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One aim I set for my directed reading, carried out across the first two terms of my PhD, was to consider how I might structure my comprehensive reading lists, as well as gather some literature I'd like to read. Another consideration was the question of what I wanted to get out of my comprehensive reading and examination process. Disciplinary training in geography is one thing. This semester, I took geography courses in the department for the first time (besides the introductory seminar). While geographical political economy and urban political ecology might not be my cup of tea, I did enjoy gleaning some context and history of the discipline. Additionally, reading theories and concepts in these to communities of practice through my own work proved generative. I also see comps as a time to read things I wouldn't otherwise read, and in so doing, become legible to those engaged in conversations around my areas of study. Finally, on a pragmatic note, I'd like to be able to teach a topical class in geography one day, so reading intensively in urban geography or critical cartography is useful in that sense.

In January 2025, I drafted the most concise version of a project proposal yet, which, while terrifying in its own way, did help me organize and articulate my research objectives. My proposed project remains invested in a multiplicity of literatures. However, mapping, science and technology studies (STS), everyday spatial practices, the city and arts of urban inhabitation, digital and locative media, and diffractive inquiry persist as central themes.

In March 2025, I iterated my first set of lists as follows: Urban Everyday, Thinking Through Practice, and mashup of speculative data, mapping, and digital geographies. Urban Everyday was a categorization actually suggested to me by a department faculty whom I'd sought out for advice. At the same time, I was enrolled in an urban political ecology course for whose final project I'd been thinking more and more about the limitations of my MA work. While my master's research-creation attended to the everyday experience of urban inhabitation and thinking with/in posthuman entanglements, my praxis lacked recognition of the socio-ecological production of cities. Therefore, in my composition of a list entitled Urban Everyday, I wanted to foreground the tension between the directness of experience and engagement with broader underlying politics that structure landscapes of encounter (see project final for that class "up my alley" in thinking-through-practice page for more). Thinking Through Practice contained the material I felt most drawn to read. This included process philosophy, research-creation, posthumanisms, and more. Lastly, the mashup list was composed of all those necessary and relevant readings that didn't quite fit into the other categories. Or, that together, seemed to constitute their own category. Early in 2025 I was reading a lot on speculative data, and envisioned these ideas directing my destination disoriented navigational application.

In early April, I refigured my lists again as a result of meeting with my co-supervisor. Basically, I agreed that I would always be reading my Thinking Through Practice material, and that it wasn't so important for me to be evaluated on my comprehension of their content. Moreover, I could easily demonstrate my engagement with those literatures through my post-comps project proposal, as well as my actual dissertation. Comprehensives was thus reiterated as an opportunity to read things I might not otherwise read, and to gain a common ground from which to participate in ongoing conversations in geography.

As you can see below, my lists are now: Cities, Vancouver, and the Urban Everyday, Digital Geographies, and Critical and Experimental Mapping. Cities, Vancouver, and the Urban Everyday is similar to what I had before, but will include more specifically urban geography literature so I can participate in these kinds of conversations and teach these sorts of things. Digital Geographies will include readings on platform economies so that I can understand Google Maps better, Media studies and STS, as well as maybe some writing on cloud infrastructure and navigational routing algorithms (I really just want to have an excuse to read Cloud Ethics). I imagine the production of space could go here (if not in cities) so as to be in dialogue with literature on locative technologies. Finally, Critical and Experimental Mapping gets at critical cartography, geohumanities, environmental digital humanities, speculative data as well as some some postqualitative inquiry.

Finally, and this may be too wild, but I was considering having a "Haunting List" that includes research-creation, (process) philosophy, crip theory and the like that I can read through whatever I'm reading. I'd have to be careful for this not to take over, but I'd be very unhappy if I didn't intentionally make time to read these things for a whole year. If there's ways to incorporate haunting list into other three lists, great. Some of the books here I've already read and wouldn't re-read so much as keep as friends etc.







lists are in progress


 

 
Amin, Ash, and N. J. Thrift. 2017. Seeing like a City. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press.
   
