ANNE GALLOWAY

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My research interests can be found at the intersections of space, culture and technology. I particularly enjoy critical social and cultural theory, social studies of science and technology, design and new media studies, material culture studies and qualitative methodologies.

PHD : locative media: designing emerging technologies for public spaces

My thesis examines tensions between actual and imagined spaces of technological
innovation and use in the design of pervasive computing and locative media for public
spaces. Through a combination of questionnaires, interviews, discourse analysis and
auto-ethnography, case histories of five locative media research and design projects
(2002-2005) are presented. Focussing specifically on technological and urban
imaginaries that are recollected in the present and projected into the future, I argue that all these projects embody certain amounts of technological determinism and other modernist beliefs surrounding the 'problem' with the public and the democratising potential of technology. Simultaneously, however, they do not follow predictable or linear models of progress towards sets of shared goals or ideals. Tracing how researchers and designers struggle to stabilise certain relations in the present by actively mobilising particular histories and futures instead reveals locative media as performing multiple spatialities and temporalities - and ultimately, my dissertation questions the political and ethical stakes implicated in the resulting mangles and disjunctures of theory and practice.

Case Histories

FAL/RE:FORM: Sonic City & Tejp
NTRG & MLE: Passing Glances (formerly Texting Glances)
Proboscis: Urban Tapestries
HP Labs: Mobile Bristol

PHD Committee

Dr. Rob Shields
Henry Marshall Tory Chair and Professor
Departments of Sociology and Art and Design
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Readers

Dr. Gitte Lindgaard
NSERC/Cognos Chair, Director, Human-Oriented Technology Lab and Professor
Department of Psychology
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Dr. Carlos Novas
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Support

My research has been funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology - Carleton University.

Status

Comprehensive examinations were completed in social studies of science and technology and cultural theory. A complete first draft of the dissertation is scheduled for late 2007, with a defense in the new year.