G Rose
Biographic Data
| ID | 48196 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Rose |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Rose |
| SIGNATURE | ROSE G |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2367-6965 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 111 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2573 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 111 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1940 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 24 |
A review of silicon valley imperialism by Erin McElroy
This review situates the book's contribution to work on the spatial divisions of digital labour, and interrogates its discussions of the fantasies and gendering of technofascism
Being(s) and difference in digitally mediated cities
Image, screen, projection
This article examines the implications for theorising the concept of the ‘urban imaginary’ in the context of digital visual culture. In digital visual culture, the vast majority of images are designed, circulated and displayed using software, data networks and screens of various kinds. The literature on urban imaginaries has long acknowledged that cities are mediated by images as much as by various kinds of other media, and significant attention …
Response to Commentaries on ‘Visualising human life in volumetric cities
This short response reflects on four aspects of city digital twins addressed by its interlocutors: the variety of city digital twins; the range of visual media and genres which they cite; the distinctiveness of their digital animation; and their urban emplacement
Visualising human life in volumetric cities
City digital twins (CDTs) are attracting considerable attention as a tool for the management of cities facing many kinds of crises. CDTs are three-dimensional, animated digital models of cities that display the big data generated by urban sensors in near-real-time. Most of the academic literature on CDTs consists of technical discussions of their design or implementation. This paper instead proposes a different context for understanding CDTs. It …
Visual Trust on Social Media – Meaning, Money and Motivation
This decade has been characterized by a deep crisis of trust and legitimacy, which is linked in complex ways to digital technologies and modes of communication. This panel focuses on the role of visuality in trust. It starts from the premise that images are increasingly used to express reliability and trustworthiness, increase engagement in online environments, while also being met with increasing suspicion across platforms. We propose five linke…
Picturing reproductive techno-futurism through pre-wedding photography in Singapore
Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Medals and Awards celebration 2025
The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual Medals and Awards recognise achievements in researching, communicating and teaching a wide range of geographical knowledge. The speeches and citations are a record of the 2025 celebrations, which occurred at the Society on 2 June 2025, with contributions from Dariusz Wójcik, Murray Gray, Gillian Rose, Børge Ousland and Susan J Smith
Does Marx have a method
This previously unpublished lecture was delivered by Gillian Rose in 1987 at the University of Sussex, as part of a multi-lecturer series called Sociological Theory and Methodology. In it, Rose explores the concept of 'method' in Marx's work and its broader implications for philosophy and social theory. Against the tendency to interpret and employ Marx's thought instrumentally or dogmatically, Rose emphasises its dialectical character. Unlike tra…
Learning From the Mess
This article examines what happened during 50 semi-structured interviews that were designed to focus on the visual content of interviewees' social media feeds. During these encounters, interviewees were invited to talk about content that appeared on their social media apps while showing their phone screens to the interviewer. Rather unexpectedly, the researchers experienced this sharing of screens as 'messy' and disruptive to the interview. From …
Time and being awkward
The commentary focuses on the techno-cultural mediation of temporality. While lauding the paper's tracing of continuities between colonial pasts and smart futures, it asks how ‘distant time’ spans two such different forms of temporal organisation
Conceptualising aesthetic power in the digitally-mediated city
Aesthetics, generally understood as an intensified emphasis on the sensorial look and feel of urban environments, has become an important perspective through which urban scholarship is examining the economic, social, political and cultural processes of urban regeneration projects across the globe. Much of this aestheticising work is now mediated by many kinds of digital technologies. The entanglement of digital technologies with the sensorial fee…
Visual Methodologies
Being specific about ‘digital images’
"Being specific about 'digital images'." Visual Studies, 38(2), pp. 181–182 DISCLOSURE STATEMENTNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsGillian RoseGillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Her more recent work has explored the visual mediation of urban spaces, particularly by digital technologies. The fifth edition of her influential book Visual Me…
What is an Image ? Roundtable transcription, International Visual Sociology Association annual conference, 16 September 2022
Response to ‘Visual studies now
Actually-existing sociality in a smart city
This paper explores the forms of sociality that are implicit in discussions about a range of smart projects in one actually-existing smart city. Current scholarship on smart cities focuses almost entirely on their digital infrastructure and on the figure of the ‘smart citizen’. This paper argues that smart city projects also emerge and develop through specific understandings of the social. The paper explores understandings of smart sociality by a…
Who’s behind the wheel? Visioning the future users and urban contexts of connected and autonomous vehicle technologies
Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are promised by their developers to transform mobilities, making travel accessible to all – including those unable to drive due to age, affordability or disability – and thereby widen the distribution of what Urry calls ‘network capital’. This paper interrogates promotional visualizations about CAVs as they imagine future automated mobilities and the scaling up of the technologies from small trials to mass…
Platform urbanism, smartphone applications and valuing data in a smart city
Recent scholarship on smart cities and platform urbanism has explored the very wide range of data harvested from urban environments by digital devices of many kinds, analysing how not only efficiencies but also profits are sought through the extraction, circulation, transformation, commodification, integration, and re‐use of data. Much of that data is generated by smartphone applications. This paper looks at the design of a group of eight smartph…
Seeing the smart city on Twitter
This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming 'smart'. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using th…
Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City
Accounts by geographers of the ways in which urban spaces are digitally mediated have proliferated in the last few years. This significant body of work pays particular attention to the production of urban space by software and digital hardware, and geographers have drawn on various kinds of posthumanist philosophies to theorize the agency of the technological nonhuman. The agency of the human, however, has been left undertheorized in this work, o…
Cultural geography going viral
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rochester-byelection-labour-mp-emily-thornberry-apologises-for-white-transit-van-and-england-flags-tweet-9874088.html
The Real Modernity that Is Here
This paper explores how Computer Generated Images (CGIs) have enabled the visualisation and negotiation of a new urban imaginary in the production of a large-scale urban development project in Doha, Qatar. CGIs were central not only to the marketing but also the design of Msheireb Downtown. Our study of their production and circulation across a transnational architectural and construction team reveals how their digital characteristics allowed for…
Producing place atmospheres digitally
Computer-generated images have become the common means for architects and developers to visualise and market future urban developments. This article examines within the context of the experience economy how these digital images aim to evoke and manipulate specific place atmospheres to emphasise the experiential qualities of new buildings and urban environments. In particular, we argue that computer-generated images are far from ‘just’ glossy repr…
Looking at Landscape
More recent work on landscape has begun to question the visuality of traditional cultural geography, however, as part of a wider critique of the latter’s neglect of the power relations within which landscapes are embedded. Some cultural geographers suggest that the discipline’s visuality is not simple observation but, rather, is a sophisticated ideological device that enacts systematic erasures. They have begun to problematize the term “landscape…
Situating knowledges
This article addresses the discussion, particularly prominent among feminist geographers, of reflexivity as a strategy for marking geographical knowledges as situated. It argues that, if the aim of feminist and other critical geographies is to acknowledge their partiality, then the particular form of reflexivity advocated needs careful consideration. Feminist geographers most often recommend a kind of reflexivity that aims, even if only ideally, …
Taking Butler Elsewhere
This paper is concerned with exploring the potential of performance and performativity as conceptual tools for a critical human geography. We begin by emphasising the importance of recognising the different ways in which performance can be theorised, and their very different critical effects. We then argue that, although the geographical literature is apparently characterised by two contrasting discussions of performance (those of Goffman and of …
Family photographs and domestic spacings
This paper elaborates the argument that domestic space should be considered as the product of relations that extend beyond the home. It examines one common domestic object - family photographs - and explores how the particularity of this photography and the specificity of its display by white middle-class mothers with young children in South-east England produce just such an extended domestic space. The stretched space co-produced by these mother…
Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies
This paper addresses how geographers conceptualize cultural artifacts. Many geographical studies of cultural objects continue to depend heavily on an approach developed as part of the ‘new cultural geography’ in the 1980s. That approach examined the cultural politics of representations of place, space and landscape by undertaking close readings of specific cultural objects. Over three decades on, the cultural field (certainly in the Global North)…
More on ‘big things
This paper begins by reviewing a range of recent work by geographers conceptualising buildings less as solid objects and more as performances. Buildings, it is argued, are not given but produced, as various materials are held together in specific assemblages by work of various kinds. This has led to a range of studies looking at the diverse sorts of work that make buildings cohere: the political institutions they are embedded in, the material aff…
The Sensory Experiencing of Urban Design
Experience is conceptualised in both academic and policy circles as a more-or-less direct effect of the design of the built environment. Drawing on findings from a research project that investigated people’s everyday experiences of designed urban environments in two UK towns, this paper suggests at least two reasons why sensory encounters between individuals and built environments cannot in fact be understood entirely as a consequence of the desi…
