Martin Dodge

Contacts:

• Email: [email protected]
• Telephone: 0161 275 3622
• Address: Room 1.045, Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.

Biography:

I am a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester. I completed my PhD at University College London and have previously worked at Cardiff University and the University of Nottingham as a researcher. My intellectual interests focus on the social and spatial enrolment of digital technologies as well as research on urban historical geography, the politics of maps and visualisation, and developing a cultural understanding of infrastructures.

I curated the well known Web-based Atlas of Cyberspaces (from 1995-2007) and have co-authored several books covering aspects of spatiality of computer technology and the internet: Mapping Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000), Atlas of Cyberspace (Addison-Wesley, 2001) and Code/Space (MIT Press, 2011). I have also co-edited a series of books, focused on the social and cultural meanings of mapping and the development of cartographic ideas: Geographic Visualization (John Wiley & Sons, 2008) and Rethinking Maps (Routledge, 2009), Classics in Cartography (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), The Map Reader (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Mapping - Critical Concepts in Geography (Routledge, 2015) and Mapping Across Academia (Springer, 2017). More recently a co-edited book on Cold War Cities (Routledge, 2021) and on the Simons of Manchester (MUP, 2024). I am working on a book for the University's bicentenary.

Much of my empirical research is currently focused on Manchester and employs archival and visual methodologies, as well as digitisation and public engagement activities. In this regard I co-wrote a large popular book, Manchester: Mapping the City (published by Birlinn, 2018). I have co-curated several high-profile public exhibitions, including Mapping Manchester (2009), Infra_MANC (2012), Making Post-war Manchester (2016), Celebrating Burnage Garden Village (2019), Who Built Wythenshawe? (2022), Marketing the Manchester Ship Canal (2023).

Current details on my research are given on the blog and my main homepage

• Homepage: https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/martin/martin.html
• Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=9awSnUMAAAAJ

Page last updated July 2024.

The area of research I am developing over the next few years concerns the broad relationships between digital technologies and the production of space; what might be termed the geographies of code. Mapping provides a critical interpretative lens through which I will work. I see three inter-linked, strands to this.

Mapping "software spaces and software in space"

Critically exploring the socio-spatial implications of pervasive computing and software embedding in cities through the concept of code/space. The goal is to expose the extent of the power of software in the automatic production of urban space, the regulation of social lives and emerging risks through complex human-code dependencies. The end goal is to try to develop a novel theoretical framework for the technological production of space that is empirically grounded, non-deterministic and open to performative views of everyday spatial practices.

Mapping "surveillance and securitisation"

Critically examining the urban assemblages of tagging and tracking surveillance technologies that are producing new, casual regimes of positional knowledge about people, objects, information and transactions. I want to understand the technical potentials, the social meanings and the political discourses that drive the deployment of new layers of geo-surveillance. An important element in this will be consideration of new modes of software-enabled identification and ‘sorting’ of people and places. As well as thinking about the political implications, in terms of privacy, exclusion and discrimination, of new means of ‘data mining’ and visualising the increasingly detailed spatial ‘pheromone trails’ of (near) whole populations.

Mapping the "personal data shadow"

At the individual level, I want to consider the spatial patterning of the ‘data shadows’ that envelop us from our consumption activities and daily mobilities.

I am interested to supervise postgraduate research students on the following topics:

• The geography of technology, especially, but not exclusively, in terms of contemporary digital technologies and cyberspace (what I have termed cybergeography), telecommunications networks and internet analysis
• Spatial implications of software in society, drawing up ideas from code/space and software studies
• New ways of mapping space: critical cartography, social and cultural reading of geographic visualisation, scientific representation, participatory mapping, information visualisation, politics of satellite imagery and GPS technologies
• Analysing the implications of urban infrastructures and large techno-social networks (such as utilities, transportation, surveillance, logistics)
• Charting the historical development of cartographic imagery and engineering plans for cities and infrastructures (such as networks of water, power, etc) and the role of technical archives

Please feel free to email with queries about PhD possibilities on these topic and related themes to my ongoing research and publications.