R Burns
Biographic Data
| ID | 71675 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Burns |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Burns |
| SIGNATURE | BURNS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Calgary |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5025-4947 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 111 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1903 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Urban futures of digitalized fossil labour: Mutual articulations of smartness in cities and extractive work
Little research to date has drawn out the connections between digitalizing extractive labour and digital urbanism. In this article, we argue that these are complementary, mutually reinforcing processes: digital urbanism enables the digitalization of extractive labour, and digitalization centralizes extractive labour in urban centres. More specifically, ‘smart’ digitalization as a political-economic strategy works on both the extractive labour and…
All That Is Urban Melts into Data: Circulations of Matter, Energy, and Data in the Digital City
International audience
(Im)material Streams in the City: Ecologies, Economies, Electrons
International audience
Toward Intimate Data: Re-Thinking Digital, Social, Political Relations
Digital technologies enable the mass datafication of human activity in new and intimate ways, allowing for both active and passive tracking bodily functions, physical movements, consumption habits, social encounters, and even moods and feelings. Despite the seeming newness of these developments, however, Internet scholars recognize that data production and use has always been bound up with broader relations between individuals, communities, and c…
A River of Data Runs Through It: Examining Urban Circulations in the Digital Age
There is a deepening need for dialogue between (digital) urbanists and Internet Studies scholarship. In this paper we are interested in "urbanizing" Internet Studies by thinking about how digital infrastructures create and control circulations, movement, flows, and streams within urban contexts. More specifically, we think about circulations and concentrations of natural, human, and digital resources by way of Urban Political Ecology to better un…
Digital transformations of the urban – carbon – labor nexus: A research agenda
Digitalization is profoundly impacting natural resource extraction. Mines and wells are monitored and managed in new ways from real-time data streams to algorithmic decision-making to implementation of automated vehicles. How mines and wells are superintended is restructuring the geographies of employment as more of the day-to-day mining operations are centralized in urban locations distant from sites of extraction. Digital infrastructures allow …
Interstitiality in the smart city: More than top-down and bottom-up smartness
The critical research agenda on smart cities has tended to assume a largely top-down orientation in which powerful actors like the state and corporations enact programmes to embed Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) in the urban landscape. Because of the way research has framed this relation of power, the dominant response has been to seek social justice by either contesting these top-down exercises of (digital) power or by reconceptua…
Make our communities better through data: The moral economy of smart city labor
Smart cities are now an established context in which data and digital technologies shape urban politics. Despite increased scholarly focus on algorithmic governance, smart cities and their data production still heavily rely on human labor, raising questions about how that labor is recruited and the implications of different recruitment strategies. In this paper, we illuminate the relations and practices mobilized to recruit the labor required to …
The Preservice Teacher Competency Performance Scale: A Standards-Based Assessment Scale to Track Teacher Competency During a Pete Preparation Program
Assessing teacher competence is a central focus of the growth and development of physical education teacher candidates. For subject matter competency, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation adopted Specialized Professional Associations (SPAs) for each academic discipline, which are used to establish specific standards and procedures for program review and accreditation. These six evidence-based standards include teaching compon…
A community farm maps back! Disputes over public urban farmland in Calgary, Alberta
Geographers, cartographers, and related social scientists are increasingly locating the (geo)politics of the vernacular within volunteered geographic information, the geoweb, and other digital technologies that enable the production of new maps. We instead focus our attention on ‘old’ cartographic practices. We contend that map-based community activism and geopolitics continue to occur in ways that much research has left behind in its shifted att…
Transgressions: Reflecting on critical GIS and digital geographies
Worlding and provincialising smart cities: From individual case studies to a global comparative research agenda
The diversity of smart city case studies presented in this special issue demonstrates the need for provincialised understandings of smart cities that account for cities’ worlding strategies. Case studies drawn from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia show that ‘the smart city’ takes very diverse forms, serves very diverse objectives, and is embedded in complex power geometries that vary from city to city. Case studies a…