On the Relation between 'Visual Research Methods' and Contemporary Visual Culture
One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between 'visual research methods' and 'contemporary visual culture' has not yet been interrogated. This paper cond…
Landscape, mobility, practice
This paper is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on 'Landscape, Mobility and Practice' which was held at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference in September 2006. In the paper the panel engage with the work of geographers and others who have been drawing upon theories of practice to explore issues of mobility and how we encounter, apprehend, inhabit and move through landscapes. The con…
Practising photography
Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City
Accounts by geographers of the ways in which urban spaces are digitally mediated have proliferated in the last few years. This significant body of work pays particular attention to the production of urban space by software and digital hardware, and geographers have drawn on various kinds of posthumanist philosophies to theorize the agency of the technological nonhuman. The agency of the human, however, has been left undertheorized in this work, o…
Using Photographs as Illustrations in Human Geography
Photographs have always played a major role in geographical studies. Ever since the invention of photography in the 1830s, it has been assumed that photographs are perfectly suited to helping us an
Producing place atmospheres digitally
Computer-generated images have become the common means for architects and developers to visualise and market future urban developments. This article examines within the context of the experience economy how these digital images aim to evoke and manipulate specific place atmospheres to emphasise the experiential qualities of new buildings and urban environments. In particular, we argue that computer-generated images are far from ‘just’ glossy repr…
Everyone's cuddled up and it just looks really nice
This paper is based on a small‐scale, qualitative research project, which used in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews to explore what a particular group of middle‐class, white mothers with young children were doing with their family photographs. It was evident from the interviews that this group of women felt ambivalent about their photos. On the one hand, photos were seen as precious objects which evoked intense emotional reaction; on the other, t…
On the Need to Ask How, Exactly, Is Geography “Visual”
Experiencing Visualities in Designed Urban Environments
In many discussions of how cities in the global North are changing, the growing importance of urban design is emphasised: that is, the production of visually and spatially coherent urban buildings and spaces seems to be increasingly central to urban change. To date, most attention has focused on exploring the reasons for this shift. Much less attention has been paid to the experiences of the people inhabiting and using such designed spaces. Altho…
The Cultural Politics of Place
In recent years, an increasing number of geographers have been concerned to develop what might be called a cultural politics of place. They have argued that the representation of places is both constituted by, and legitimates, social power relations. Although it is often acknowledged that the process of representation is thus the focus of struggle, there have been very few studies of particular examples of resistance. The paper suggests that the …
Distance, Surface, Elsewhere
In this paper I focus on a particular subjectivity and a particular spatiality. The subjectivity is that of dominant Western masculinities. The spatiality is the specific organisation of space through which that subjectivity is constituted and through which it sees the world, a problematic described here as a space of self/knowledge. The importance of a particular organisation of space to this particular subjectivity is introduced through the wor…
Platform urbanism, smartphone applications and valuing data in a smart city
Recent scholarship on smart cities and platform urbanism has explored the very wide range of data harvested from urban environments by digital devices of many kinds, analysing how not only efficiencies but also profits are sought through the extraction, circulation, transformation, commodification, integration, and re‐use of data. Much of that data is generated by smartphone applications. This paper looks at the design of a group of eight smartph…
Seeing the smart city on Twitter
This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming 'smart'. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using th…
Teaching visualised geographies
This paper suggests a number of questions which can be used to structure a small‐group discussion about the interpretation of visual images. As many geographers now are demonstrating, geographical knowledges are very often visualised. However, there is currently little on offer methodologically to help students approach the interpretation of visual images critically. This paper hopes to start to remedy this situation. It begins by sketching a the…
Tradition and Paternity
plinary practice, both theoretical and institutional, is produced. The writing of certain kinds of pasts is legitimated by, and legitimates, only certain kinds of presents. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which the construction of geographical traditions is, at the same time, the construction of sameness and difference. Even more specifically, this essay concentrates on the ways gendered sameness and difference is constituted throug…
All or Nothing? Politics and Critique in the Modernism-Postmodernism Debate
The abstract for this paper is presented in the form of a preface: Preface. In this paper we are concerned with the structure of the debate over modernism and postmodernism in geography. We feel we are being asked to take a position, for (or against) modernism and against (or for) postmodernism. We have different reasons for refusing the politics of this choice. Both of us take a separate route to this refusal, as shown in this paper. Some words …
