Thomas Birtchnell
Biographic Data
| ID | 86334 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Birtchnell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Birtchnell |
| SIGNATURE | BIRTCHNELL T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wollongong |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6095-5576 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 157 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Social practices in community responses to disasters in Fiji
When a disaster strikes, citizens are expected to respond by following carefully prepared procedures implemented by emergency services and personnel that run in tandem, and at times in conflict with, their established social practices. This paper examines how disasters in Fiji impact community gender norms, which are rapidly unsettled during an emergency. Communities under duress are compelled by government interventions to interact with the stan…
Towards an assemblage approach to mobile disability politics
This paper addresses embodied geographies of power assisted devices (powered wheelchairs and motorised scooters) for disabled people in Australia to augment understandings of mobile disability politics. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘lines’ is used to reimagine spatial thinking about mobile disability politics. Disability in this paper is understood as an emplaced, emergent, relational and embodied process that arises in the interaction betwee…
Region power for mobilities research
In this Thinking Space essay, we explain why the COVID-19 pandemic makes mobilities research more important than ever. In a time when mobilities have been reconfigured so dramatically, perhaps even leading people to value mobility differently, we need concepts and theories that can help us to attend to and navigate this new situation. Our contention is that mobilities research must recentre the region. Building on earlier work in the mobilities p…
The rush of the rush hour: Mobility justice for seniors on public transport in Sydney, Australia
Access to transport for older people is inherently related to the right to lead an independent life and to participate in social and cultural life with dignity. Yet often transport planning strategies prioritise the smooth flow of urban commuters, while people over the age of 60 are at risk of experiencing marginalisation and inequality. In this paper, we consider the mobility patterns of a group of seniors who regularly travel by public transpor…
Pay to play? Subverting the digital economy of Pokémon Go in the smart city
Location-based games (LBGs) on smart mobile phones are challenging people's conceptions of public and private space and, in the process, opening up windows of opportunity for subverting the neoliberalisation of urban space associated with the smart city. In the context of the smart city, urban control by corporate, neoliberal interests exerts pressure on players to interweave digital gameplay with everyday life in hybrid urban space. However, pla…
Digital swadeshi and 3D printing intellectual property in India: The multi-level perspective, causal layered analysis and backcasting
Urban greening and mobility justice in Dhaka's informal settlements
Urban greening in Dhaka, Bangladesh is fraught with injustice for slum dwellers. Access to the commons for the enactment of gardening, farming and foraging by the urban poor, many recent internal migrants from rural areas, is contested by wealthier citizens, developers and political elites. Through qualitative research with households within the informal settlement of Korail in Dhaka’s urban core, and a range of stakeholders in governmental and n…
Autonomous automobilities: The social impacts of driverless vehicles
Autonomous vehicles are one of the most highly anticipated technological developments of our time, with potentially wide-ranging social implications. Where dominant popular discourses around autonomous vehicles have tended to espouse a crude form of technological determinism, social scientific engagements with autonomous vehicles have tended to focus on rather narrow utilitarian dimensions related to regulation, safety or efficiency. This article…
D-printed Futures of Manufacturing, Social Change and Technological Innovation in China and Singapore: The Ghost of a Massless Future
This article outlines preliminary findings from a futures forecasting exercise where participants in Shenzhen and Singapore considered the socio-technological construction of 3D printing in terms of work and social change. We offered participants ideal political-economic futures across local–global knowledge and capital–commons dimensions, and then had them backcast the contextual waypoints across markets, culture, policy, law and technology dime…
Automating the black art: Creative places for artificial intelligence in audio mastering
On the verge of change: Maverick innovation with mobility scooters
Listening without ears: Artificial intelligence in audio mastering
Since the inception of recorded music there has been a need for standards and reliability across sound formats and listening environments. The role of the audio mastering engineer is prestigious and akin to a craft expert combining scientific knowledge, musical learning, manual precision and skill, and an awareness of cultural fashions and creative labour. With the advent of algorithms, big data and machine learning, loosely termed artificial int…
