Geography
Dr Matt Finn
Lecturer in Human Geography
Key publications | Publications by category | Publications by year
Key publications
Finn M (2016). Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school. Cultural Geographies, 23(1), 29-49.Abstract:
In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’. Abstract. Author URL. Full text. DOI.
Abstract:
Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school
In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’.Finn M (2015). Education, Data and Futurity: a data-based school in the North East of England. Abstract:
Abstract
An emerging and now highly significant way by which futures are being imagined and enacted in schools is through the increased production and use of data. This thesis explores the life of data and experiences of data-based living through a deeply-textured account from one school in North-East England. Based on a multi-method qualitative study it seeks, with pupils and teachers in the school, to understand how the proliferation of data is negotiated in detail, in place and in practice. From the school, and with its members, I consider what might constitute an ethic of care in the context of data.
The thesis offers a detailed exploration of the roles that data are playing in the process of education and the production of futures. I draw on and contribute to education studies, the sociology of education, data studies and the geographies of education, childhood, youth and young people, futurity and data. I argue that data work to bundle and bind. Data bundle together different spaces and times as ‘the school’, knowable in the present, comparable with recorded ‘pasts’ and enabling the imagining and realising of futures. This bundling of spaces, times and knowledges – both within and beyond the school – renders them amenable to judgment, decision and intervention. Data also act to bind people and their futures together where pupils and teachers become coresponsible for securing each other’s futures and so also the future of the school and the nation. The ‘pupil multiple’ is produced and pupils’ digital personae circulate with many sources of data assembled, sorted and sifted. However, the relationship between bodies and bytes, and different sources of data, shifts between coherence, divergence and blurring and becomes both a source of conflict and underpins an ‘atmosphere of progress’. Abstract. Author URL.
Abstract:
Education, Data and Futurity: a data-based school in the North East of England
AbstractAn emerging and now highly significant way by which futures are being imagined and enacted in schools is through the increased production and use of data. This thesis explores the life of data and experiences of data-based living through a deeply-textured account from one school in North-East England. Based on a multi-method qualitative study it seeks, with pupils and teachers in the school, to understand how the proliferation of data is negotiated in detail, in place and in practice. From the school, and with its members, I consider what might constitute an ethic of care in the context of data.
The thesis offers a detailed exploration of the roles that data are playing in the process of education and the production of futures. I draw on and contribute to education studies, the sociology of education, data studies and the geographies of education, childhood, youth and young people, futurity and data. I argue that data work to bundle and bind. Data bundle together different spaces and times as ‘the school’, knowable in the present, comparable with recorded ‘pasts’ and enabling the imagining and realising of futures. This bundling of spaces, times and knowledges – both within and beyond the school – renders them amenable to judgment, decision and intervention. Data also act to bind people and their futures together where pupils and teachers become coresponsible for securing each other’s futures and so also the future of the school and the nation. The ‘pupil multiple’ is produced and pupils’ digital personae circulate with many sources of data assembled, sorted and sifted. However, the relationship between bodies and bytes, and different sources of data, shifts between coherence, divergence and blurring and becomes both a source of conflict and underpins an ‘atmosphere of progress’.
Finn M, McEwan C (2015). Left in the Waiting Room of History?: Provincializing the European Child. Interventions, 17(1), 113-134.Abstract:
This paper highlights an important lacuna within critiques of infantilizing (neo-)colonial European discourses: the failure to question whom or what was the ‘child’ against which non-Europeans were gauged. The premise is that the unacknowledged figure at the heart of these critiques is in fact the figure of the universalised, European child. Not only is this paradoxical, it also opens the potential for taking these critiques further, and for shifting the analytical lens away from the racialized, infantilized Other in order to challenge the assumed universality of European notions of childhood against which the Other was, and sometimes remains, positioned. We develop this critique through a sympathetic engagement with broader postcolonial writings on the subject of infantilization and, specifically, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). The paper reveals the paradoxical presence of the figure of the European child within Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism, arguing that this figure is present even as Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize Europe. The paper explores examples of the work that the figure of the universal European child continues to perform and concludes with some reflections on what it might mean to provincialize the European child, both for postcolonial theory and for the broader ethical issues this raises. Abstract. Author URL. Full text. DOI.
