Tom Apperley: Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global (2010)

Global gaming networks are heterogenous collectives of localized practices, not unified commercial products. Shifting the analysis of digital games to local specificities that build and perform the global and general, Gaming Rhythms employs ethnographic work conducted in Venezuela and Australia to account for the material experiences of actual game players. This book explores the materiality of digital play across diverse locations and argues that the dynamic relation between the everyday life of the player and the experience of digital game play can only be understood by examining play-practices in their specific situations.

Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2010
Theory on Demand series, No 6
ISBN: 978-90-816021-1-2
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License

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Transit Labor: Circuits, Regions, Borders 1-2 (2010)

Transit Labor: Circuits, Regions, Borders #2

When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural.

Editors: Kernow Craig, Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Soenke Zehle
December 2010
48 pages
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Transit Labor: Circuits, Regions, Borders #1

Transit-labour investigates changing patterns of labour and mobility in the whirlwind of Asian capitalist transformation. Mindful of the view of Asia as the world’s factory, this three year research project examines the role of creativity, invention and knowledge production in the new economic order being forged from the region’s capitalist centres. Particular attention is given to changing relations of culture and economy in this transition and their entanglement with the production of new subjectivities and modalities of labour.

Editors: Kernow Craig, Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter
July 2010
20 pages
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Direct download, Volume 1

Jane M. Jacobs: Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (1996)

“Edge of Empire examines struggles over urban space in four contemporary first world cities: two sites in London and two sites in the Australian cities of Perth and Brisbane. Through these examples the spatialised cultural politics of a number of ‘postcolonial’ processes are unravelled: the imperial nostalgias of the one-time heart of empire, the City of London; the struggle of diasporic groups to make a homespace in the old imperial heartlands; the unsettling presence of Aboriginal claims for the sacred in the space of the modern city and the emergence of hybrid spaces in the contemporary city. This book is about the unruly spatial politics of race and nation, nature and culture, past and present. This is a ‘global geography of the local’. The book is distinctive in that it takes theories of colonialism and postcolonialism to the space of the city – it gives real space to the spatial metaphors of much contemporary social theory. If the contemporary city is a postmodern space it has not-so-hidden geographies of imperialism and postcolonialism. The global reach of the book – its focus of two poles of one trajectory of British imperialism – provides a global assemblage which form a basis for understanding the unruly fortunes of imperialism over space and time. This is not simply a material geography of territory, it is also an imaginative geography of desire and memory.”

Publisher Routledge, 1996
ISBN 0415120063, 9780415120067
193 pages

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