Geography and gender, cartographies and corporealities
I Some things stay the same, and sometimes this is discouraging and sometimes this is encouraging In the first of my commentaries on gender and geography for this journal, I argued that feminist geography was simply too extensive to be ignored by contemporary accounts of the discipline. A number of book-length studies have been published during the past year which, in their detailed examinations of the construction of gendered environments, allow…
The Struggle for Political Democracy
The discursive meaning of places and spaces is central to configurations of power. The author focuses on the patriarchal imaginative geography which designates spaces either as public, masculine, and political or as private, feminine, and domestic, and argues that this is an oppressive structure of signification which limits women's identities and powers by denying them a place in the polity. The author concentrates on resistance by feminists aga…
Cultural geography going viral
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rochester-byelection-labour-mp-emily-thornberry-apologises-for-white-transit-van-and-england-flags-tweet-9874088.html
Carl Flügges Grundriss der Hygiene
Familial Patterns in Ischaemic Heart Disease
Cold weather and ischaemic heart disease
It is well known that the incidence of ischaemic heart disease tends to be higher in winter than in summer. In England and Wales, for example, mortality from "arteriosclerotic heart disease" (ASHD :ISC 420) averages 50 per cent. more in midwinter than in mid-summer (Annual Reports of the Registrar General of England and Wales); and a similar swing has been reported for hospital ad- mission rates It may how- ever be objected that results of this k…
Remembering Doreen
Remembering Doreen
How is Critical Theory Possible? Theodor W. Adorno and Concept Formation in Sociology
The Melancholy Science
The Melancholy Science
The Lament over Reification
The concept of reification has been overworked in sociology and thus made to bear an enormous amount of theoretical responsibility. The reasons for this need to be recovered in order to reassess the suitability of 'reification' for such a central theoretical role
The Crisis in Culture
All the tensions within the German academic community which accompanied the changes in political, cultural and intellectual life in Germany since 1890 were reproduced in the Institute for Social Research from its inception in Frankfurt in 1923.1 These changes were widely diagnosed as a ‘crisis in culture’.2 By this very definition the ‘crisis’ was deplored yet exacerbated. The Institute carried these tensions with it into exile and when it return…
The Origin of Negative Dialectics
The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas
Relational Dimension as Ground of Human Dignity.What do we mean when we talk about human dignity?Going beyond the classical legal definitions (dignity as a principle or as a value), I try to link this ambiguous concept to the human condition, arguing that it arises in relational contexts where human beings recognize each other.Looking to some philosophical modern contributes (Nedelsky, Malpas), I assume the centrality of the human relationships i…
The Melancholy Science
The Melancholy Science
The Melancholy Science
Melancholy is Gillian Rose s investigation into TheodorAdorno s work and legacy. Rose uncovers the unity discernableamong the many fragments of Adorno s oeuvre, and argues that hisinfluence has been to turn Marxism into a search for style. The attempts of Adorno, Lukacs and Benjamin to develop a Marxisttheory of culture centred on the concept of reification are contrasted, and the ways in which the concept of reification has come to bemisused are…
Habermas and Hegel
Dialectic of Nihilism
This book fundamentally challenges the radical credentials of post--structuralism. Though Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze claim to have a deconstructeda metaphysics, their work has much in common with previous attempts to a enda the metaphysical tradition, from Kant to Nietzshe and Heidegger, and by sociology in general. Gillian Rose shows that this anti--metaphysical writing always appears in historically specific jurisprudential terms, which them…
Hegel Contra Sociology
The antinomies of sociological reason politics in the severe style the philosophy of history the division of labour and illusion work and representation rewriting the logic with what must science end
Dialectic of Nihilism
The Dialectic of Nihilism
Feminism and historical geography
Locality, Politics, and Culture; Poplar in the 1920s
The relationship between a local polity and its civil society is explored, and it is argued that local polities cannot be understood in isolation from the specific institutions, practices, and culture of the locality. This is no longer a particularly novel claim to make, of course; yet it is a claim interpreted in a peculiarly narrow way by current theorists of the locality and the local state, who see the influence of civil society on local poli…
Architecture to Philosophy - The Postmodern Complicity
Locality-Studies and Waged Labour
The paper contributes to the growing critique of locality-studies by questioning their frequent assumption that the social relations of waged work are fundamental to explanations of society and politics. It argues that, despite recent theoretical developments, locality-studies still tend to conflate industrial, social and political geography by confining their analyses almost wholly to the sphere of waged labour. The paper then turns to a localit…
Resources for teaching gender and geography
Gender and history
Sociology (75 works) · Epistemology (39 works) · Philosophy (36 works) · Political science (32 works) · History (27 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Art (26 works) · Geography (24 works) · Psychology (24 works) · Aesthetics (23 works)