Abstract:
Left in the Waiting Room of History?: Provincializing the European Child
This paper highlights an important lacuna within critiques of infantilizing (neo-)colonial European discourses: the failure to question whom or what was the ‘child’ against which non-Europeans were gauged. The premise is that the unacknowledged figure at the heart of these critiques is in fact the figure of the universalised, European child. Not only is this paradoxical, it also opens the potential for taking these critiques further, and for shifting the analytical lens away from the racialized, infantilized Other in order to challenge the assumed universality of European notions of childhood against which the Other was, and sometimes remains, positioned. We develop this critique through a sympathetic engagement with broader postcolonial writings on the subject of infantilization and, specifically, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). The paper reveals the paradoxical presence of the figure of the European child within Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism, arguing that this figure is present even as Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize Europe. The paper explores examples of the work that the figure of the universal European child continues to perform and concludes with some reflections on what it might mean to provincialize the European child, both for postcolonial theory and for the broader ethical issues this raises.Pain R, Finn M, Bouveng R, Ngobe G (2013). Productive tensions - engaging geography students in participatory action research with communities. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 37(1), 28-43.Abstract:
This study discusses the benefits and challenges of an undergraduate module on participatory geographies, involving students in co-producing research with community partners. The module challenges the knowledge production model predominant in Geography curricula. We argue that it develops students' skills and understanding through engaging them intellectually, socially and emotionally outside the university. As a student, two community partners and a professor, we offer our perspectives on the opportunities and conflicts that arose. We do not gloss over tensions in achieving the module's diverse aims, but suggest that these are productive for teaching, learning, research and the needs of community organizations. Abstract. Author URL. Full text. DOI.
Abstract:
Productive tensions - engaging geography students in participatory action research with communities
This study discusses the benefits and challenges of an undergraduate module on participatory geographies, involving students in co-producing research with community partners. The module challenges the knowledge production model predominant in Geography curricula. We argue that it develops students' skills and understanding through engaging them intellectually, socially and emotionally outside the university. As a student, two community partners and a professor, we offer our perspectives on the opportunities and conflicts that arose. We do not gloss over tensions in achieving the module's diverse aims, but suggest that these are productive for teaching, learning, research and the needs of community organizations.Publications by category
Journal articles
Finn M (In Press). Book Review: Rethinking Children’s Spaces and Places, New Childhoods Series. cultural geographies Full text.
Finn M (2016). Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school. Cultural Geographies, 23(1), 29-49.Abstract:
In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’. Abstract. Author URL. Full text. DOI.
Abstract:
Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school
In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’.Finn M (2016). Religion in the primary school: ethos, diversity, citizenship. Children's Geographies, 15(4), 499-501. Full text. DOI.
Finn M, McEwan C (2015). Left in the Waiting Room of History?: Provincializing the European Child. Interventions, 17(1), 113-134.Abstract:
This paper highlights an important lacuna within critiques of infantilizing (neo-)colonial European discourses: the failure to question whom or what was the ‘child’ against which non-Europeans were gauged. The premise is that the unacknowledged figure at the heart of these critiques is in fact the figure of the universalised, European child. Not only is this paradoxical, it also opens the potential for taking these critiques further, and for shifting the analytical lens away from the racialized, infantilized Other in order to challenge the assumed universality of European notions of childhood against which the Other was, and sometimes remains, positioned. We develop this critique through a sympathetic engagement with broader postcolonial writings on the subject of infantilization and, specifically, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). The paper reveals the paradoxical presence of the figure of the European child within Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism, arguing that this figure is present even as Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize Europe. The paper explores examples of the work that the figure of the universal European child continues to perform and concludes with some reflections on what it might mean to provincialize the European child, both for postcolonial theory and for the broader ethical issues this raises. Abstract. Author URL. Full text. DOI.
