Dr Scott Rodgers

Research Associate

Geography

Profile

From January 2010 I will be Lecturer in Media Theory within the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. 

My current role is within the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), where I am working on a project to develop and enhance CCIG's research profile. I was previously an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at The Open University. My PhD, an organizational ethnography of a major Canadian metropolitan newspaper, was completed in the Department of Geography at King's College London. My prior education includes an MSc in Cities, Space and Society from the London School of Economics, and a first degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Ryerson University.

Qualifications

BAA (Ryerson), MSc (London School of Economics), PhD (King’s College London)

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the many intersections of media, politics and cities. My current concerns are with the changing practices, technologies and organizational spaces of journalism and other journalistic media, and their connections with contemporary urban politics. I am currently engaging this broad area through a wide range of means, including conference papers, peer-reviewed articles and symposia. In collaboration with colleagues at The Open University, I hosted in June 2008 an interdisciplinary workshop entitled Mediapolis: media practices and the political spaces of cities (see the Mediapolis project website for more information). Over the medium term I also hope to develop my interests more holistically through a research monograph.

I am developing this ongoing research project along the following crosscutting themes:

1. Publicity, media and urban politics
I have broad interests in the connection between the urban and the political, and in particular, how the more unfamiliar lenses of media and public action make a difference to studying and theorizing urban politics. In refracting urban politics through these lenses, I hope to move beyond, or otherwise rethink, the scalar imaginary explicitly or implicitly underlying most writing on the topic. This is less via some outright rejection of scale, but instead by deemphasizing reified accounts of scale and thereby opening up new normative questions. My interests in this area extend from conventional concerns for power and democracy to the ways that multiple claims, framings and struggles over citizenship and difference come together in relation to cities.

2. Geographies of journalism
A connected interest is in the ways that geography and geographers (and spatial theorists more generally) have engaged journalism and news media as objects and subjects of study. Though geographers have often professed or intimated an interest in ‘the media’, in practice they have tended to offer either highly theorized accounts of new media technologies and cyberspace, or otherwise have studied the geographies in media representations. By contrast, there has been much less study of the spatialities through which mediated practices such as journalism actually ‘happen’. My own modest aim here is to identify some geographical entry points into the fray of wider debate about journalism and news media across disciplines, as well as beyond the academy.

3. Practice-materiality and organizational spaces
The ontological commitments through which most of my research gets filtered is a twin concern for social practices and materiality. In my own work I have primarily followed this interest through in relation to organizational spaces, in both their heterogeneous constitution and wider effects and affects. In particular, I have been interested in how journalism and other media-connected activities can be understood by considering how their constitutive activities, technologies and narratives come together.

Recent Publications

Journal Articles
Rodgers, S., C. Barnett and A. Cochrane (2009) ‘Mediating urban politics’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 33(1): 246-249.

Book Chapters
Rodgers, S. (2009) ‘Mediating new cities of diversity: the Toronto Star and Toronto’s reading publics’ In The contemporary Canadian metropolis. R. Dennis, C. Morgan and S. Shaw (eds). London: Institute for the Study of the Americas.

Rodgers, S. (2009) ‘Urban geography: urban growth machine’ In The international encyclopedia of human geography. R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds). Oxford: Elsevier.

Edited Journal Issues
Rodgers, S., C. Barnett and A. Cochrane (eds) (2009). Debates and Developments special issue on ‘Re-engaging the intersections of media, politics and cities’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 33(1).

Book Reviews
Review of: Blum, A. (2003) The imaginative structure of the city. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. In: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30(1): 240-241

Conference Proceedings
Rodgers, S. (2007) ‘The politics of researching ‘elite’ media geographies’ Doing postgraduate research on citizenship, identities and governance. Open University: Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance.

Rodgers, S. (2006) ‘Newspaper journalism and the changing publics of multimedia cities’; Linköping electronic conference proceedings, No. 20 – Cities and media: cultural perspectives on urban identities in a mediatized world. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.

A repository of research publications and other research outputs can be viewed at The Open University's Open Research Online.