Avramidis, Konstantinos, and Myrto Tsilimpounidi, eds. 2016. Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315585765.
   
Baloy, Natalie J.K. 2016. “Spectacles and Spectres: Settler Colonial Spaces in Vancouver.” Settler Colonial Studies 6 (3): 209–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101.
   
Barua, Maan. 2023. Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
   
Bassett, Keith. 2004. “Walking as an Aesthetic Practice and a Critical Tool: Some Psychogeographic Experiments.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 28 (3): 397–410. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309826042000286965.
   
Bissell, Laura, and David Overend. 2015. “Regular Routes: Deep Mapping a Performative Counterpractice for the Daily Commute 1.” Humanities 4 (3): 476–99. https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030476.
   
Blomley, Nicholas K., and Roy Miki. 2004. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge.
   
Brown, Andrew. 2017. “Soundwalking: Deep Listening and Spatio-Temporal Montage.” Humanities 6 (3): 69. https://doi.org/10.3390/h6030069.
   
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
   
Darling, Jonathan, and Helen F. Wilson, eds. 2016. Encountering the City: Urban Encounters from Accra to New York. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315579467.
   
Ingold, Tim. n.d. “Against Soundscape.” Accessed July 27, 2022. http://lajunkielovegun.com/AcousticEcology-11/AgainstSoundscape-AutumnLeaves.pdf.
   
Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. “Right to the City.” In Writings on Cities, translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell.
   
Lefebvre, Henri, Nicholson- Smith, David Harvey, and Roy Miki. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford, OX, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
   
Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Publications of the Joint Center for Urban Studies. Cambridge [Mass.]: Technology Press.
   
Maracle, Lee. 2010. “Goodbye, Snauq.” In Our Story Canadian Edition: Aboriginal Voices on Canada’s Past, by Thomas King, Tantoo Cardinal, and Tomson Highway, 178–97. New York, CANADA: Doubleday Canada. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=6377466.
   
Middleton, Jennie. 2010. “Sense and the City: Exploring the Embodied Geographies of Urban Walking.” Social & Cultural Geography 11 (6): 575–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2010.497913.
   
Modeen, Mary, and Iain Biggs. 2020. Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003089773.
   
Myers, Natasha. 2017. “Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds: A More-than-Natural History of a Black Oak Savannah.” In Between Matter and Method. Routledge.
   
Peters, Evelyn, and Chris Andersen, eds. 2014. Indigenous in the City. UBC Press. https://www.ubcpress.ca/indigenous-in-the-city.
   
Springgay, Stephanie, and Sarah E. Truman. 2018. Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World: WalkingLab. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315231914.
   
Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Driving in the City.” Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4–5): 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276404046060.
   
Trafí-Prats, Laura, and Aurelio Castro-Varela, eds. 2022. Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in the City: Ontology, Aesthetics and Ethics. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003027966.
   
Wilson, Helen F. 2015. “Sonic Geographies, Soundwalks and More-Than-Representational Methods.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 2nd ed. Routledge.
   
———. 2017. “On Geography and Encounter: Bodies, Borders, and Difference.” Progress in Human Geography 41 (4): 451–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516645958.
   
Yi’En, Cheng. 2013. “Telling Stories of the City: Walking Ethnography, Affective Materialities, and Mobile Encounters.” Space and Culture, October. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331213499468.
 




lists are in progress

Amoore, Louise. 2020. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/cloud-ethics.
   
Ash, James, Rob Kitchin, and Agnieszka Leszczynski. 2018. “Digital Turn, Digital Geographies?” Progress in Human Geography 42 (1): 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516664800.
   
Bergmann, Luke. 2016. “Toward Speculative Data: ‘Geographic Information’ for Situated Knowledges, Vibrant Matter, and Relational Spaces.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (6): 971–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816665118.
   
