Well, I have officially started pulling together my research for my first enthnographic interviews. I am trying to arrange to go film groups of urban explorers and infiltrators in London.

Unfortunately, this has been more difficult than I planned. Turns out that people who are trespassing as a hobby don’t really want to be filmed and/or interviewed. Makes life a little more difficult, but it is all good data on the practicality of doing ethnography and the difficulties of using video for research.

As of now, I am trying to post of 4 different Urban Exploration facebook groups, on a website called UER (where people were incredibly rude/incredulous/suspicious), on urbexforums and on 28 Days Later, all of which require months as a member before you are ‘trusted’ (which I guess means I have to prove I am not ‘the man’).

So much for jumping right into my research – I guess its back to reading Lefevre.

Just got back from a strange weekend at the 2008 CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) conference. Nothing about the conference was strange – it was brilliantly done actually – but I came down with a stomach virus the day before the conference and missed 2/3 of it.

Rather disappointing missing most of the conference as I have been waiting 2 years to go to one, but prospects for next year look bright.

One of the issues raised at the conference was that the website was not getting a decent google ranking. I came home and tried to verify this and actually could not find an ‘official’ CHAT website. If anyone knows where it lives, can you send me a link?

Just spent two days at the Royal Geographic Society Urban Research Group’s 2-day MultipliCITIES conference at Queen Mary, University of London.

It was a fantastic two days filled with a lot of great talks. Unfortunately, I found out about it a bit late to give one.

Thanks to the Urban Research group for organizing this! Now on to the CHAT conference next week!

Hey everyone!

Welcome – allow me to introduce myself!

I am a new Ph.D. student at Royal Holloway, University of London in cultural geography. My academic background in anthropology and archaeology. My current research is on geographies of film and I spend more time shooting film than writing at the moment. I am also writing about cyborg culture and MMORPG’s (i.e. World of Warcraft) so you may find posts on that coming up soon.

On this site, you will find both my written work and my filmic documents. Between the two, I see the blog as an interesting way to chart my progress through this Ph.D. program.

I have been procrastinating on writing a blog forever and the way I finally convinced myself to start was to promise myself I would not become a Blog addict.

So, as for what you can expect here… Weekly updates. Or monthly.

More importantly, this blog will do two important things. One is that it will serve as my storage area for work so that hopefully someone besides my family will see it! The other is that I will post links to the goodies I find during the course of my research which you might find useful.

If you made it here on purpose, congrats on finding it! If you stumbled in, welcome and feel free to take your shoes off.

Powered by WebRing.