Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Abstract:
“Civil Neoliberties”
Neoliberalism as a set of institutions and ideas and as a mode of governance has posed a real
challenge to Cultural Studies. On the one hand, multiculturalism as formulated by Stuart Hall and
the Birmingham school, sought a deeply committed mapping of counter-cultures of the marginal
and minoritized. On the other hand, multiculturalism also anticipates the tropes of neoliberal
governance as a management of diverse populations under democratic regimes. The difficulty of
distinguishing authoritarian or majoritarian cultural formations from their minoritarian
manifestations as they travel across nation-states creates new problems for understanding
emergent global political formations like “indigeneity.” In this paper I turn to the emergence of a
majoritarian discourse of indigeneity in in India that not only disappears adivasi (first peoples)
subjects from the Indian political landscape, but violently “counters” Dalit presence in
Northamerica not only through the appropriation of the language of civil rights and antidiscrimination
law, but through deployment of the cultural studies critique of Orientalism and of
post-colonial theory more generally. Indian immigrants thus become “native” or “indigenous” on
foreign soil through adaptation of the very civil liberties discourse they decry in India for being “soft
on minorities.” Such paradoxes undergird what I call “Civil Neoliberties.”
Rowan Wilken (Swinburne University of Technology), Rowan Wilken is Associate Professor in media and
communication within the Swinburne Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology,
Melbourne. His authored and co-edited books include Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (Routledge,
2011), Mobile Technology and Place (Routledge, 2012), Locative Media (Routledge, 2015), and The
Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). He is currently working on two new books:
Cultural Economies of Locative Media (Oxford University Press) and Location Technologies in International
Context (Routledge).
Abstract:
“Traces of Our Passage: Location Awareness in an Age of Ubiquitous Geodata Capture”
Since the advent of the smartphone, the means by which one’s physical location at particular
venues is registered by end-users and by proprietors of location-enabled social media applications
has shifted significantly, passing through a number of iterations, or generations. “First generation”
location-based smartphone services required the active registering of one”s location by end users,
often in the form of “check-ins”. “Second generation” location services involved “passive” location
disclosure, tracking, and compatibility pairing of end-users. While the “third generation” and
dominant present form of location-based services involve what I am referring to as ubiquitous
geodata capture. These are services where location remains fundamental to their operation, but is
integrated into that service at both the front end (the interface) and the back end (algorithmic
processing, database population, monetisation efforts, and so on). This paper begins by tracing
these earlier iterations, before turning to consider the importance of, and challenges we face, in
trying to make critical sense of what is involved – and at stake – in the move towards ubiquitous
geodata capture.
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