R Shields
Biographic Data
| ID | 35511 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Shields |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Shields |
| SIGNATURE | SHIELDS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7999-1833 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 514 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1945 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Biotech Barbeque: A Regulatory Figuration and Policy Making
Hidrotuango: Understanding the Reach of Cascading Risk
Practical aesthesis
Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct albeit contested relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic, somatic concept, prompting a re-evaluation of the distin…
Eeyou Istchee Bodies of Water
In the Eastern James Bay Cree Nation, a region known as Eeyou Istchee, water (neebee/Nîpîy) is a multiplicity of things and qualities: it is quantified as potentials in the reservoirs of HydroQuébec’s hydroelectric power generating system; it is also a mobile element in the hydrological cycle, the platform for colonial mobilities and the past trapping economy; as well as an Eenouch (Cree) symbolic force and a liquid that saturates the James Bay l…
Ink wash virtualities in Qing landscape painting
This study considers virtuality in Qing ink wash landscape paintings via an album by Pan Gongshou (1741–94). We examine the painterly devices by which a liminal, ‘virtual,’ space is constructed as a ‘realm’ or world in which the viewer is synaesthetically absorbed into a landscape image. Landscape in this tradition is not a pure creation of the human gaze, nor a representation of material elements and topography. We examine the painterly devices …
La portée d’ Espaces et sociétés dans l’espace académique anglophone
Cet article considère la réception très limitée d’ Espaces et sociétés , ainsi que d’autres revues d’études urbaines dans la littérature sociologique et urbaine anglophone. Nous manquons de données sur l’impact des citations des revues françaises dans les publications anglophones et dans les débats internationaux, d’ailleurs souvent menés en anglais. Les articles français circulent peu dans les revues internationales malgré les efforts de traduct…
The Bridge Spanning Past, Present, and Future: Time Infrastructure
Background: This article considers the temporal aspects and effects of infrastructure that bridges past, present, and future rather than connecting places or delivering services. Analysis: Four “moments” of time infrastructure will be considered in the case of a reconstructed heritage wooden bridge: heritage sites that link to the past, undertakings that mark the present, endeavours that project the current society forward into the future, and th…
The Illocutionary Force of Inuit Ice Vocabularies
Lexicons of Yup’ik sea-ice terminology rely on extra-textual elements, including photographs, diagrams and sketches. Definitions are also supplemented with stories about personal experience and of the behaviour of ice phenomena. Speech act theory argues that these elements communicate an often overlooked illocutionary dimension which shows the importance of semantics in addition to the syntax of scientific definitions. The illocutionary aspects c…
Special Issue: Beyond Melt
Place and community responses to opportunity: A example from nanoscience innovation
Focus groups on nanoscience, walking tours and a Citizen Summit demonstrate the Edmonton Canada community acting as both a sounding board and also as a collective think tank that mediates across networks in a city-region where strong local elites that draw on mechanical solidarity. This demonstrates the collective learning potential of social networks to be effective mediators in the process of recognizing opportunities. Our participatory researc…
Feet Apart: Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine
Introduction to Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine. This special issue assembles a set of short interventions selected by internal blind review from submissions in response to a call for papers. The contributors document the first phase of the pandemic from February to May 2020, reflect on and respond to the first few months of the global spread of COVID-19, its arrival in communities and its personal impacts and effects on the public realm, from …
Edmonton, Amiskwaciy Wâskahikan , and a Papaschase suburb for settlers
The Papaschase Indian Reservation outside Edmonton, Alberta was established as part of Treaty 6 in 1877, but annulled in 1888. A significant portion of the land was later assembled in Canada's first land bank and sold at below‐market prices to create “Mill Woods,” an idealistic vision for a planned mixed‐use suburb. Settler Colonial Theory is introduced to explore the history of the Papaschase Cree and the Reservation. This testifies to the proce…
Liminal abstraction
This paper surveys discussions of abstraction in the sociological and political economic literature that tie it a relation to the material. This is developed from the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Under the rubric of the liminal, the diachronic interchange between these poles will be examined to better understand how the Abstract saturates the material. This entails not only the purely Abstract but involves Virtualities that are intangible, Ideal-R…
