DR JACOB COPEMAN – UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

THE POLITICS OF NAMES AND NAMING IN INDIA

This research project analyses the significance of naming and renaming practices in respect of caste and religion in India. The project aims to explore historical strategies of naming and renaming whilst also bringing the study squarely into the present: what can naming strategies tell us about Indian society in a time of expedited social transition?

Jacob Copeman - ISRF Early Career Fellow 2013

Audio from the Urban Laboratory Lecture Series on 27 November 2018.

 "It died once at playgroup, I didn’t know what to do": towards vital, vibrant and material geographies of the mobile phone in austerity

This paper makes the case for revitalising and rematerialising geographical understanding of the mobile phone, as a result of their renewed and irreplaceable importance in times of austerity.

Geographers have long considered mobile phones to be instruments and agents of globalisation, migration and commodification, to name but a few, as well as a technology for fieldwork. However, this common placing of the mobile phone as little more than piece of physical infrastructure, a commodity, or a status symbol, results in it being largely depoliticised.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with families and communities in Greater Manchester, in the context of nearly a decade of recession and austerity in the UK, this paper makes the case for the repositioning and repoliticisation of the mobile phone in austere times. It draws on concepts of vital materialism and vibrant matter, and feminist politics of care, bringing these literatures to speak to one another. It illustrates the place, value and politics of the mobile phone as a necessary utility, part of the fabric of everyday social and physical urban infrastructures in contemporary austerity. Using a vignette approach to presenting the findings, we will explore the political capacities and strategies of the mobile phone to both liberate the user and obfuscate draconian austerity polities, at the same time as being an unremarkable, mundane, functional object and service provider. The conclusions reflect on where such everyday materials fit within ideas of social inequalities, urban living, and the neoliberal state.

Dr Sarah Marie Hall is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research sits in the broad field of feminist political economy: understanding how socio-economic processes are shaped by gender relations, lived experience and social difference. Her recent research focuses on everyday family life and economic change, which culminated in the ‘Everyday Austerity’ exhibition and 'zine. 

This lecture is introduced by Dr Yasminah Beebeejaun (Bartlett School of Planning, UCL).

'Vital, vibrant and material geographies of the mobile phone in austerity' - Sarah Marie Hall

The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) is a public benefit foundation funded by a group of private philanthropists with interests in academia and social science, founded in 2008. It is dedicated to cross-fertilisation in the social sciences, the promotion of new modes of inquiry and the development of interdisciplinary expertise and methods. One of its specific objectives is to promote better understanding of social entities and processes and see this used in solving subject specific problems.

To achieve this objective it intends to provide a series of research grants, enter into partnerships with academic institutions and support research activities that promote development in its field.

Jacob Copeman - ISRF Early Career Fellow 2013

ISRF

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