De Souza E Silva, Adriana, and Daniel M. Sutko. 2011. “Theorizing Locative Technologies Through Philosophies of the Virtual.” Communication Theory 21 (1): 23–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01374.x.
   
Elmer, Greg. 2010. “Locative Networking: Finding and Being Found.” Aether: The Journal of Media Geography A 5:18–26.
   
Farman, Jason. 2010. “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography.” New Media & Society 12 (6): 869–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809350900.
   
———. 2020. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429460241.
   
Gentzel, Peter, and Jeffrey Wimmer. 2024. “Restricted but Satisfied: Google Maps and Agency in the Mundane Life.” Convergence 30 (3): 1041–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231205869.
   
Gentzel, Peter, Jeffrey Wimmer, and Ruben Schlagowski. 2021. “Doing Google Maps: Everyday Use and the Image of Space in a Surveillance Capitalism Centrepiece.” https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.14361/dcs-2021-070208/html.
   
Koro-Ljungberg, Mirka, Teija Löytönen, and Marek Tesar, eds. 2017. Disrupting Data in Qualitative Inquiry: Entanglements with the Post-Critical and Post-Anthropocentric. Post-Anthropocentric Inquiry, Vol. 1. New York: Peter Lang.
   
Leszczynski, Agnieszka. 2015. “Spatial Media/Tion.” Progress in Human Geography 39 (6): 729–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514558443.
   
McCullough, Malcolm. 2006. “On the Urbanism of Locative Media.” Places Journal 18 (2). https://placesjournal.org/article/on-the-urbanism-of-locative-media/.
   
McQuire, Scott. 2019. “One Map to Rule Them All? Google Maps as Digital Technical Object.” Communication and the Public 4 (2): 150–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047319850192.
   
Plantin, Jean-Christophe. 2018. “Google Maps as Cartographic Infrastructure: From Participatory Mapmaking to Database Maintenance.”
   
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2012. “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care.” The Sociological Review 60 (2): 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02070.x.
   
Quiquivix, Linda. 2014. “Art of War, Art of Resistance: Palestinian Counter-Cartography on Google Earth.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (3): 444–59.
   
St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. 2013. “The Appearance of Data.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 13 (4): 223–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613487862.
   
Ström, Timothy Erik. 2017. “Abstraction and Production in Google Maps: The Reorganisation of Subjectivity, Materiality and Labour.” Arena Journal, 2017.
   
———. 2020. “Journey to the Centre of the World: Google Maps and the Abstraction of Cybernetic Capitalism.” Cultural Geographies, March. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474020909478.
   
Sutko, Daniel M., and Adriana de Souza e Silva. 2011. “Location-Aware Mobile Media and Urban Sociability.” New Media & Society 13 (5): 807–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810385202.
   
Thielmann, T. 2007. “”You Have Reached Your Destination!” Position, Positioning and Superpositioning of Space through Car Navigation Systems.”
   
Thielmann, Tristan. n.d. “Locative Media and Mediated Localities: An Introduction to Media Geography.” Accessed April 23, 2025. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242642396_Locative_Media_and_Mediated_Localities_An_Introduction_to_Media_Geography.
 
 





in progress

Anderson, Ben. 2016. Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315611792.
   
Caquard, Sébastien. 2015. “Cartography III: A Post-Representational Perspective on Cognitive Cartography.” Progress in Human Geography 39 (2): 225–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514527039.
   
Crampton, Jeremy W. 2001. “Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communication and Visualization.” Progress in Human Geography 25 (2): 235–52. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913201678580494.
   
Gieseking, Jack Jen. 2013. “Where We Go From Here: The Mental Sketch Mapping Method and Its Analytic Components.” Qualitative Inquiry 19 (9): 712–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800413500926.
   
Harley, J. B. 1992. “Deconstructing the Map.” Passages. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.4761530.0003.008.
   
