Etymology: < French motricité (1855) < motrice , feminine of moteur (adjective; see MOTORadj.) + -ité-ITY suffix. Physiology Motor function; the faculty or power of movement by the body or a body part. ‘motricity, n.’. OED Online. June 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/122763?redirectedFrom=motricity& (accessed August 13, 2015)
‘Intimate Listening’: paper for Emotional Geographies conference 2015
Katy Bennet from the University of Leicester approached me months ago to speak at the ‘Emotional Geographies’ conference in Edinburgh in June. I went to the first ever Emotional Geographies conference in Lancaster back in 2003, and Katy’s session is about Listening, so I said yes. It was an opportunity to work on some of…
Chapter in ‘Geographical Aesthetics’ volume
A chapter that I wrote some time ago recently went through the proofs stage and will come out in the edited collection Geographical Aesthetics edited by Harriet Hawkins and Libby Straughan. The chapter, ‘On Aisthêsis, “inner touch” and the aesthetics of the Moving body’, develops material from the How We Became Sensory-Motor research program, and will…
Talk on robots as ‘companion species’ at Carnegie Mellon, Jan 14th
So my next upcoming talk is at Carnegie Mellon University, at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, on January 14th, 4-5.30pm. Link on the CMU website is here. Here is the title and abstract: Robots as ‘companion species’? Designing for disability and the mixed spaces of human-robot interactions There is a burgeoning ecology of robots as “machines…
The Tongue Display Unit (TDU) at UPMC: seeing with the tongue?
Courtesy of staff at University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Center (UPMC), in September 2013 I was invited to the Sensory Substitution Lab to do something that I have wanted to do for years: have a hands-on experience with a device that I have written about. WICAB’s ‘BrainPort’ is a ‘sensory substitution’ device that translates a visual feed from a camera…
Book on blindness, ‘Seeing With the Hands’, now with Edinburgh UP
As the book progressed, the original idea of a quirky history with some cross-over readership started to mutate into something more historically and philosophically consistent. My reading around Descartes and Locke especially added some necessary epistemological context, whilst a recent translation of an essay by Grosrichard (originally in Cahiers pour L’Analyse) where the Molyneux Question is…
‘Google Glass for cops’: wearable cameras, surveillance, and Ferguson
At the end of June I submitted an article to the Journal of Geography in Higher Education on using Google Glass based on the Urban Studies fieldtrip. In between receiving the reviewers’ comments (which were hearteningly, unmistakably positive, the first time this has happened for several years…) and then doing the edits for the final version,…
Blindness and ‘feeling seeing’ article
My article “Blindness, empathy and ‘feeling seeing’” published recently in Emotion, Space and Society, it turns out, has been viewed 200 times. Thanks to the automated metrics of the Elsevier dashboard, I now know this. That’s pretty good. Take a look at the article here. There has been a change of Editors and some additions to the Editorial…
Urban Studies fieldtrip: Google Glass ‘in the wild’
“OK Glass – direct me to coffee” The end of day 3 of the Urban Studies fieldtrip – we’re in Kuala Lumpur, it’s hot and humid, and we are encouraging the students to use Google Glass and handheld video equipment to gather impressionistic street-level data in the different quarters (Chinese, Malay, Anglo, Arabic) in the city….
Using Google Glass for social science research…
Or, put another way: I am about to become a ‘glasshole’. A research grant co-authored with a colleague from Urban Studies, appropriately named Michael Glass, has meant we are awaiting delivery of a bunch of video-recording equipment along with one very new, very shiny Google Glass kit. Why for research in Urban Studies? We’re going…
Deleule and Guéry: The Productive Body
Thanks to Stewart Elden’s very impressive Progressive Geographies blog, he is more aware than most about what’s in the publishing pipeline. Deleule and Guéry’s book The Productive Body (1972) has a brand new translation, published only a few days ago, and this is exciting for a number of reasons. Firstly, their book is mentioned by…
Leonardo Art-Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in NY: January 19th
Short notice, but I’m speaking at an art-science event in New York on the 19th. LASER is part of the beautiful, sprawling Leonardo project that encompasses a journal, book series, and other events. LASER stands for Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous. The official website blurb is here but the relevant section I paste below: LevyArts 40 E 19th…