Smart cities: Between worlding and provincialising
We introduce key concepts that have guided the diverse case studies of this special issue on smart cities. Calling into question Global North conceptions of the smart city, nine different articles analyse smart city projects around the world, with particular attention paid to the need to provincialise our understanding of these projects as well as to consider their relationship to worlding strategies. These case studies demonstrate the diversity …
Introduction to regional approaches to data, environment and society
Theoretical and methodological research into the geographical effects of software, algorithms, sensors and platforms increasingly focuses squarely on data and their analysis. Amidst increasing attention on ‘the digital’ (broadly defined) within various cognate fields, scholars have begun critically scrutinizing the recursive relations between individual, society, city-regions and environment as mediated through technological and computational dev…
(Digital) neo-colonialism in the smart city
The critical research agenda on smart cities has become increasingly interested in the political–economic relations between digital technologies and everyday urban life. It is now clear that in the smart city, quotidian activities have become valorized as data, and are produced, extracted and circulated with little, if any, remuneration to those individuals from whom they have been abstracted. Smart-city scholars often call this process ‘digital …
Smart cities: Who cares
The growing critical research agenda on smart cities and open data programs has largely overlooked the body-subjects that enable its (re)production. The "ideal" subject of the smart city is prefigured as tech-savvy, independent, and uber-modern, able to produce digital data and analyze it to hold city government "accountable." In this subject production, however, we argue that smart cities continue to rely on forms of reproductive labor that are …
Moral Economies of Open Data Platforms
Municipal open data platforms are currently caught in a range of tensions. They rely on an unspecified subject to analyze the data, and yet are surrounded by discourses of "empowerment" and "transparency". They are often most beneficient when approached with data science skills, yet often entail unremunerated digital labor. And they are often engaged by organizations tacking "for Social Good" onto their mandate - the Canada-wide organization Data…
Changes in Daily Step Counts and Health-Related Fitness After a Sports-Based Residential Summer Camp in Boys
Several schoolwide initiatives have been created to combat the rate of obesity in adolescents. However, despite programs showing an ability to advance health-related fitness during the academic year, the summer months contribute to the most accelerated weight gain and health-related fitness (HRF) losses in school aged youth. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of a residential summer camp on health-related fitness markers in ado…
Gender, Resistance and Conformity in Early Modern Scotland, 1560-1650
The article claims that men and women in mixed marriages often subverted patriarchal norms when attempting to escape ecclesiastical censure in early modern Scotland. Ministers held husbands responsible for ensuring the conformity of their households, and they insisted that Protestant husbands bring their wives into the fold. These husbands then argued that they had no right to compel their wives in matters of conscience. Some even insisted that t…
A Covid-19 panacea in digital technologies? Challenges for democracy and higher education
Universities have transitioned to online education in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. This transition mobilizes the technological utopian imaginary that digital technologies can rescue populations from the disease. It also raises the risk of deepening neoliberal educational reforms and, by extension, poses a threat to democracy itself. This commentary explores this risk and suggests ways to resist the resulting neoliberalization of educatio…
Where's the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data research
Contemporary cities are witnessing momentous shifts in how institutions and individuals produce and circulate data. Despite recent trends claiming that anyone can create and use data, cities remain marked by persistently uneven access and usage of digital technologies. This is the case as well within the emergent phenomenon of the 'smart city,' where open data are a key strategy for achieving 'smartness,' and increasingly constitute a fundamental…
Salute to Reviewers 2017–2018/ Hommage aux évaluateurs de 2017–2018
Rethinking big data in digital humanitarianism: Practices, epistemologies, and social relations
Towards Qualitative Geovisual Analytics: A Case Study Involving Places, People, and Mediated Experience
This article seeks to address the gap between the quantitative, summative data that are typically engaged in geovisual analytics and the more personal, experiential ways of knowledge construction accentuated by qualitative GIS. By incorporating diverse forms of data within a high-dimensional conceptual framework, we set out a type of qualitative geovisual analytics. This approach is attentive to the epistemological limitations of singular data so…
Psychological Well-Being Is an Independent Predictor of Falling in an 8-Year Follow-Up of Older Adults
