Category Archives: Articles

OUT NOW: Interview with Dayne Walling on the 10th Anniversary of the Flint Water Crisis (Popula)

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“Happy” 10th Anniversary to the switch that kicked off the Flint Water Crisis. Though that moment and its optimistic press coverage provides a convenient pulse point, the crisis writ large was possible due to the conditions set forth by obnoxious Tea Party-laced GOP politics and that heady, all-American mix of “racism and bad capitalism” (h/t to Henry Zebrowski).

I recently met up with Dayne Walling (Flint Mayor 2009-2015) to chat about what really happened, and how the systemic tragedy continues playing out for him and his city a decade later. Read the full piece here.

The Flint Water Crisis, Ten Years Later

Special thanks to Popula/Maria Bustillos for their interest and for publishing this piece!

Enjoy, and pass it along to other concerned citizens.

Dayne Walling points out toward the old Fisher Auto plant grounds from the home of his office at Insight. Flint, MI, March 5, 2024. (Photo by Tyler for Sonic Geography)

New Book Chapter Alert!

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After a looooooong time in limbo for various reasons (COVID being chief among them, and then some legal things publisher-side; I’m sure it sounds more intriguing than it was in actuality), my chapter is finally about to appear in the forthcoming Routledge volume Interrogating Popular Music and the City, edited By Shane Homan, Catherine Strong, Seamus O’Hanlon, and John Tebbutt.

My chapter, which I’ve now presented at a couple of conference – most recently the 2023 Chicago Punk Scholars network meeting last summer – is called “Ground-Truthing DC Punk History in Adams–Morgan.” It was largely inspired by the punk walking tour I ran for the 2019 AAG meeting. It’s at Chapter 12, sandwiched in between what promise to be two great Melburnian (Melbournian?) chapters, the former of which co-authored by Cath Strong and Sam Whiting, two of my favorite Aussie colleagues.

The link to pre-order the hardcover will open on May 13th, so tell your institutional libraries!

New Publication Alert: Suede/Madrid/Psychogeography in ‘Riffs’

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I must apologize for my own tardiness in updating this on my own site, BUT my new article “Trash in Everything We Do: Suede’s Singles and Psychogeography in Madrid” was published last week in Volume 6(2) of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music.

Though I spent much of 2022 putting it together, the piece itself felt almost nineteen years in the making, and I’m proud of how it turned out. Thank you to the editors (Sarah Raine, Iain Taylor, Nick Gehbhart) for including me in such a great issue, and special thanks to my friend Lara and her brother Abrahan for their valuable input.

You can read the article here.

You can check out the whole issue (highly recommended) here in PDF form.

I am working on getting my hands on a few copies of the physical journal, too. Reach out if you would like one.

2009 Photo from outside Club Supersonic in Chamberi.
I made no mention in the article of how incongruous it was to see Debbie Harry on the sign. She was obviously influential to Britpop artists, but it’s still odd to me.

New Zine! ‘POSTCARDS FROM IRVING’ Coming in August

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Why a Zine, and Why Now?

Without giving too much away, this isn’t about Ben Irving as much as it is about the worlds and times he inhabited, and I am still consistently amazed at the things I discover about them. For reasons both personal and professional about which I will go into more detail in Issue One, I’ve decided to self-publish the Ben Irving chronicles, and I’ve decided to do it (mostly) away from the internet.

Those of you who have been following this site for a while may be familiar with who Irving was. If not, feel free to take a look back through the archives so far. Postcards from Irving will take these rabbit holes of research on the man, his music career(s), and his travels and expand upon them with each issue. My plan is to publish and mail out Postcards from Irving quarterly – once per season – with occasional bonus issues or collaborations. I will try to announce/preview each new issue on this website, and still include occasional nuggets from the archives.

Will this Cost Anything?

The ‘Postcards from Irving’ zine/newsletter will be free indefinitely from the date of subscription for anybody US-based, and back issues will be available for $1 each. In order to help offset costs of printing and mailing down the line, I will also be accepting donations. A small donation will get you a shout-out in ‘Postcards from Irving’ and my undying gratitude.

If you are outside of the United States and would like to subscribe to Postcards from Irving please get in touch via the form below or on Instagram.

How to Subscribe

If you would like to have fun and keep it analog (aside from reading about it online here), then direct all correspondence to POSTCARDS FROM IRVING, P.O. BOX 1309, MT. PLEASANT, MI 48804. You are welcome to (1) send me a postcard or letter requesting to subscribe or (2) pay for back issues/donate to the project with well-concealed cash.

You can also subscribe right here, using this form:

How to Donate to the ‘Postcards from Irving’ Project

You can mail well-concealed cash or a check to P.O. Box 1309, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48804, or you can donate via PayPal using the button below (or this link, if you can’t see the button). Any small amount is appreciated and will go directly to cover any printing/mailing expenses.

Thank you. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

“Trinidad” (Ben Irving, original lyric sheet header, 1940s)

New chapter on Ethnographic research in ‘Geographies of the Internet,’ out soon on Routledge

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I have a chapter in the new Geographies of the Internet volume in the Routledge Studies in Human Geography series entitled “Ethnographic research and the internet.” It is available via the Routledge site here and, ideally, your campus library!

Special thanks to Barney Warf for inviting me to contribute. It was already a challenge pushing this long-term project through the process with Routledge, and I’m sure the pandemic hasn’t made things any easier.

I’ll paste the book description and table of contents here:

This book offers a comprehensive overview of recent research on the internet, emphasizing its spatial dimensions, geospatial applications, and the numerous social and geographic implications such as the digital divide and the mobile internet.

