tensions between the directness of experience and the broader underlying politics
that compose landscapes of encounter. I turn to the "urban everyday" as a diffractive
apparatus for investigating the infra/structural as it articulates in mundane events,
encounters, and arts of inhabitation. Taking neither "urban" nor "everyday" for granted, I
seek instead to think them through one another towards an understanding of their
organization of a scale analytic.
While List 1 may bear the title, all 3 lists work together to develop a theorization of the "urban everyday". List 1 focuses on theories that configure the city, matters of scale, and approaches to (studying) urban inhabitation. Infrastructure—as political, lived/lively, and affectively inflected—begins here and threads throughout. List 2 contends with digital navigational applications as platforms but also infrastructure that increasingly orients everyday spatial practices in many cities. List 3 draws from critical, experimental, and speculative practices of generating, rendering, and interrupting spatial data to suggest mapping as not only a representational apparatus but a mode of inquiry itself. In many ways, this list marks a return to what first got me interested in human geography. I intend to read the lists/sublists (though not the content therein) in the order laid out below.
Questions to think with build from one list to another. If they serve, I'm always bringing them forward. Key to employing them effectively in my learning is figuring out how to use these questions to think through things. In other words, reflecting on my questions after each reading will be practice in and of itself, as they are not all easily answered (or definitively answerable).
List 1 will ground me in different approaches to urban theory and practice. Sublist 1.1 concerns urban theories and how they configure this thing we call the city. I intend for these readings to ground my exploration of cities and urban infrastructure within key debates such as planetary urbanization. Sublist 1.2 attends to the specificities of place in research, and what it means to produce situated urban knowledges—for me a question of researching cities from within and as part of a specific city. Here, I attend also to differential arts of inhabitation. Inhabiting the urban (otherwise) has a reprise in List 3, and more focused accounts of everyday spatial practices of navigating the city appear in both Lists 2 and 3.
Questions
This list contends with digital navigational platforms as they increasingly orient urban everyday spatial practices. There exists a plethora of literature on platforms and the city, some written by geographers but much of it generated outside the discipline. I intentionally begin by grounding myself in digital geographies with Sublist 2.1 because I believe a geography and history of the digital offers a strong framework for studying navigational technologies and locative media as they infrastructure urban inhabitation. Sublist 2.2 will help me decipher the political economy of navigational platforms. Here, I draw in discussions on platform urbanism and smart city debates, as well as readings on platform economies and digital capitalism. Sublist 2.3 concerns digital navigational applications—particularly Google Maps—in everyday use. In this sublist (and the one prior) I branch out to non-geographers to get a sense of different perspectives on the topic.
Questions
List 3 organizes literature I believe will help think threads from the above lists—the urban, the everyday, navigation, inhabitation, and infrastructure—more critically, experimentally, and speculatively. While the readings in List 3 are clearly influenced by the "ethico-onto-epistem-ology" (Barad 2007) I bring with me to comps, most of the readings suggested below are intentionally perspectives I have not read before. Sublist 3.1 contends with critical cartography and countermapping in theory and practice, with specific focus on the digital. The digital humanities finds its way into the conversation here. Sublist 3.2 moves beyond maps as representational apparatuses (however emancipatory/participatory, artistic, and counter-hegemonic) towards mapping as a mode of immanent, immersive inquiry. Here, I explore the contingent production of spatial data and what non-representational (or perhaps always already more-than representational) mappings and mapping practices might look like. Sublist 3.3 marks a reprise of urban inhabitation first introduced in Sublist 1.2, though this time attending to more localized accounts of engaging the city otherwise. While on the surface much of 3.3 might appear to be "walking methods", I see my work as less concerned with the specificity of particular modes of wayfinding and more interested in spatial awareness as it is differentially developed through the taking of different routes. I include these texts on "walking the city" more to complicate de Certeau's largely symbolic critique, and just acquaint myself with literature I often see cited. For my fieldwork and dissertation I will surely read more thoroughly in this genre, as in many others.