Jellis, Thomas, and Joe Gerlach. 2019. “Hitchhiking Guattari.” In Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics. Routledge.
   
Knight, Linda. 2021. Inefficient Mapping: A Protocol for Attuning to Phenomena. Goleta, California: Advanced Methods.
   
Kurgan, Laura. 2013. Close up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. First hardcover edition. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.
   
Pearce, Margaret, and Renee Louis. 2008. “Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 32 (3): 107–26. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.32.3.n7g22w816486567j.
   
Pinder, D. 1996. “Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 28 (3): 405–27. https://doi.org/10.1068/a280405.
   
Roberts, Les. 2018. Spatial Anthropology: Excursions in Liminal Space. Rowman and Littlefield.
   
Rousell, David. 2021. Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry: A Speculative Adv. Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780367816445/immersive-cartography-post-qualitative-inquiry-david-rousell.
   
Sameshima, Pauline, Patricia Maarhuis, and Sean Wiebe. 2019. Parallaxic Praxis: Multimodal Interdisciplinary Pedagogical Research Design. Vernon Press. https://vernonpress.com/book/441.
   
Schranz, Christine. 2021. “Shifts in Mapping – Two Concepts Which Have Changed the World View.” In Shifts in Mapping: Maps as a Tool of Knowledge, edited by Christine Schranz, 21–38. Transcript Verlag.
   
St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. 2018. “Writing Post Qualitative Inquiry.” Qualitative Inquiry 24 (9): 603–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417734567.
   
———. 2021a. “Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New.” Qualitative Inquiry 27 (1): 3–9. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419863005.
   
———. 2021b. “Why Post Qualitative Inquiry?” Qualitative Inquiry 27 (2): 163–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420931142.
   
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2014. “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 20 (6): 811–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414530265.
   
Wood, Denis. 1992. The Power of Maps. Guilford Press. https://www.guilford.com/books/The-Power-of-Maps/Denis-Wood/9780898624939.
 






not finished - just some unsorted things

Barad, Karen. 2020. “9 Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable.” In Eco-Deconstruction, edited by Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood, 206–48. Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823279531-011.
   
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
   
Cresswell, Tim. 2019. “Writing Place.” In Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place, 1–20. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226604398-002.
   
Croft, Jo. 2018. “Gleaning and Dreaming on Car Park Beach.” Humanities 7 (2): 33. https://doi.org/10.3390/h7020033.
   
Crouch, David. 2003. “Spacing, Performing, and Becoming: Tangles in the Mundane.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 35 (11): 1945–60. https://doi.org/10.1068/a3585.
   
———. 2016. Flirting with Space: Journeys and Creativity. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315582528.
   
———. 2017. “Bricolage, Poetics, Spacing.” Humanities 6 (4): 95. https://doi.org/10.3390/h6040095.
   
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
   
Geerts, Evelien, and Iris Tuin. 2021. “Diffraction & Reading Diffractively,” February. https://doi.org/10.1344/jnmr.v2i1.33380.
   
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
   
Kincheloe, Joe L. 2001. “Describing the Bricolage: Conceptualizing a New Rigor in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 7 (6): 679–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780040100700601.
   
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.
   
Manning, Erin. 2012. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822395829.
   
———. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374411.
   
———. 2020. For a Pragmatics of the Useless. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012597.
   
Manning, Erin, and Vivienne Grace Bozalek. 2024. “In Conversation With Erin Manning: A Refusal of Neurotypicality Through Attunements to Learning Otherwise.” Qualitative Inquiry, May, 10778004241254397. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004241254397.
   
Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. 2014. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/monograph/book/29551.
   
Murris, Karin, and Vivienne Bozalek. 2019. “Diffracting Diffractive Readings of Texts as Methodology: Some Propositions.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 51 (14): 1504–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1570843.
   
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. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
   
Stengers, Isabelle, and Robert Bononno. 2010. Cosmopolitics. Posthumanities 9. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.