Written by leading scholars in the field, the book sheds light on the origins and the multiple facets of the internet. It addresses the various definitions of cyberspace and the rise of the World Wide Web, draws upon media theory, as well as explores the physical infrastructure such as the global skein of fibre optics networks and broadband connectivity. Several economic dimensions, such as e-commerce, e-tailing, e-finance, e-government, and e-tourism, are also explored. Apart from its most common uses such as Google Earth, social media like Twitter, and neogeography, this volume also presents the internet’s novel uses for ethnographic research and the study of digital diasporas.

Illustrated with numerous graphics, maps, and charts, the book will best serve as supplementary reading for academics, students, researchers, and as a professional handbook for policy makers involved in communications, media, retailing, and economic development.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction Barney Warf

PART I Conceiving the history, technology, and geography of the internet

2 Is cyberspace there after all? Aharon Kellerman

3 The World Wide Web as media ecology Michael L. Black

4 Robustness and the internet: a geographic fiber-optic infrastructure perspective Ramakrishnan Durairajan

5 The history of broadband Elizabeth Mack

6 The mobile internet Matthew Kelley

7 Geographies of the internet in rural areas in developing countries Jeffrey James

8 Geographies of global digital divides James B. Pick and Avijit Sarkar

PART II Political economy of the internet

9 The geography of e-commerce Bruno Moriset

10 Online retailing Emily Fekete

11 Finance and information technologies: opposite sides of the same coin Jayson J. Funke

12 E-tourism Irene Cheng Chu Chan and Rob Law

13 The state and cyberspace: e-government geographies Barney Warf

14 A geography of the internet in China Xiang Zhang

PART III The internet in everyday life

15 Google Earth Todd Patterson

16 Augmented Reality: an overview Mark Billinghurst

17 Twitter Matthew Haffner

18 Neogeography Wen Lin

19 Ethnographic research and the internet Tyler Sonnichsen

20 Cyber-spatial cartographies of digital diasporas Michel S. Laguerre

21 Wearable internet for wellness and health: interdigital territories of new technology Monica Murero

22 The Internet of Things Anurag Agarwal and Bhuvan Unhelkar

Index

New Release: Entry on Ethnographic Research in the SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet

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51oe9xjvafl-_sx385_bo1204203200_I was invited to contribute a passage on Ethnographic Research and the Internet in the brand new SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet (B. Warf, Ed.). It just hit the SAGE online portal this week, and my entry is located on pp. 363-366 in the print edition.

If your institution has library access to the volume (which they should… this is the SAGE Encyclopedia we’re talking about), then you can just search under my name within the book, or find it via direct link here.

Thanks to Dr. Barney Warf for inviting me to contribute, and thanks to Dr. Michael Semen for recommending me to Barney.

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer! I will post some updates on a few projects when I have the chance soon.

NEW ARTICLE OUT. ‘Tout Faux’: Parisian landscape and hardcore punk, 1983–87

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20441983Happy 2018! I’m excited to announce I’ve just published a new article in the UK journal Punk and Post-Punk. Read the abstract, order it, or find citation info here. It overviews the geographic history of Paris hardcore, focusing on the three or four years of the mid-1980s when the underground style first attempted circulation in the Ile-de-France region. I based this off of a range of accounts I gathered during my fieldwork in France in 2015 and through follow-up correspondence since then.

As far as I know, this story has never been told formally before,  and I’m grateful for this opportunity to give progenitors like Heimat-Los and Kromozom 4 their rightful place in the greater global post-punk timeline. Hopefully somebody who was there at the time can take the baton and publish a more authoritative and comprehensive history of that era someday. In the meantime, there is plenty of great material archived and linked via Euthanasie Records.

Thank you to Russ Bestley and all of his colleagues at this fantastic journal. You can look into the index of Punk & Post-Punk back issues and learn how to submit on the Intellect Ltd. page here.

New Article Published in ‘Arts and the Market’ Journal

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aamcoverJust a quick announcement that I have a new article out this week! I wrote a piece about the idea of the vinyl record as a souvenir for the Emerald Publishing journal Arts and the Market. Thanks to the editorial staff for helping me sculpt this one, which originated as a research paper for a seminar on tourism. I drew equally on some older MA thesis research on the marketplace around vinyl as well as some PhD research on the seismic legend around harDCore.

Sonnichsen, T. (2017). Vinyl tourism: records as souvenirs of underground musical landscapes. Arts and the Market 7 (2), 235-248.

You can check out this issue as well as prior issues of Arts and the Market on the Emerald Insight page here. Depending on your institutional access, you may be able to find the HTML or PDF version of the article directly from there. If not, then don’t hesitate to contact me and I can help get you a copy.

New Pedagogy Article in the Journal of Geography

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Happy December, again. I just received exciting news from my esteemed colleague Ron Kalafsky. This past spring, I TA’d for his class on the Global Economy this last spring, and we conducted something of an experiment with our students. Ron had the idea to use the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) paradigm that business-minded folks (unlike myself) employ when analyzing whether to invest in a new market. We chose a set of regional, mid-size cities and assigned them throughout the class as a mechanism for teaching geography. The set of essays we received gave us a mountain of material with which to work, but the result of the project was published today in the Journal of Geography.

Take a look.

Per usual with Taylor & Francis, a subscription or University Affiliation is required, but if you’re interested, drop me a line and I’ll make sure you get to read it. I’m glad to have co-authored a piece that hopefully points anybody teaching economic geography in a certain direction. Of course, always grateful to get to work with Dr. Kalafsky, even if he is a Penguins fan. At least his musical and action-movie preferences are all solid.

Not that any of you seemed worried, but the whole flâneur thing is coming around sometime soon, too.