The Mobilities of Ships
A popular beginning in many academic works is to establish that a lacuna—that is, an unfilled space or gap—exists in a scholarly area and to then attempt to fill it. The Mobilities of Ships is no exception here and from the get-go the special issue-cum-edited book launches down the slipway with just such an argument. As the book's abstract highlights, the ‘unexplored waters’ the collection ‘tacks through’ are the mobilities lying offshore, which …
D printing and the third mission: The university in the materialization of intellectual capital
Drones in human geography
Drones have recently surfaced as one of the most ominous – yet simultaneously promising – technologies. This chapter addresses the role these machines play in military and civilian life, their definition, history and much-debated role in conflicts, where they have revolutionized warfare. Yet drones have wide non-military uses as well, such as delivering cargo, nature conservation (e.g. keeping an eye on poachers) and emergency management. Concern…
On the commodity trail: The journey of a bargain product from East to West
The missing mobility: Friction and freedom in the movement and digitization of cargo
Logistics, freight, cargo and containerization are understood to be a final frontier for mobilities research; however, a burgeoning body of literature is now engaging with this oversight. Of interest are various components in this complex: the mobility of the container through different transport modes; the techno-science of logistics and the telecommunications architecture in place to track and trace objects through global production networks; a…
Vastu compliance: The gentrification of India's sacred spaces and the mobilities of ideas
This article examines the mobilities of ideas in the context of sacred spaces in India and transnational flows of trends and services. Mobile subjects on the global stage are still bound by immobile concerns, such as their homes. In this article I examine the anxieties of India’s globally mobile middle and elite classes through their efforts to make their gated multi-storey residences compliant with an ancient form of spatial spirituality: vastu …
Cargomobilities: Moving Materials in a Global Age
Less talk more drone: Social research with UAVs
There is a growing body of work in geography and sociology on the impact of drones on warfare, surveillance and civil protest. This paper assesses the challenges of using drones for teaching human geography and spatial social sciences. Affordable and expensive drones are now available in the market place; however, there has been next to no reflection on how drones might impact upon the social sciences as a research tool. Yet, unmanned flying vehi…
The mobilities and post-mobilities of cargo
Cargo is moved from factories through global production networks via supply chains to consumers, but this process is hidden from them by what Raymond Williams termed the magic system of marketing and what Allan Sekula and Noël Burch call the forgotten space of containerization. This paper addresses recent concern that the mobilities paradigm has neglected two domains relevant to cargo: global production networks and global cultures of consumption…
Indovation
How should we understand the many reports that poverty is the mother of innovation in India? What has the role of austerity been in the development of India's knowledge economy? In this critical study
Austerity in the Dark Ages
It is said, Sir, that poverty is the mother of invention — so is indolence the mother of imposture. Sociologist Dipankar Gupta perceptively summarizes that the period after India’s Independence was widely considered to be a move out of the ‘Dark Ages’ and ‘into the light’.2 This was most significantly a discoursal shift. For most of the twentieth century scholarship on India dwelled upon why India had not, and perhaps could not, industrialize. No…
Elite Mobilities
This is a chapter from the book Elite Mobilities published by Taylor and Francis. It is available here with the kind permission of the publishers
D, SF and the future
Stranded: An Eruption of Disruption
An editorial introduction to a special section on the disruptions to air travel triggered by Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull's eruptions in April and May 2010. A spontaneously organized workshop and open call for papers gathered together analyses from different perspectives – systems theory, impromptu surveys, personal reflection, literary and philosophical probing. This introduction explores some of the connecting themes and highlights the strange, s…
Jugaad as systemic risk and disruptive innovation in India
Jugaad is the latest/trend in management and business reports of India's awakening. The term refers to the widespread practice in rural India of jury-rigging and customizing vehicles using only available resources and know-how. While the practice is often accompanied by indigence and corruption in traditional interpretations, the notion of jugaad has excited many commentators on India's emergence into the global economy in its promise of an inimi…
D, SF and the future
Less talk more drone: Social research with UAVs
