Digital @ Leicester
Workshop 1 of the “Towards innovative mixed-methods approaches to studying living multiculture in small cities” seminar series organised by Stef De Sabbata, Katy Bennett, Matteo Dutto, Maarten Loopmans and Giorgia Mascaro and funded by the (USF Seminar Series Awards).
To be held online on Thursday, November 2nd, 2023.
About this event
In a new era of global migration, diverse forms of urban mobility, migration settlement, and resettlement have contributed to the reshaping of national populations and localities, paving the way for new encounters, exchanges, and tensions (Neal et al. 2017). In this context, cities are not only the terrain on which these entangled relationships unfold, but these relationships shape them. Indeed, studies on multiculture demand a new focus on place and space because they are vital to understanding how multicultural social relations are enacted and lived.
Informed by the recent postcolonial turn in urban studies that calls for a decentralisation of urban theory (Robinson 2006) and embracing a comparative case study approach (Robinson 2016), this seminar series will bring together academics, early career researchers and practitioners in thinking and learning about mixed-methods research practices (Bennett and De Sabbata 2023) for understanding and describing heterogeneous formations of multiculture across different local contexts: Leicester (UK), Prato (Italy) and Antwerp (Belgium). We aim to explore how a range of diverse historical and material processes have led Leicester, Prato and Antwerp to variously develop the status of “the multicultural” city in their respective countries. We will explore what “multicultural” means in the three different contexts, using geo-spatial, geo-political and cultural lenses to interrogate processes taking place.
The seminar series is structured into four events. This is the first of three online workshops aimed at allowing participants to showcase research conducted using three different methodological approaches or focusing on one of the three local contexts outlined above. We will then conclude the seminar series with an in-person, three-day event, including training and workshops to bring together these three different methodological approaches and apply them to develop a mixed-method project.
Digital
The first online workshop will focus on the role of the digital in our everyday lives, which are now increasingly living behind a wide range of digital footprint data, from shopping purchases to library borrowings to social media. Key topics for discussion will be the increasingly important role of data science and AI in making sense of those data, as well as the emerging practices in the fields of digital geographies.
Leicester
The workshop will also focus on one of the three local contexts outlined above. Defined as a ‘city of diversity’, Leicester has often been central to discourses concerned with the successes and failures of multicultural Britain (Katy Bennett and Sabbata 2023). A key centre for textiles, clothing and footwear manufacturing since the industrial revolution, Leicester has been referred to as a ‘model of successful multiculturalism’ in Britain (Hassen and Giovanardi 2018; Clayton 2009) whilst also being the subject of crisis talk by media outlets highlighting divisions and tensions within the city. Going beyond ‘celebratory’ and ‘crisis’ talk, recent research uses the lens of conviviality to understand everyday social and spatial relations shaping multiculturalism in Leicester (Neal et al. 2017).
Preliminary schedule
| 09:00 | Introductions |
| Introduction to the seminar series, Dr Stef De Sabbata | |
| Round of introductions | |
| Geographies of multiculturalism in Leicester: An introduction, Prof Katy Bennett | |
| On Digital Geographies, Dr Tess Osborne | |
| 10:30 | Coffee break |
| 10:45 | Talks |
| - Digital first food access in Newport News, VA (USA), Dr Federica Bono | |
| - Investigating community networks in the city of Leicester, Giorgia Mascaro | |
| - Neither safe nor legal: experiencing the Afghan Relocation and Assistance Policy, Dr Helen Dexter and Dr Kelly Staples | |
| - Exploring the use of large language models in human geography, Dr Stef De Sabbata | |
| - Biosocial walking: capturing the emotionality of urban walking for migrants, Dr Tess Osborne | |
| 12:15 | Lunch break |
| 13:30 | World cafè session |
| Rotating discussions in small groups on three topics/questions | |
| - Digital and AI | |
| - Mixed-methods in studying multiculture | |
| - Comparative studies of small cities | |
| 14:30 | Discussion and wrap-up |
| Reports from world cafè groups, discussion and wrap-up |
Abstracts
Introductions
Geographies of multiculturalism in Leicester: An introduction
In this short presentation, I briefly introduce you to Leicester, one of the UK’s most superdiverse cities, and its representation in political, popular and policy debates concerned with multiculturalism and immigration. Alongside this, I briefly touch on some of the conceptual development, mapping and innovation around methodological approaches keen to understand the dynamism of Leicester’s population and how we live together here and now.