Abstract:
Left in the Waiting Room of History?: Provincializing the European Child
This paper highlights an important lacuna within critiques of infantilizing (neo-)colonial European discourses: the failure to question whom or what was the ‘child’ against which non-Europeans were gauged. The premise is that the unacknowledged figure at the heart of these critiques is in fact the figure of the universalised, European child. Not only is this paradoxical, it also opens the potential for taking these critiques further, and for shifting the analytical lens away from the racialized, infantilized Other in order to challenge the assumed universality of European notions of childhood against which the Other was, and sometimes remains, positioned. We develop this critique through a sympathetic engagement with broader postcolonial writings on the subject of infantilization and, specifically, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). The paper reveals the paradoxical presence of the figure of the European child within Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism, arguing that this figure is present even as Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize Europe. The paper explores examples of the work that the figure of the universal European child continues to perform and concludes with some reflections on what it might mean to provincialize the European child, both for postcolonial theory and for the broader ethical issues this raises.Pain R, Finn M, Bouveng R, Ngobe G (2013). Productive tensions - engaging geography students in participatory action research with communities. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 37(1), 28-43.Abstract:
This study discusses the benefits and challenges of an undergraduate module on participatory geographies, involving students in co-producing research with community partners. The module challenges the knowledge production model predominant in Geography curricula. We argue that it develops students' skills and understanding through engaging them intellectually, socially and emotionally outside the university. As a student, two community partners and a professor, we offer our perspectives on the opportunities and conflicts that arose. We do not gloss over tensions in achieving the module's diverse aims, but suggest that these are productive for teaching, learning, research and the needs of community organizations. Abstract. Author URL. Full text. DOI.
Abstract:
Productive tensions - engaging geography students in participatory action research with communities
This study discusses the benefits and challenges of an undergraduate module on participatory geographies, involving students in co-producing research with community partners. The module challenges the knowledge production model predominant in Geography curricula. We argue that it develops students' skills and understanding through engaging them intellectually, socially and emotionally outside the university. As a student, two community partners and a professor, we offer our perspectives on the opportunities and conflicts that arose. We do not gloss over tensions in achieving the module's diverse aims, but suggest that these are productive for teaching, learning, research and the needs of community organizations.Internet publications
Fields D, Finn M, Oates Y (2016). Level Up: Writing Strategies for New Undergraduates. Web link.
Publications by year
In Press
Finn M (In Press). Book Review: Rethinking Children’s Spaces and Places, New Childhoods Series. cultural geographies Full text.
2016
Finn M (2016). Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school. Cultural Geographies, 23(1), 29-49.Abstract:
In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’. Abstract. Author URL. Full text. DOI.
Abstract:
Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school
In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’.Fields D, Finn M, Oates Y (2016). Level Up: Writing Strategies for New Undergraduates. Web link.
Finn M (2016). Religion in the primary school: ethos, diversity, citizenship. Children's Geographies, 15(4), 499-501. Full text. DOI.
2015
Finn M (2015). Education, Data and Futurity: a data-based school in the North East of England. Abstract:
Abstract
An emerging and now highly significant way by which futures are being imagined and enacted in schools is through the increased production and use of data. This thesis explores the life of data and experiences of data-based living through a deeply-textured account from one school in North-East England. Based on a multi-method qualitative study it seeks, with pupils and teachers in the school, to understand how the proliferation of data is negotiated in detail, in place and in practice. From the school, and with its members, I consider what might constitute an ethic of care in the context of data.
The thesis offers a detailed exploration of the roles that data are playing in the process of education and the production of futures. I draw on and contribute to education studies, the sociology of education, data studies and the geographies of education, childhood, youth and young people, futurity and data. I argue that data work to bundle and bind. Data bundle together different spaces and times as ‘the school’, knowable in the present, comparable with recorded ‘pasts’ and enabling the imagining and realising of futures. This bundling of spaces, times and knowledges – both within and beyond the school – renders them amenable to judgment, decision and intervention. Data also act to bind people and their futures together where pupils and teachers become coresponsible for securing each other’s futures and so also the future of the school and the nation. The ‘pupil multiple’ is produced and pupils’ digital personae circulate with many sources of data assembled, sorted and sifted. However, the relationship between bodies and bytes, and different sources of data, shifts between coherence, divergence and blurring and becomes both a source of conflict and underpins an ‘atmosphere of progress’. Abstract. Author URL.
