Les Roberts
I am based in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. My work explores the intersection between space, place, mobility, and memory with a particular focus on film and popular music cultures.
Areas of research interest include: the cultural production of place, space and mobility; spatial anthropology; popular culture, heritage and cultural memory; mapping cultures; digital spatial humanities; urban cultural studies; tourism and visual culture; film and urban space; liminal landscapes and non-places.
Address: www.liminoids.com
Areas of research interest include: the cultural production of place, space and mobility; spatial anthropology; popular culture, heritage and cultural memory; mapping cultures; digital spatial humanities; urban cultural studies; tourism and visual culture; film and urban space; liminal landscapes and non-places.
Address: www.liminoids.com
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (34)
Uploads
Papers by Les Roberts
"Volume 4 of Screenworks (rolling publication 2013) is edited by Charlotte Crofts and Associate Editor, Steve Presence, both based at the University of the West of England with the support of the Digital Cultures Research Centre"
Design/methodology/approach – With reference to classical studies as well as debates in the social science literature, the paper starts by examining some of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings to hospitality and eroticism. It then develops this analysis by considering examples drawn from ethnographic studies of “traditional” hospitality settings as well as of commercial hospitality environments of charter tourism.
Findings – The main outcome of the discussion is to demonstrate the structural relations between hospitality and eroticism. By situating the analysis within a broad theoretical and ethnographic
context, it is shown that the erotic has historically functioned as a socially-binding and communicative mode of social intercourse that, while undermined by the demands of a market-based culture of commercial hospitality, is also able to flourish within these same adverse conditions.
Research limitations/implications – This paper invites further research into the connections between hospitality and eroticism in settings similar to and different from those described in the paper. A fuller ethnographic study of the relationship between the two is needed, as well as an exploration of more theoretical perspectives on hospitality drawn from the social science literature.
Practical implications – By highlighting the socially binding role of eroticism in the structuring of host-guest relations, the paper draws on and contributes to a broader politics of love and sensuality that will inform critical reflections on commercial and market-driven hospitality practices.
Originality/value – This paper provides an original insight into the interrelationship between hospitality and eroticism. It further illuminates previous writings on both subjects but particularly
that of eroticism and is supported by empirical data. It is of particular interest to those studying hospitality from a social science perspective."
"Volume 4 of Screenworks (rolling publication 2013) is edited by Charlotte Crofts and Associate Editor, Steve Presence, both based at the University of the West of England with the support of the Digital Cultures Research Centre"
Design/methodology/approach – With reference to classical studies as well as debates in the social science literature, the paper starts by examining some of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings to hospitality and eroticism. It then develops this analysis by considering examples drawn from ethnographic studies of “traditional” hospitality settings as well as of commercial hospitality environments of charter tourism.
Findings – The main outcome of the discussion is to demonstrate the structural relations between hospitality and eroticism. By situating the analysis within a broad theoretical and ethnographic
context, it is shown that the erotic has historically functioned as a socially-binding and communicative mode of social intercourse that, while undermined by the demands of a market-based culture of commercial hospitality, is also able to flourish within these same adverse conditions.
Research limitations/implications – This paper invites further research into the connections between hospitality and eroticism in settings similar to and different from those described in the paper. A fuller ethnographic study of the relationship between the two is needed, as well as an exploration of more theoretical perspectives on hospitality drawn from the social science literature.
Practical implications – By highlighting the socially binding role of eroticism in the structuring of host-guest relations, the paper draws on and contributes to a broader politics of love and sensuality that will inform critical reflections on commercial and market-driven hospitality practices.
Originality/value – This paper provides an original insight into the interrelationship between hospitality and eroticism. It further illuminates previous writings on both subjects but particularly
that of eroticism and is supported by empirical data. It is of particular interest to those studying hospitality from a social science perspective."