A population-based sample (N = 787) was followed for 8 years and assessed three times on measures of well-being (depressive symptoms, morale, and control) and fall history. Marginal models assessed the association between baseline well-being measures and falling. Random effects models assessed change in well-being indicators as well as change in fall rate over 8 years. After adjustment for sociodemographics, psychotropic medication, health, and s…
Rethinking big data in digital humanitarianism: Practices, epistemologies, and social relations
(Digital) neo-colonialism in the smart city
The critical research agenda on smart cities has become increasingly interested in the political–economic relations between digital technologies and everyday urban life. It is now clear that in the smart city, quotidian activities have become valorized as data, and are produced, extracted and circulated with little, if any, remuneration to those individuals from whom they have been abstracted. Smart-city scholars often call this process ‘digital …
Smart cities: Between worlding and provincialising
We introduce key concepts that have guided the diverse case studies of this special issue on smart cities. Calling into question Global North conceptions of the smart city, nine different articles analyse smart city projects around the world, with particular attention paid to the need to provincialise our understanding of these projects as well as to consider their relationship to worlding strategies. These case studies demonstrate the diversity …
Worlding and provincialising smart cities: From individual case studies to a global comparative research agenda
The diversity of smart city case studies presented in this special issue demonstrates the need for provincialised understandings of smart cities that account for cities’ worlding strategies. Case studies drawn from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia show that ‘the smart city’ takes very diverse forms, serves very diverse objectives, and is embedded in complex power geometries that vary from city to city. Case studies a…
Where's the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data research
Contemporary cities are witnessing momentous shifts in how institutions and individuals produce and circulate data. Despite recent trends claiming that anyone can create and use data, cities remain marked by persistently uneven access and usage of digital technologies. This is the case as well within the emergent phenomenon of the 'smart city,' where open data are a key strategy for achieving 'smartness,' and increasingly constitute a fundamental…
Interstitiality in the smart city: More than top-down and bottom-up smartness
The critical research agenda on smart cities has tended to assume a largely top-down orientation in which powerful actors like the state and corporations enact programmes to embed Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) in the urban landscape. Because of the way research has framed this relation of power, the dominant response has been to seek social justice by either contesting these top-down exercises of (digital) power or by reconceptua…
Smart cities: Who cares
The growing critical research agenda on smart cities and open data programs has largely overlooked the body-subjects that enable its (re)production. The "ideal" subject of the smart city is prefigured as tech-savvy, independent, and uber-modern, able to produce digital data and analyze it to hold city government "accountable." In this subject production, however, we argue that smart cities continue to rely on forms of reproductive labor that are …
A Covid-19 panacea in digital technologies? Challenges for democracy and higher education
Universities have transitioned to online education in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. This transition mobilizes the technological utopian imaginary that digital technologies can rescue populations from the disease. It also raises the risk of deepening neoliberal educational reforms and, by extension, poses a threat to democracy itself. This commentary explores this risk and suggests ways to resist the resulting neoliberalization of educatio…
Introduction to regional approaches to data, environment and society
Theoretical and methodological research into the geographical effects of software, algorithms, sensors and platforms increasingly focuses squarely on data and their analysis. Amidst increasing attention on ‘the digital’ (broadly defined) within various cognate fields, scholars have begun critically scrutinizing the recursive relations between individual, society, city-regions and environment as mediated through technological and computational dev…
Psychological Well-Being Is an Independent Predictor of Falling in an 8-Year Follow-Up of Older Adults
A population-based sample (N = 787) was followed for 8 years and assessed three times on measures of well-being (depressive symptoms, morale, and control) and fall history. Marginal models assessed the association between baseline well-being measures and falling. Random effects models assessed change in well-being indicators as well as change in fall rate over 8 years. After adjustment for sociodemographics, psychotropic medication, health, and s…
Digital transformations of the urban – carbon – labor nexus: A research agenda
Digitalization is profoundly impacting natural resource extraction. Mines and wells are monitored and managed in new ways from real-time data streams to algorithmic decision-making to implementation of automated vehicles. How mines and wells are superintended is restructuring the geographies of employment as more of the day-to-day mining operations are centralized in urban locations distant from sites of extraction. Digital infrastructures allow …