There is a growing body of work in geography and sociology on the impact of drones on warfare, surveillance and civil protest. This paper assesses the challenges of using drones for teaching human geography and spatial social sciences. Affordable and expensive drones are now available in the market place; however, there has been next to no reflection on how drones might impact upon the social sciences as a research tool. Yet, unmanned flying vehi…
Elites, elements and events: Practice theory and scale
The mobilities and post-mobilities of cargo
Cargo is moved from factories through global production networks via supply chains to consumers, but this process is hidden from them by what Raymond Williams termed the magic system of marketing and what Allan Sekula and Noël Burch call the forgotten space of containerization. This paper addresses recent concern that the mobilities paradigm has neglected two domains relevant to cargo: global production networks and global cultures of consumption…
Autonomous automobilities: The social impacts of driverless vehicles
Autonomous vehicles are one of the most highly anticipated technological developments of our time, with potentially wide-ranging social implications. Where dominant popular discourses around autonomous vehicles have tended to espouse a crude form of technological determinism, social scientific engagements with autonomous vehicles have tended to focus on rather narrow utilitarian dimensions related to regulation, safety or efficiency. This article…
The rush of the rush hour: Mobility justice for seniors on public transport in Sydney, Australia
Access to transport for older people is inherently related to the right to lead an independent life and to participate in social and cultural life with dignity. Yet often transport planning strategies prioritise the smooth flow of urban commuters, while people over the age of 60 are at risk of experiencing marginalisation and inequality. In this paper, we consider the mobility patterns of a group of seniors who regularly travel by public transpor…
Fabricating Futures and the Movement of Objects
This paper assesses possible futures concerning so-called 3D printing in relation to socio-technical systems and consumption and production. Drawing on an Economic and Social Research Council funded project, the paper details the results of research exploring possible futures of the manufacturing industry and impacts upon the transport of objects. Such ‘printing’, or ‘personal fabrication’, could permit many objects to be produced near to or even…
On the verge of change: Maverick innovation with mobility scooters
Automating the black art: Creative places for artificial intelligence in audio mastering
The missing mobility: Friction and freedom in the movement and digitization of cargo
Logistics, freight, cargo and containerization are understood to be a final frontier for mobilities research; however, a burgeoning body of literature is now engaging with this oversight. Of interest are various components in this complex: the mobility of the container through different transport modes; the techno-science of logistics and the telecommunications architecture in place to track and trace objects through global production networks; a…
Towards an assemblage approach to mobile disability politics
This paper addresses embodied geographies of power assisted devices (powered wheelchairs and motorised scooters) for disabled people in Australia to augment understandings of mobile disability politics. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘lines’ is used to reimagine spatial thinking about mobile disability politics. Disability in this paper is understood as an emplaced, emergent, relational and embodied process that arises in the interaction betwee…
Region power for mobilities research
In this Thinking Space essay, we explain why the COVID-19 pandemic makes mobilities research more important than ever. In a time when mobilities have been reconfigured so dramatically, perhaps even leading people to value mobility differently, we need concepts and theories that can help us to attend to and navigate this new situation. Our contention is that mobilities research must recentre the region. Building on earlier work in the mobilities p…
Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market
Two distinct audiences will find much reward in reading Janine R. Wedel’s Shadow Elite. First, those concerned with the extant focus of the book: U.S. political-economic issues and public policy—albeit in a global context—and the trajectories of America’s neoconservatives. It is a vital area of inquiry and one that has considerable commercial appeal in light of the current power shift that has taken place in the United States; a power shift that …
From ‘Hindolence’ to ‘Spirinomics’: Discourse, Practice and the Myth of Indian Enterprise
A resurgence in Hindu nationalism in India is accompanying a burgeoning interest in Indian spiritual values in global aspirational and management literature. This article traces the shift in understandings of the economic valency of Indian spiritual values outlining the popular relation of Hindu values to economic growth and management and leadership discourse and practice
Listening without ears: Artificial intelligence in audio mastering