My overall PhD project will once again be a research-creation endeavor. Yet you'll find maybe one explicit reading on research-creation. This doesn't mean I'm "saving" the research-creation component for later, when I design an artistic artifact or for much later, when I write up my dissertation. It's already here, in the way I've gone about the work of composing my lists. Research-creation is a mode of inquiry, not a method; "Against method!" (Manning 2016, 163). Postqualitative inquiry (which self-identifies as poststructuralist in approach) likewise "refuses methodology" (St. Pierre 2021, 5). Without making a case for such refusal here, I wanted to clarify that List 3, while seemingly more concerned with methods than List 1 or 2, is actually about honing a mode of inquiry that can begin to account for what of/in mapping practice remains beyond representation. What is the more-than of using Google Maps? It's no coincidence that the questions guiding List 3 are my most longstanding questions—questions I've carried throughout my MA project, and which have been revised thanks to this year's readings, courses, projects, practices, and presentations. Maybe my task in this final list is not to answer them, so much as rewrite them again.
Questions
Necessary to the above lists' composition was the exclusion of lists dedicated to process philosophy, posthumanist performativity, (critiques of) feminist new materialisms, postqualitative inquiry, crip theory, and an extended engagement with research-creation. What I've done is twofold: First, I've begun an open-ended list of the above topics which I'll steadily add to as readings come to my attention. Because these topics, and thinking through practice and posthumanisms/posthumanist performativity in particular, are relevant to my actual project, I will at some point need to read more on them. That moment is just not comps. Second, I include this Haunting list to make space for the ever growing collection of theories, practices, books, and people (and I should expand this to include the nonhuman as well as phenomena, I guess) "I" am moved by and which I continue to think with and through my own research-creation. Intercessors for the outside, these "Friends" (see Manning and Massumi 2014) accompany me without needing to show up explicitly in in my exam responses.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
Bissell, Laura, and David Overend. 2015. “Regular Routes: Deep Mapping a Performative Counterpractice for the Daily Commute 1.” Humanities 4 (3): 3.
Calvino, Italo. 1974. Invisible Cities. 1st edition. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest Books. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2013. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Gerald Moore and Stuart Elden. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Loveless, Natalie. 2019. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke University Press.
Loveless, Natalie, and Erin Manning. 2019. “Research-Creation as Interdisciplinary Praxis.” In Knowings and Knots, edited by Natalie Loveless. The University of Alberta Press.
Magrane, Eric. 2020. “Climate Geopoetics (the Earth Is a Composted Poem).” Dialogues in Human Geography 11 (1): 8–22.
Manning, Erin. 2012. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Duke University Press.
Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press.
Manning, Erin, and Vivienne Grace Bozalek. 2024. “In Conversation With Erin Manning: A Refusal of Neurotypicality Through Attunements to Learning Otherwise.” Qualitative Inquiry, May 22, 10778004241254397.
Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. 2014. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. University of Minnesota Press.
Murris, Karin, and Vivienne Bozalek. 2019. “Diffracting Diffractive Readings of Texts as Methodology: Some Propositions.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 51 (14): 1504–17.
Narayan, Priti, and Emily Rosenman. 2022. “From Crisis to the Everyday: Shouldn’t We All Be Writing Economies?” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 54 (2): 392–404.
Price, Margaret. 2024. Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life. Duke University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Posthumanities 41. University of Minnesota Press.
Roberts, Les. 2018a. Spatial Anthropology: Excursions in Liminal Space. Rowman and Littlefield.
Roberts, Les. 2018b. “Spatial Bricolage: The Art of Poetically Making Do.” Special Issue, Humanities 7 (2): 2.
St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. 2018. “Writing Post Qualitative Inquiry.” Qualitative Inquiry 24 (9): 603–8.
St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. 2021. “Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New.” Qualitative Inquiry 27 (1): 3–9.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press.