Make our communities better through data: The moral economy of smart city labor
Smart cities are now an established context in which data and digital technologies shape urban politics. Despite increased scholarly focus on algorithmic governance, smart cities and their data production still heavily rely on human labor, raising questions about how that labor is recruited and the implications of different recruitment strategies. In this paper, we illuminate the relations and practices mobilized to recruit the labor required to …
Note on Bronzes in Persia
The Commercial Policy of the Moguls
Sensory Spatial After‐effects in Relation to Chronological Age, Mental Retardation and Schizophrenia
Claims that the visual and kinaesthetic spatial after‐effect vary as a function of chronological age, mental retardation, and schizophrenia have been tested in four experiments. The principal after‐effect studied was that involving judgements of the horizontal following stimulation by a slanted pattern or object. In Exps. III and IV more traditional visual (alignment) and kinaesthetic (width estimation) tasks were also investigated. Data from Exp…
Social and Economic Information for Urban Planning. Volume I: Its Selection and Use. Volume II: A Directory of Data Sources
Psychological Well-Being Is an Independent Predictor of Falling in an 8-Year Follow-Up of Older Adults
A population-based sample (N = 787) was followed for 8 years and assessed three times on measures of well-being (depressive symptoms, morale, and control) and fall history. Marginal models assessed the association between baseline well-being measures and falling. Random effects models assessed change in well-being indicators as well as change in fall rate over 8 years. After adjustment for sociodemographics, psychotropic medication, health, and s…
Towards Qualitative Geovisual Analytics: A Case Study Involving Places, People, and Mediated Experience
This article seeks to address the gap between the quantitative, summative data that are typically engaged in geovisual analytics and the more personal, experiential ways of knowledge construction accentuated by qualitative GIS. By incorporating diverse forms of data within a high-dimensional conceptual framework, we set out a type of qualitative geovisual analytics. This approach is attentive to the epistemological limitations of singular data so…
Rethinking big data in digital humanitarianism: Practices, epistemologies, and social relations
Salute to Reviewers 2017–2018/ Hommage aux évaluateurs de 2017–2018
Moral Economies of Open Data Platforms
Municipal open data platforms are currently caught in a range of tensions. They rely on an unspecified subject to analyze the data, and yet are surrounded by discourses of "empowerment" and "transparency". They are often most beneficient when approached with data science skills, yet often entail unremunerated digital labor. And they are often engaged by organizations tacking "for Social Good" onto their mandate - the Canada-wide organization Data…
Changes in Daily Step Counts and Health-Related Fitness After a Sports-Based Residential Summer Camp in Boys
Several schoolwide initiatives have been created to combat the rate of obesity in adolescents. However, despite programs showing an ability to advance health-related fitness during the academic year, the summer months contribute to the most accelerated weight gain and health-related fitness (HRF) losses in school aged youth. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of a residential summer camp on health-related fitness markers in ado…
Gender, Resistance and Conformity in Early Modern Scotland, 1560-1650
The article claims that men and women in mixed marriages often subverted patriarchal norms when attempting to escape ecclesiastical censure in early modern Scotland. Ministers held husbands responsible for ensuring the conformity of their households, and they insisted that Protestant husbands bring their wives into the fold. These husbands then argued that they had no right to compel their wives in matters of conscience. Some even insisted that t…
A Covid-19 panacea in digital technologies? Challenges for democracy and higher education
Universities have transitioned to online education in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. This transition mobilizes the technological utopian imaginary that digital technologies can rescue populations from the disease. It also raises the risk of deepening neoliberal educational reforms and, by extension, poses a threat to democracy itself. This commentary explores this risk and suggests ways to resist the resulting neoliberalization of educatio…
Where's the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data research
Contemporary cities are witnessing momentous shifts in how institutions and individuals produce and circulate data. Despite recent trends claiming that anyone can create and use data, cities remain marked by persistently uneven access and usage of digital technologies. This is the case as well within the emergent phenomenon of the 'smart city,' where open data are a key strategy for achieving 'smartness,' and increasingly constitute a fundamental…
The Preservice Teacher Competency Performance Scale: A Standards-Based Assessment Scale to Track Teacher Competency During a Pete Preparation Program
Assessing teacher competence is a central focus of the growth and development of physical education teacher candidates. For subject matter competency, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation adopted Specialized Professional Associations (SPAs) for each academic discipline, which are used to establish specific standards and procedures for program review and accreditation. These six evidence-based standards include teaching compon…