Since the inception of recorded music there has been a need for standards and reliability across sound formats and listening environments. The role of the audio mastering engineer is prestigious and akin to a craft expert combining scientific knowledge, musical learning, manual precision and skill, and an awareness of cultural fashions and creative labour. With the advent of algorithms, big data and machine learning, loosely termed artificial int…
Vastu compliance: The gentrification of India's sacred spaces and the mobilities of ideas
This article examines the mobilities of ideas in the context of sacred spaces in India and transnational flows of trends and services. Mobile subjects on the global stage are still bound by immobile concerns, such as their homes. In this article I examine the anxieties of India’s globally mobile middle and elite classes through their efforts to make their gated multi-storey residences compliant with an ancient form of spatial spirituality: vastu …
Digital swadeshi and 3D printing intellectual property in India: The multi-level perspective, causal layered analysis and backcasting
Fill the ships and we shall fill the shops: The making of geographies of manufacturing
Alongside ‘Dig for Victory’, ‘Make Do and Mend’ is a well‐known ideology from the austerity campaigns unleashed on B ritain's home front in the S econd W orld W ar. Less well known are the post‐war prosperity campaigns. These campaigns mutated the moral economy created by wartime propaganda to encourage the British to become reacquainted with geographies of manufacturing and to focus again on imports and exports. P ost‐ S econd W orld W ar consum…
From ‘Hindolence’ to ‘Spirinomics’: Discourse, Practice and the Myth of Indian Enterprise
A resurgence in Hindu nationalism in India is accompanying a burgeoning interest in Indian spiritual values in global aspirational and management literature. This article traces the shift in understandings of the economic valency of Indian spiritual values outlining the popular relation of Hindu values to economic growth and management and leadership discourse and practice
Jugaad as systemic risk and disruptive innovation in India
Jugaad is the latest/trend in management and business reports of India's awakening. The term refers to the widespread practice in rural India of jury-rigging and customizing vehicles using only available resources and know-how. While the practice is often accompanied by indigence and corruption in traditional interpretations, the notion of jugaad has excited many commentators on India's emergence into the global economy in its promise of an inimi…
Stranded: An Eruption of Disruption
An editorial introduction to a special section on the disruptions to air travel triggered by Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull's eruptions in April and May 2010. A spontaneously organized workshop and open call for papers gathered together analyses from different perspectives – systems theory, impromptu surveys, personal reflection, literary and philosophical probing. This introduction explores some of the connecting themes and highlights the strange, s…
Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market
Two distinct audiences will find much reward in reading Janine R. Wedel’s Shadow Elite. First, those concerned with the extant focus of the book: U.S. political-economic issues and public policy—albeit in a global context—and the trajectories of America’s neoconservatives. It is a vital area of inquiry and one that has considerable commercial appeal in light of the current power shift that has taken place in the United States; a power shift that …
Elites, elements and events: Practice theory and scale
Indovation
How should we understand the many reports that poverty is the mother of innovation in India? What has the role of austerity been in the development of India's knowledge economy? In this critical study
Austerity in the Dark Ages
It is said, Sir, that poverty is the mother of invention — so is indolence the mother of imposture. Sociologist Dipankar Gupta perceptively summarizes that the period after India’s Independence was widely considered to be a move out of the ‘Dark Ages’ and ‘into the light’.2 This was most significantly a discoursal shift. For most of the twentieth century scholarship on India dwelled upon why India had not, and perhaps could not, industrialize. No…
Elite Mobilities
This is a chapter from the book Elite Mobilities published by Taylor and Francis. It is available here with the kind permission of the publishers
D, SF and the future
Fill the ships and we shall fill the shops: The making of geographies of manufacturing
Alongside ‘Dig for Victory’, ‘Make Do and Mend’ is a well‐known ideology from the austerity campaigns unleashed on B ritain's home front in the S econd W orld W ar. Less well known are the post‐war prosperity campaigns. These campaigns mutated the moral economy created by wartime propaganda to encourage the British to become reacquainted with geographies of manufacturing and to focus again on imports and exports. P ost‐ S econd W orld W ar consum…
Fabricating Futures and the Movement of Objects
This paper assesses possible futures concerning so-called 3D printing in relation to socio-technical systems and consumption and production. Drawing on an Economic and Social Research Council funded project, the paper details the results of research exploring possible futures of the manufacturing industry and impacts upon the transport of objects. Such ‘printing’, or ‘personal fabrication’, could permit many objects to be produced near to or even…