Re-storying autism: A body becoming disability studies in education approach
This paper presents and analyzes six short first-person films produced through a collaborative multimedia storytelling workshop series focused on experiences of autism, education and inclusion. The aim of the project is to co-create new understandings of autism beyond functionalist and biomedical ones that reify autism as a problem of disordered brains and underpin special education. We fashion a body becoming disability studies in education appr…
Spatial Culture in Contemporary China: The Nanjing Workshop
Urban virtues and the innovative city: An experiment in placing innovation in Edmonton, Canada
In the highly competitive landscape of global cities and entrepreneurial urbanism, the development goals of cities are increasingly framed through discourses of ‘innovation’. In this paper we critically examine this relationship through a case study exploring the attempt to build a nanotechnology sector in Edmonton, Alberta. Adopting a collaborative research methodology involving citizen engagement and urban touring, we explore participant repres…
Space and Culture as Critical Practice and as Space of Culture
This is an introduction to the 20th anniversary special issue of Space and Culture and overview of the experience of working on the journal
Lifelong sorrow: Settler affect, state and trauma at Anne of Green Gables
This paper contributes a definition of ‘settler affect’ using Lucy Maud Montgomery’s early twentieth century series of novels Anne of Green Gables. The adopted protagonist, Anne, struggles to become ‘of Green Gables’ and to fit in to rural community despite her red hair, difference and impetuous character and then to succeed in life the subsequent books in the series. Empowering and disempowering ‘settler affect’ and traumas related to colonialis…
Bare Nature
This article considers the ethical implications of a stance toward or relation with the natural environment that could be characterized as dominant across many sectors of not only the economy but consumption patterns generally. Despite popular perception or denial of climate change over the past decades, this is an implicit relation toward the collateral risks and damages to ecosystems by human activity. Not only are livelihoods sustained on the …
Expanding the borders ofThe Sociological Imagination: Spatial difference and social inequality
This article argues that C Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination has changed, as evident in sociologies that think beyond national societies and analyse globalization. This 'imagination' has in effect been 'expanded', moving from one-dimensional (linear) analyses based on historical vectors of force and teleologies to a more contextualized, relativized spatial analysis with more dimensions. There were always outliers. However, at least for m…
Villes et universités
Alors que les espaces publics brésiliens se transforment, l’observation de type socio-ethnographique de deux parcs publics de Belo Horizonte révèle des tendances ambivalentes. Le Parc Municipal, en plein centre-ville, très fortement sécurisé, accueille principalement des usagers des classes populaires ou des populations marginales. Au Parc Barrage, la coexistence de fait entre habitants des classes aisées et des classes populaires va de pair avec…
Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity
The debate on modernity and postmodernity has awakened interest in the importance of the spatial for cultural formations. But what of those spaces that exist as much in the imagination as in physical reality? This book attempts to develop an alternative geography and sociology of space by examining `places on the margin'.
Lefebvre and the Right to the Open City
"Where is Fort McMurray? The Camera as a Tool for Assembling "Community
In response to the global mythology spawned by visual representations of Fort McMurray, Canada, this article examines a critical, collaborative youth project that sought oblique entry points to prevailing storylines of “community” and to what it might mean to live in the shadow of one of the world’s largest resource extraction complexes. Building on visual methodologies where participants are encouraged to produce representations of home and plac…
Feral suburbs: Cultural topologies of social reproduction, Fort McMurray, Canada
Through case studies drawn from Fort McMurray (Alberta, Canada) near the Athabasca Tar Sands, builders’, residents’ and public officials’ attempts to develop neighbourhoods in the midst of an oil boom and bust economy are considered. Drawing on interviews with these actors, photographs and participant observation, this article considers the production of new suburbs through crown land release and development. Within a highly constrained planning …
Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity
The debate on modernity and postmodernity has awakened interest in the importance of the spatial for cultural formations. But what of those spaces that exist as much in the imagination as in physical reality? This book attempts to develop an alternative geography and sociology of space by examining `places on the margin'.