A community farm maps back! Disputes over public urban farmland in Calgary, Alberta
Geographers, cartographers, and related social scientists are increasingly locating the (geo)politics of the vernacular within volunteered geographic information, the geoweb, and other digital technologies that enable the production of new maps. We instead focus our attention on ‘old’ cartographic practices. We contend that map-based community activism and geopolitics continue to occur in ways that much research has left behind in its shifted att…
Transgressions: Reflecting on critical GIS and digital geographies
Worlding and provincialising smart cities: From individual case studies to a global comparative research agenda
The diversity of smart city case studies presented in this special issue demonstrates the need for provincialised understandings of smart cities that account for cities’ worlding strategies. Case studies drawn from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia show that ‘the smart city’ takes very diverse forms, serves very diverse objectives, and is embedded in complex power geometries that vary from city to city. Case studies a…
Smart cities: Between worlding and provincialising
We introduce key concepts that have guided the diverse case studies of this special issue on smart cities. Calling into question Global North conceptions of the smart city, nine different articles analyse smart city projects around the world, with particular attention paid to the need to provincialise our understanding of these projects as well as to consider their relationship to worlding strategies. These case studies demonstrate the diversity …
Introduction to regional approaches to data, environment and society
Theoretical and methodological research into the geographical effects of software, algorithms, sensors and platforms increasingly focuses squarely on data and their analysis. Amidst increasing attention on ‘the digital’ (broadly defined) within various cognate fields, scholars have begun critically scrutinizing the recursive relations between individual, society, city-regions and environment as mediated through technological and computational dev…
(Digital) neo-colonialism in the smart city
The critical research agenda on smart cities has become increasingly interested in the political–economic relations between digital technologies and everyday urban life. It is now clear that in the smart city, quotidian activities have become valorized as data, and are produced, extracted and circulated with little, if any, remuneration to those individuals from whom they have been abstracted. Smart-city scholars often call this process ‘digital …
Smart cities: Who cares
The growing critical research agenda on smart cities and open data programs has largely overlooked the body-subjects that enable its (re)production. The "ideal" subject of the smart city is prefigured as tech-savvy, independent, and uber-modern, able to produce digital data and analyze it to hold city government "accountable." In this subject production, however, we argue that smart cities continue to rely on forms of reproductive labor that are …
Make our communities better through data: The moral economy of smart city labor
Smart cities are now an established context in which data and digital technologies shape urban politics. Despite increased scholarly focus on algorithmic governance, smart cities and their data production still heavily rely on human labor, raising questions about how that labor is recruited and the implications of different recruitment strategies. In this paper, we illuminate the relations and practices mobilized to recruit the labor required to …
Toward Intimate Data: Re-Thinking Digital, Social, Political Relations
Digital technologies enable the mass datafication of human activity in new and intimate ways, allowing for both active and passive tracking bodily functions, physical movements, consumption habits, social encounters, and even moods and feelings. Despite the seeming newness of these developments, however, Internet scholars recognize that data production and use has always been bound up with broader relations between individuals, communities, and c…
A River of Data Runs Through It: Examining Urban Circulations in the Digital Age
There is a deepening need for dialogue between (digital) urbanists and Internet Studies scholarship. In this paper we are interested in "urbanizing" Internet Studies by thinking about how digital infrastructures create and control circulations, movement, flows, and streams within urban contexts. More specifically, we think about circulations and concentrations of natural, human, and digital resources by way of Urban Political Ecology to better un…
Digital transformations of the urban – carbon – labor nexus: A research agenda
Digitalization is profoundly impacting natural resource extraction. Mines and wells are monitored and managed in new ways from real-time data streams to algorithmic decision-making to implementation of automated vehicles. How mines and wells are superintended is restructuring the geographies of employment as more of the day-to-day mining operations are centralized in urban locations distant from sites of extraction. Digital infrastructures allow …
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (13 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Smart Cities and Technologies (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Data science (5 works)