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• Technological Natures: Materialities, Mobilities, Politics research cluster

Dr Bradley L Garrett

• Academic Profile
• Current Research
• Publications

Academic Profile

Bradley L Garrett joined the Technological Natures research cluster in October 2012. He holds a BS in Anthropology and a BA in History from the University of California Riverside (2003) and an MA in Maritime Archaeology from James Cook University, Australia (2005). Brad completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London in February 2012. His doctoral research was a visual ethnography with urban explorers, people who trespass into, and often photograph, off-limits urban spaces. The research was one of the first multimedia theses in geography, being comprised of text, photography and video. Prior to 2008, Brad worked for several years as a heritage consultant and archaeologist for the United States Bureau of Land Management and several Native American tribes.

Brad's broader research interests revolve around issues concerning urban life, place, ruins and waste, memory and loss, human rights, spatial politics, subversive social practices, heritage and multimedia methodologies. All of Brad's past, current and future projects work to reveal, through experiential engagement, what is hidden from plain sight.

Current Research

Brad is currently working on completing his first monograph, Place hacking: tales of urban exploration, which will be released by Verso Books in Autumn 2013. He is also developing a project on astral geographies, exploring the ways in which new technologies are changing human relationships with space.

In addition to this research, Brad continues to advocate for, and practice, innovative visual methods, including both film and photography. He is currently collaborating on two visual projects, one with Katherine Brickell at Royal Holloway, University of London on participatory video narratives of domestic violence and another with Kate Maclean, Andrew Brooks and Mike Goodman at King's College London on mobile phone supply chains and commodity circuits.

Selection of Recent Publications

• Garrett, B.L. (in press, 2012) Undertaking recreational trespass: urban exploration and infiltration. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
• Garrett, B.L. (in press, 2012) The affectual affordances of industrial urban exploration. In, Orange, H. and S. Penrose (eds.) Reanimating Industrial Spaces. Left Coast press, Walnut Creek, CA, USA.
• Garrett, B.L. (in press, 2012) Worlds through glass: photography and video as geographic method. In, Ward, K. (ed.) Researching the City. SAGE Publication, London, UK.
• Garrett, B.L. (2012) Videographic geographies: using digital video for human geography research. In, Hughes, J. (ed.) SAGE Visual Methods, SAGE Publications, London, UK. 1672pp. ISBN: 9781446241028.
• Garrett, B.L. (2012) Edgework: Getting Close, Getting Cut, Getting Out. Speculative Geographies (Volume II), The State, United Arab Emirates.
• Brickell, K. and Garrett, B.L. (2012) Geography, film and exploration: women and amateur filmmaking in the Himalayas. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Early View.
• Anton, M., Garrett, B.L., Hess, A., Miles, E. and Moreau, T. (2012) London's Olympic waterscape: capturing transition. International Journal of Heritage Studies (invited article for special issue), iFirst.
• Garrett, B.L. (2011) Assaying history: creating temporal junctions through urban exploration. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(6): 1048-1067.
• Garrett, B.L. (2011) Cracking the Paris carrières: corporal terror and illicit encounter under the City of Light. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 10(2): 269-277.
• Garrett, B.L., Rosa., B. and Prior, J. (2011) Jute: excavating material and symbolic surfaces. Liminalities, the Journal of Performance Studies, 7(2), (paper and video article).
• Sigvardsdotter, E. and Garrett, B.L. (2011) 'The Tree' by Torgny Lindgren (translated from the Swedish). Asymptote Journal, April 2011 issue.
• Garrett, B.L. (2010) Urban explorers: quests for myth, mystery and meaning. Geography Compass, 4(6): 1448-1461, (paper and video article).
• Garrett, B.L. (2010) Videographic geographies: using digital video for human geography research. Progress in Human Geography, 35(4): 521-541.
• Garrett, B.L. (2009) Drowned memories: the submerged places of the Winnemem Wintu. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, 6(2): 346-371.