Social Spatialization and the Built Environment: The West Edmonton Mall
The West Edmonton Mall, situated on the northwestern extremities of the Canadian Prairies, and the largest shopping-leisure complex at the time of writing, draws shoppers from all over North America and even Japan. As a privatized public space which diverts consumers from other urban areas it has occasioned much civic boosterism. It presents a fascinating set of interventions in the local social spatialization of a regional capital on the North A…
The 'System of Pleasure: Liminality and the Carnivalesque at Brighton
A Truant Proximity: Presence and Absence in the Space of Modernity
Jameson described postmodernism as a change in Western urban populations' 'cognitive maps' of the world. But this seemed to suggest a totalising change in our space-time regimes or 'social spatialisations' which does not fit with everyday experiences of contemporary life. There is a continuity of most aspects of social spatialisation (which, denying locality and regionalism, once unified the empire of Western modernity). Yet, even small shifts ma…
Cultural Topology: The Seven Bridges of Königsburg, 1736
In an example of Enlightenment 'engaged research' and public intellectual practice, Euler established the basis of topology and graph theory through his solution to the puzzle of whether a stroll around the seven bridges of 18th-century Königsberg (Kaliningrad) was possible without having to cross any given bridge twice. This 'Manifesto' argues that, born in a form of cultural studies, topology offers 21st-century researchers a model for mapping …
Contested Sovereignty in a Changing Arctic
Climate change is challenging the notions of permanency and stability on which the ideal of the sovereign, territorial state historically has rested. Nowhere is this challenge more pressing than in the Arctic. As states expand their sovereignty claims northward in pursuit of potential opportunities (in many cases made possible by climate change), these same states are being confronted with the region's increasing territorial indeterminacy (which …
Flow as a New Paradigm
Feral suburbs: Cultural topologies of social reproduction, Fort McMurray, Canada
Through case studies drawn from Fort McMurray (Alberta, Canada) near the Athabasca Tar Sands, builders’, residents’ and public officials’ attempts to develop neighbourhoods in the midst of an oil boom and bust economy are considered. Drawing on interviews with these actors, photographs and participant observation, this article considers the production of new suburbs through crown land release and development. Within a highly constrained planning …
Virtualities
Meeting or Mis-Meeting? The Dialogical Challenge to Verstehen
L'A. porte son attention sur la notion de comprehension. Il s'attache a definir ce que signifie comprendre, «verstehen», en sciences sociales. Il examine la theorie de l'intersubjectivite. Il pose le probleme de l'adequation des conceptions que l'on peut deduire par comprehension du comportement d'autrui. Il montre que depuis les annees 1960, a l'initiative des sociologues americains, l'accent a ete porte sur les aspects empiriques et historiques…
Flânerie for Cyborgs
As a literary figure or conceit, Haraway's cyborg is kin to Dumas' and Balzac's flâneur. As a social science fiction, crossing and mixing categories, the cyborg is an abject quasi-body who does not fit the Enlightenment model of the political subject and actor. The 'Manifesto' has a geography of sites - Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital and Church - which this article updates and to which it adds the Body and the Web. …
Abject citizenship – rethinking exclusion and inclusion: Participation, criminality and community at a small town youth centre
This article discusses the complex and contradictory nature of ‘abject citizenship’ as it is experienced by teenagers from a small town youth centre. Lines between inclusion and exclusion are blurred by these resilient youth as they re-appropriate central and accepted spaces as well as marginalized spaces to destabilize the categories of insider and outsider. This snapshot ethnography demonstrates how these young disadvantaged citizens create une…
Culture and the Economy of Cities
A division of social processes into different, mutually exclusive ‘value spheres’ such as ‘cultural’ or ‘economic’ derives from a 19th-century, European model of civil society. This model cannot respond to current political demands for cultural recognition and redistributive justice which characterize multicultural societies. It does not acknowledge the economic importance of knowledge work. Spatially located analyses, such as in urban and region…