Cargomobilities: Moving Materials in a Global Age
Less talk more drone: Social research with UAVs
There is a growing body of work in geography and sociology on the impact of drones on warfare, surveillance and civil protest. This paper assesses the challenges of using drones for teaching human geography and spatial social sciences. Affordable and expensive drones are now available in the market place; however, there has been next to no reflection on how drones might impact upon the social sciences as a research tool. Yet, unmanned flying vehi…
The mobilities and post-mobilities of cargo
Cargo is moved from factories through global production networks via supply chains to consumers, but this process is hidden from them by what Raymond Williams termed the magic system of marketing and what Allan Sekula and Noël Burch call the forgotten space of containerization. This paper addresses recent concern that the mobilities paradigm has neglected two domains relevant to cargo: global production networks and global cultures of consumption…
The missing mobility: Friction and freedom in the movement and digitization of cargo
Logistics, freight, cargo and containerization are understood to be a final frontier for mobilities research; however, a burgeoning body of literature is now engaging with this oversight. Of interest are various components in this complex: the mobility of the container through different transport modes; the techno-science of logistics and the telecommunications architecture in place to track and trace objects through global production networks; a…
Vastu compliance: The gentrification of India's sacred spaces and the mobilities of ideas
This article examines the mobilities of ideas in the context of sacred spaces in India and transnational flows of trends and services. Mobile subjects on the global stage are still bound by immobile concerns, such as their homes. In this article I examine the anxieties of India’s globally mobile middle and elite classes through their efforts to make their gated multi-storey residences compliant with an ancient form of spatial spirituality: vastu …
D printing and the third mission: The university in the materialization of intellectual capital
Drones in human geography
Drones have recently surfaced as one of the most ominous – yet simultaneously promising – technologies. This chapter addresses the role these machines play in military and civilian life, their definition, history and much-debated role in conflicts, where they have revolutionized warfare. Yet drones have wide non-military uses as well, such as delivering cargo, nature conservation (e.g. keeping an eye on poachers) and emergency management. Concern…
On the commodity trail: The journey of a bargain product from East to West
Automating the black art: Creative places for artificial intelligence in audio mastering
On the verge of change: Maverick innovation with mobility scooters
Listening without ears: Artificial intelligence in audio mastering
Since the inception of recorded music there has been a need for standards and reliability across sound formats and listening environments. The role of the audio mastering engineer is prestigious and akin to a craft expert combining scientific knowledge, musical learning, manual precision and skill, and an awareness of cultural fashions and creative labour. With the advent of algorithms, big data and machine learning, loosely termed artificial int…
The Mobilities of Ships
A popular beginning in many academic works is to establish that a lacuna—that is, an unfilled space or gap—exists in a scholarly area and to then attempt to fill it. The Mobilities of Ships is no exception here and from the get-go the special issue-cum-edited book launches down the slipway with just such an argument. As the book's abstract highlights, the ‘unexplored waters’ the collection ‘tacks through’ are the mobilities lying offshore, which …
D-printed Futures of Manufacturing, Social Change and Technological Innovation in China and Singapore: The Ghost of a Massless Future
This article outlines preliminary findings from a futures forecasting exercise where participants in Shenzhen and Singapore considered the socio-technological construction of 3D printing in terms of work and social change. We offered participants ideal political-economic futures across local–global knowledge and capital–commons dimensions, and then had them backcast the contextual waypoints across markets, culture, policy, law and technology dime…
Pay to play? Subverting the digital economy of Pokémon Go in the smart city
Location-based games (LBGs) on smart mobile phones are challenging people's conceptions of public and private space and, in the process, opening up windows of opportunity for subverting the neoliberalisation of urban space associated with the smart city. In the context of the smart city, urban control by corporate, neoliberal interests exerts pressure on players to interweave digital gameplay with everyday life in hybrid urban space. However, pla…
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Social science (14 works) · Business (11 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Economics (8 works) · History (8 works)