Media appearances

• 2012 - Big Picture: Urban exploration, The Guardian Magazine, London, UK, 21st September 2012.
• 2012 - Meet a Geographer, Geographical Magazine, August issue, Royal Geographical Society, London, UK.
• 2012 - The London chronicles: Memory, BBC World Service, produced by Francesca Panetta, first broadcast 10th July 2012.
• 2012 - Britain by night, ITV, produced by Plum Pictures, first broadcast August 30th, 2012.
• 2012 - Between the ears: Invisible cities, BBC Radio 3, produced by Falling Tree Productions, produced by Eleanor McDowall, first broadcast 2nd June 2012.
• 2012 - Security at the London 2012 Olympics (guest interview), CBC (Canada), first broadcast 5th July 2012.
• 2012 - The Legacy of the Shard (guest interview), RTL Broadcasting (Germany), first broadcast 7th July 2012.
• 2012 - Meet place hacker Bradley L. Garrett (guest interview), West Coast Live with Sedge Thompson, San Francisco, California, first broadcast June 30th 2012.
• 2012 - Meet the explorers who climbed the Shard, ITV Daybreak Show (show guest with Lucinda Grange), first broadcast 13th April, 2012.
• 2012 - GeoQuiz, Public Radio International's The World, first broadcast April 11th, 2012.
• 2011 - Londra Underground: L'esplorazione del sottosuolo ci rende cittadini più consapevoli? Il caso Londra, Studio Magazine, Nicola Bozzi, 4th October.
• 2011 - Urban explorers enter London's landmarks, Evening Standard, by Lucy Osborn, 10th November 2011.
• 2011 - Londres et les visiteurs du soir, Le Temps, written by Julie Zaugg, Switzerland, published 19th June 2011.
• 2011 - En fotos: Viaje a uno de los secretos mejor guardados de Londres, BBC Mundo, written by Rosario Gabino, published 3rd May 2011.

Conference and Workshop Presentations

• 2012 - The subtle politics of urban exploration, Brighton Photo Biennial, Brighton, UK 24th October 2012.
• 2012 - Recoding urban space through place hacking, Taking Place, CRASSH Graduate Research Group, University of Cambridge, 29th October, Cambridge, UK.
• 2012 - Spatio/temporal collapse factors, Ruins and Radiation workshop, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, 28th November.
• 2012 - Emotion dump, Stichting Idee-fixe (IDFX), Breda, Netherlands, 13th September 2012.
• 2012 - Exploring the uncanny, The Stone Tapes I, CTM.12: Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Arts, Berlin, Germany, 3rd February 2012.
• 2010 - Place hacking - tales of urban exploration, Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, 1st - 3rd September 2010, London, UK.
• 2010 - Transgressive mobilities and place hacking: embodied experiences of urban exploration, American Association of Geographers annual conference, Washington D.C., USA 14th-18th April 2010.
• 2009 - I think it's unlocked: exploring remnants of industry, 2009 Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference, Durham, UK, 17th-19th December 2009.
• 2009 - Bring your own torch: an ethnography of urban exploration, Royal Geographic Society annual conference, London, UK, 26th-28th August 2009.
• 2009 - Submerged tribal memory: the case of the Winnemem Wintu, American Association of Geographers annual conference, Las Vegas, Nevada, 22nd-27th March 2009.

Sessions Convened

• 2011 - Sensing the City session organized with Sue Ball and Bob Levene, Compass Festival of Live Art, Leeds, 25th-27th November.
• 2011 - Moving geographies: film and video as research method with Katherine Brickell and Jessica Jacobs, RGS-IBG Annual Meeting, 31st August - 2nd September 2011.
• 2010 - Video as method in geography symposium (chair) at Royal Holloway, University of London Landscape Surgery, 9th December, London, UK.
• 2010 - Urban subversions: conceptualising alternative urban pastimes in the modern world city, Session organizer (3 sessions with Oli Mould), Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, 1st - 3rd September, London, UK.