Re-storying autism: A body becoming disability studies in education approach
This paper presents and analyzes six short first-person films produced through a collaborative multimedia storytelling workshop series focused on experiences of autism, education and inclusion. The aim of the project is to co-create new understandings of autism beyond functionalist and biomedical ones that reify autism as a problem of disordered brains and underpin special education. We fashion a body becoming disability studies in education appr…
Culture and Power: A Media, Culture and Society Reader
Introduction PART ONE: CULTURE AND POWER Culture and Power - N[ac]estor Garc[ac]ia Canclini The State of Research Popular Culture and Social Control in Late Capitalism - David Tetzlaff Post-Marxism - Kuan-Hsing Chen Critical Postmodernism and Cultural Studies Feminism and Cultural Studies - Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey Media, Ethnicity and Identity - Thomas K Fitzgerald PART TWO: THE AUDIENCE AND EVERYDAY LIFE Text, Readers and Co…
Boundary-Thinking in Theories of the Present: The Virtuality of Reflexive Modernization
Theories of the present have converged on changes in spatialization or the spatial order of societies. This article discusses the focus on borders and boundaries in programmatic statements on reflexive modernity or remodernization (RM) by Latour and Beck. It is insufficient to say that boundary-marking and border-making become simply more fraught or obvious. There is an historicity and dynamic quality which are central to these analyses which are…
Knowing Space
Lefebvre and the Right to the Open City
Hope and Fear in Biotechnology: The Space-Times of Regulatory Affect
This article draws out temporal and spatial affects such as hope and fear, trust and confidence, and assumptions of actors in plant biotechnology development and its regulation by the Federal Government of Canada. These underlie both insider developers' and regulators' hopes and trust, and outsider experts' and publics' anxiety and fear. Etymologically, hope is rooted in actual capacities or dunamis and in latent potency or potentia . Ethnographi…
Space and Culture: A Resumé of Everyday Life
Introduction to 'The Ethic of Aesthetics
Urban trauma: Comment on Karen Till's 'Wounded Cities
Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity
Eeyou Istchee Bodies of Water
In the Eastern James Bay Cree Nation, a region known as Eeyou Istchee, water (neebee/Nîpîy) is a multiplicity of things and qualities: it is quantified as potentials in the reservoirs of HydroQuébec’s hydroelectric power generating system; it is also a mobile element in the hydrological cycle, the platform for colonial mobilities and the past trapping economy; as well as an Eenouch (Cree) symbolic force and a liquid that saturates the James Bay l…
Feet Apart: Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine
Introduction to Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine. This special issue assembles a set of short interventions selected by internal blind review from submissions in response to a call for papers. The contributors document the first phase of the pandemic from February to May 2020, reflect on and respond to the first few months of the global spread of COVID-19, its arrival in communities and its personal impacts and effects on the public realm, from …
Don Juan Alonso de Vera y Zárate, adelantado del Río de la Plata
Diego de Rojas y la primera entrada española al TucumánTres documentos inéditos relacionados con la fundación de MendozaEscudo de armas de Santiago del Estero
Children under Pressure
Social Spatialization and the Built Environment: The West Edmonton Mall
The West Edmonton Mall, situated on the northwestern extremities of the Canadian Prairies, and the largest shopping-leisure complex at the time of writing, draws shoppers from all over North America and even Japan. As a privatized public space which diverts consumers from other urban areas it has occasioned much civic boosterism. It presents a fascinating set of interventions in the local social spatialization of a regional capital on the North A…
The 'System of Pleasure: Liminality and the Carnivalesque at Brighton
Introduction to 'The Ethic of Aesthetics
Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity
Making Histories and Constructing Human Geographies: The Local Transformation of Practice, Power Relations, and Consciousness
A Truant Proximity: Presence and Absence in the Space of Modernity