On Digital Geographies
‘The digital’ has become deeply enmeshed within our everyday lives and society, so much so that the COVID-19 pandemic merely accelerated the move towards placing many aspects of our lives online. The inescapable nature of digitisation has, and will continue to have, major consequences on how we live, work, and learn. In all sectors of society, the tidal wave of digitisation creates significant dilemmas and challenges, as well as opportunities. I will explore geography’s ‘digital turn’, which advocates for a research philosophy that ‘opens out’ the discipline of geography and represents a novel avenue of inquiry for geographers, with innovative research foci, methods, and epistemologies.
Talks
Digital first food access in Newport News, VA (USA)
by Dr Federica Bono (10min)
Digital first food access in Newport News, VA (USA) Digital platforms, including social media, play an increasingly crucial role in first food access in the United States. This role became possibly even more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic which made in-person breastfeeding support harder to access or even non-existent while the subsequent formula shortage affected millions of families who found themselves in front of empty shelves, scrambling for formula. Amidst significant racial disparities in breastfeeding initiation and duration rates, parents are active in online breastfeeding support groups, informal human milk sharing Facebook groups, formula exchange groups, and groups that specialize in assisting parents who want to import European formula. This research asks what, exactly, the role of digital platforms is in securing first food and in building solidarity networks across racial and socio-economic divides. Ultimately, the research asks what is their potential in achieving first food justice: to what extent do digital resources fill up the gaps that are present in the formal health care sector (lack of lactation training and support, racial prejudices in perinatal health care)? And to what extent do digital resources fill up the spatial gaps that are present in (first) food deserts?
Neither safe nor legal: experiencing the Afghan Relocation and Assistance Policy
by Dr Helen Dexter and Dr Kelly Staples (20min)
In late December 2020, the government of the United Kingdom (UK) announced the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) for Afghan citizens who had worked for or with the UK Government in Afghanistan in exposed or meaningful roles. The ongoing and, so far, open-ended scheme includes an offer of relocation to the UK for those deemed eligible by the Ministry of Defence and deemed suitable by the Home Office. The Policy was formally launched in April 2021, a matter of weeks before the Taliban launched a major offensive against the Afghan Armed Forces and made rapid advances. The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, situated ARAP within the Government’s New Plan for Immigration commitment ‘to expand legal and safe routes to the UK for those in need of protection, whilst toughening our stance against illegal entry and the criminals that endanger life by enabling it’. The scheme was aimed, furthermore, at the ‘rapid self-sufficiency and social integration’ (Home Office, 2023) of those relocated. Convinced by the importance of ‘listening to and engaging with voices of refugees and other migrants’ (Fine 2019, p. 29), we set out to listen to the experiences of people relocated to Leicester on the ARAP scheme. In this paper, we consider what it means to be ‘safe’ and to be ‘legal’, focusing on the spatial and temporal dimensions of their lived experiences of the scheme and their time in Leicester. In their accounts of, and understandings of, the scheme, we find temporalities of violence and displacement which challenge the government’s binary and linear narratives around displacement, violence, and integration.
Exploring the use of large language models in human geography
by Dr Stef De Sabbata (20min)
The past few years have seen an unprecedented improvement in computer models’ ability to process natural language, starting with the development of the transformer architecture and culminating with the release of ChatGPT to the public in November 2022. Since then, the pace of development and the abilities of these new large language models have been paralleled only by the challenges and concerns such developments have brought to society. Despite the challenges, there are also many opportunities that these models are opening. At the core, large language models are pre-trained to predict the next word in a sentence and then fine-tuned to solve specific tasks such as assessing sentence similarity, text summarisation or question answering. However, they have demonstrated a wide range of unexpected skills, limitations and emergent behaviours, which are still not fully understood. In this talk, I will present the preliminary findings of two projects where we adopted large language models to study everyday geographies and explore an oral history archive. I will conclude with a broader discussion on how large language models can provide new approaches (and concerns) to exploring textual and oral content in human geography.
Acknowledgments
This workshop is supported by a Seminar Series Award from the Urban Studies Foundation, grant reference: USF-SSA-230312.
