In this episode, we speak with Burcu Baykurt.

Burcu is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work centres the technological dimensions of statecraft, from its expressions in nationalism and borders, to the various kinds of automation being incorporated in local government infrastructures.

Our discussion centred more so on the latter, and specifically Burcu’s longstanding interests in Google as an increasingly influential agent in urban affairs. While the influence that Google and its parent company Alphabet exert on our worlds has hardly been ignored, in a strange way, less attention than we might expect has been directed to the unique place ‘Big Tech’ companies like Google have in an emerging ‘platform urbanism’, or in debates about so-called ‘smart cities’.

We spent some time discussing a special issue Burcu has co-edited with Antoine Courmont on what they call Google urbanism, before turning to her own extended research into Google in specific locales, in her case Kansas City. We end our discussion talking a bit about where Burcu’s research and writing is heading, specifically concerning the notion of a rising ‘test-bed urbanism’, and how the urban interventions of the tech sector interweave with local knowledge, practices, cultures, inequities and histories.

This interview, which was recorded on 26 February 2025, is Episode 8 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

In this episode, we speak with Caitlin Bruce.

Caitlin is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Originally trained through Northwestern University’s renowned PhD programme in rhetoric and public culture, her research focuses on the politics and possibilities of urban public art, in settings including the United States, Germany, Colombia, and France. But one place Caitlin’s work has taken her for longer and more immersive durations is Mexico, which has been the basis for two book-length projects exploring the localisation of global graffiti practices in situated contexts.

Our discussion centred on Caitlin’s more recent book project, Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico. It is a book which explores how the city government of León, in central Mexico, went from fighting a war on graffiti in the early 2000s to a much different approach ten years later, when it turned towards sanctioning and valuing it. And, it seeks to understand how young people, engaging in such artistic practices, navigated these shifting conditions.

We discuss the book’s origins as a research project, as well as its historical and global contexts – from Mexican muralism to American hip-hop culture – before moving on to its unique anchoring in a kind of sonic or aural perspective on graffiti and more broadly visual culture. We also end by discussing Caitlin’s recent efforts in social-engaged research, bringing the work with Leónese graffiti writers into contact with Latinx and other contemporaries in US urban contexts.

This interview, which was recorded on 28 October 2024, is Episode 7 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Myria Georgiou.

Myria is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has been working for more than two decades on the mediation of identity and citizenship. Myria’s work has spanned interests in: the relationships of media and cities; how media are implicated in identity construction for diasporic populations and migrants; and how diversity and difference are represented in the media.

Our discussion centred on Myria’s recent book Being Human in Digital Cities. It is a book which explores the curious resurrection of a kind of ‘people centrism’ in discourses about digital cities, analysing the rise of competing claims to urban humanity by a range of different actors, from technology companies to local governments to ordinary urban citizens.

Our discussion provides a good overview of the book’s thematic attention to three varieties of digital humanism in cities: popular, demotic, and critical. We also touch on the where Myria sees her arguments in relation to broader contemporary debates about the ‘human’ or ‘posthuman’.

This interview, which was recorded on 7 May 2024, is Episode 6 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)