Jameson described postmodernism as a change in Western urban populations' 'cognitive maps' of the world. But this seemed to suggest a totalising change in our space-time regimes or 'social spatialisations' which does not fit with everyday experiences of contemporary life. There is a continuity of most aspects of social spatialisation (which, denying locality and regionalism, once unified the empire of Western modernity). Yet, even small shifts ma…
The logic of the mall
Culture and Power: A Media, Culture and Society Reader
Introduction PART ONE: CULTURE AND POWER Culture and Power - N[ac]estor Garc[ac]ia Canclini The State of Research Popular Culture and Social Control in Late Capitalism - David Tetzlaff Post-Marxism - Kuan-Hsing Chen Critical Postmodernism and Cultural Studies Feminism and Cultural Studies - Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey Media, Ethnicity and Identity - Thomas K Fitzgerald PART TWO: THE AUDIENCE AND EVERYDAY LIFE Text, Readers and Co…
Social Engineering
Meeting or Mis-Meeting? The Dialogical Challenge to Verstehen
L'A. porte son attention sur la notion de comprehension. Il s'attache a definir ce que signifie comprendre, «verstehen», en sciences sociales. Il examine la theorie de l'intersubjectivite. Il pose le probleme de l'adequation des conceptions que l'on peut deduire par comprehension du comportement d'autrui. Il montre que depuis les annees 1960, a l'initiative des sociologues americains, l'accent a ete porte sur les aspects empiriques et historiques…
Flow as a New Paradigm
Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics
Lefebvre, Love and Struggle provides the only comprehensive guide to Lefebvre's work. It is an accessible introduction to one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century. Rob Shields draws on the full range of Lefebvres writings, including many previously untranslated and unpublished works and correspondence. Topics covered include Lefebvre's early relationship with Marxism, his critique of the rise of fascism, as well as h…
A Voluntary Smokers' Registry: Characteristics of joiners and non-joiners in the Community Intervention Trial for Smoking Cessation (Commit)
OBJECTIVES: This paper examines differences between joiners and nonjoiners of a voluntary smokers' registry. METHODS: A baseline prevalence survey was used to identify characteristics of smokers who joined or did not join a smokers' registry. RESULTS: Communities varied significantly in registry enrollment rates. Heavy-smoking joiners expressed more desire to quit, were more likely to live with nonsmokers, and were older than nonjoiners. Light-to…
Modest Reviewer Goes on Virtual Voyage: Some Recent Literature of Cyberspace
Virtual Spaces
Culture and the Economy of Cities
A division of social processes into different, mutually exclusive ‘value spheres’ such as ‘cultural’ or ‘economic’ derives from a 19th-century, European model of civil society. This model cannot respond to current political demands for cultural recognition and redistributive justice which characterize multicultural societies. It does not acknowledge the economic importance of knowledge work. Spatially located analyses, such as in urban and region…
Harmony in Thirds: Chora for Lefebvre
Forum on: Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, by Edward W. Soja
Culture and the Just City
Hvordan kan bysociologien bidrage til at omforme det, der i Danmark og andre lande er blevet kaldt ‘velfærdsbyen’ til en ‘retfærdig by’? Velfærdsbyen er kendetegnet ved idealer om lige adgang til kollektive forbrugsgoder såsom service og bolig, og ved operationaliseringen af programmer for omfordelende retfærdighed. Etiske krav om kulturel anerkendelse af forskellige grupper fordrer nu, at spørgsmål om det gode liv stilles på linie med deontologi…
Space and Culture: A Resumé of Everyday Life
End Comment: Geopolitical Spatialisations
The Virtual
This book looks at the origins and the many contemporary meanings of the virtual. Rob Shields shows how the construction of virtual worlds has a long history. He examines the many forms of faith and hysteria that have surrounded computer technologies in recent years. Moving beyond the technologies themselves he shows how the virtual plays a role in our daily lives at every level. The virtual is also an essential concept needed to manage innovatio…
New Orleans and Other Urban Calamities
Sociology (40 works) · Political science (24 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Aesthetics (16 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Geography (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Art (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works)