Abstract:
Education, Data and Futurity: a data-based school in the North East of England
AbstractAn emerging and now highly significant way by which futures are being imagined and enacted in schools is through the increased production and use of data. This thesis explores the life of data and experiences of data-based living through a deeply-textured account from one school in North-East England. Based on a multi-method qualitative study it seeks, with pupils and teachers in the school, to understand how the proliferation of data is negotiated in detail, in place and in practice. From the school, and with its members, I consider what might constitute an ethic of care in the context of data.
The thesis offers a detailed exploration of the roles that data are playing in the process of education and the production of futures. I draw on and contribute to education studies, the sociology of education, data studies and the geographies of education, childhood, youth and young people, futurity and data. I argue that data work to bundle and bind. Data bundle together different spaces and times as ‘the school’, knowable in the present, comparable with recorded ‘pasts’ and enabling the imagining and realising of futures. This bundling of spaces, times and knowledges – both within and beyond the school – renders them amenable to judgment, decision and intervention. Data also act to bind people and their futures together where pupils and teachers become coresponsible for securing each other’s futures and so also the future of the school and the nation. The ‘pupil multiple’ is produced and pupils’ digital personae circulate with many sources of data assembled, sorted and sifted. However, the relationship between bodies and bytes, and different sources of data, shifts between coherence, divergence and blurring and becomes both a source of conflict and underpins an ‘atmosphere of progress’.
Finn M, McEwan C (2015). Left in the Waiting Room of History?: Provincializing the European Child. Interventions, 17(1), 113-134.Abstract:
This paper highlights an important lacuna within critiques of infantilizing (neo-)colonial European discourses: the failure to question whom or what was the ‘child’ against which non-Europeans were gauged. The premise is that the unacknowledged figure at the heart of these critiques is in fact the figure of the universalised, European child. Not only is this paradoxical, it also opens the potential for taking these critiques further, and for shifting the analytical lens away from the racialized, infantilized Other in order to challenge the assumed universality of European notions of childhood against which the Other was, and sometimes remains, positioned. We develop this critique through a sympathetic engagement with broader postcolonial writings on the subject of infantilization and, specifically, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). The paper reveals the paradoxical presence of the figure of the European child within Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism, arguing that this figure is present even as Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize Europe. The paper explores examples of the work that the figure of the universal European child continues to perform and concludes with some reflections on what it might mean to provincialize the European child, both for postcolonial theory and for the broader ethical issues this raises. Abstract. Author URL. Full text. DOI.
Abstract:
Left in the Waiting Room of History?: Provincializing the European Child
This paper highlights an important lacuna within critiques of infantilizing (neo-)colonial European discourses: the failure to question whom or what was the ‘child’ against which non-Europeans were gauged. The premise is that the unacknowledged figure at the heart of these critiques is in fact the figure of the universalised, European child. Not only is this paradoxical, it also opens the potential for taking these critiques further, and for shifting the analytical lens away from the racialized, infantilized Other in order to challenge the assumed universality of European notions of childhood against which the Other was, and sometimes remains, positioned. We develop this critique through a sympathetic engagement with broader postcolonial writings on the subject of infantilization and, specifically, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). The paper reveals the paradoxical presence of the figure of the European child within Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism, arguing that this figure is present even as Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize Europe. The paper explores examples of the work that the figure of the universal European child continues to perform and concludes with some reflections on what it might mean to provincialize the European child, both for postcolonial theory and for the broader ethical issues this raises.2013
Pain R, Finn M, Bouveng R, Ngobe G (2013). Productive tensions - engaging geography students in participatory action research with communities. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 37(1), 28-43.Abstract:
This study discusses the benefits and challenges of an undergraduate module on participatory geographies, involving students in co-producing research with community partners. The module challenges the knowledge production model predominant in Geography curricula. We argue that it develops students' skills and understanding through engaging them intellectually, socially and emotionally outside the university. As a student, two community partners and a professor, we offer our perspectives on the opportunities and conflicts that arose. We do not gloss over tensions in achieving the module's diverse aims, but suggest that these are productive for teaching, learning, research and the needs of community organizations. Abstract. Author URL. Full text. DOI.