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, 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 an extended articulation of the aims, objectives, significance, and contribution of my project, please see the most recent iteration of my research proposal at 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 politics immanent to 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 lists 2 and 3. List 2 contends with digital navigational applications not only as platforms but also as infrastructure that increasingly orients everyday spatial practice in many cities. List 3 draws from critical, experimental, and speculative practices of generating, rendering, and interrupting spatial data to suggest mapping as a mode of inquiry itself. Indented readings are readings purposefully paired together because they either elaborate one another, or contrast in a useful way.
For each list, I've developed reading questions to think with. These questions build from one list to another; if they serve, I'm always bringing them forward. Employing these questions effectively will be a practice in and of itself as they are not all that easily answered (or definitively answerable). No doubt they will be refigured. An ongoing, open-ended collection of key questions that drive my experimentation forwards (Murris and Bozalek 2019) can be found at: negative-spaces.github.io/the-middle-of-things/questions.html.
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 urban encounter and differential arts of inhabitation. Inhabiting the urban (otherwise) has a reprise in List 3, and more on everyday spatial practices of navigating the city appears 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 digital, 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-ontoepistemology" (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 (DH) finds its way into the conversation here as I will be co-teaching a spatial visualization course at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute next summer, and want to invest time in considering what such an approach to the digital affords mapping, particularly more critical, speculative, and experimental cartography. Fundamental knowledge of DH will also support my proposed design and construction of an alternative digital navigational application. Sublist 3.2 moves beyond maps as representational apparatuses (however emancipatory/participatory, artistic, and counterhegemonic) 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 transportation and more interested in spatial awareness as it is differentially developed through a disorientation-nonadverse approach to wayfinding. 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 necessarily showing up explicitly in in my exam responses.