"This collection breaks new ground for cinema history. Hallam and Roberts have gathered some of the foremost scholars who are mapping spatial histories of the moving image and the geographies of film production, distribution and consumption. Introducing new interdisciplinary methods and asking new questions, Locating the Moving Image takes film studies into new territory, beyond the boundaries of the text and its interpretation, towards an understanding of the relationship between culture, spatiality and place."
Richard Maltby, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University.
"[Locating the Moving Image] introduces some of the concrete ways practical mapping and GIS technologies help elaborate historical film projects. . . . The scope of many of these projects is breathtaking in scale. . . . Others embrace ethnographic methods that tell poignant individual stories. Still others deftly merge qualitative and quantitative approaches. . . . As a whole, the volume brings together disparate fields of study in interesting ways."
James Craine, California State University, Northridge.
"This is the most interesting film book I have read in years.... an excellent book that is consistently interesting, theoretically smart, and a pleasure to read. [Film, Mobility and Urban Space is] a serious contribution to (and intervention within) film studies (and other disciplines)."
Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, 2011.
"This book gives a detailed map of what has been done recently in relevant fields of study. Roberts’s use of a perspective from cinematic geography provides a unique possibility to study the city as built on mobility and as constituted by multiple connections, and to trace the image of the “city-in-film” both in the past and in the future."
Transfers 3 (2), 2013.
"The essays are largely compelling and thoughtful, addressing the interdisciplinary theme of the book with creativity and aplomb... Just as they turn towards a theoretically diverse understanding of mapping, the contributions offer a number of thought provoking methodological and pedagogical interpellations of use to anyone interested in using maps conscientiously in research or in the classroom. What this symbiosis brings to our understanding of mapping and their cultures is a welcome addition to a bias towards geographic or cartographic understanding of maps, and a necessary reminder that developments in digital media and the geoweb are certainly not the only ways to comprehend maps and the work they do in new and novel ways."
Progress in Human Geography 38 (2), 2014.
"Mapping Cultures offers a collection of innovative studies and theoretical essays, each confronting the diffusion of cartographic method and rhetoric throughout humanities and social science research over the past two decades... [the book] is brimming with insight into the emergent mapping practices and vocabularies by which we might better resist authoritarian, anti-democratic practices, which themselves do work through mapping. And it helps clear a path by which researchers in the humanities and social sciences alike might better understand and express that ‘‘it is not so much what people do with maps as it is what maps do with people’’ (Wood, p. 300). For this alone, the book is an important bridge between the relatively recent innovations of critical cartography, in particular, and a host of other fields just as recently innovated by the methods and metaphors of cartography in general."
Cartographica 48 (2), 2013.
"The book closes with a call for a more explicit critical reorientation towards mapping, and map use – a project of the anthropology of cartography (D. Wood). This call seems to be still valid and one can admit that Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance is a significant step towards achieving the goal. Readers from different disciplines will find valuable contributions – both theoretical and empirical – in the collection. For a tourism researcher or student, the book is thought-provoking for several reasons, not only because of the enhancing awareness of cartography in relation to areas such as cinema, music, travel..."
Tourism, Culture and Communication 12, 2013.
"The volume offers a multidisciplinary reappraisal of “the liminal” as a geographical concept, and is a refreshing mix of contributions from scholars at different stages of their research careers... The rich mix of contributions and thought-provoking questions raised makes Liminal Landscapes a highly-accessible book for those who may be unfamiliar with the concepts in discussion, while challenging those more familiar with the literature."
Transfers 3 (2), 2013.
"[Liminal Landscapes] reassesses coastal areas as simply sites of tourism, leisure and consumption and related ideas of the ludic, consumption and the carnivalesque and broadens the concept of liminality beyond that of tourism, migration and pilgrimage... [contributors] revisit and remap the concept of liminality using more contemporary developments and theorists in the study of place, space and mobility such as de Certeau as well as develop new insights and perspectives."
Tourism Management 38, 2013
"The City and the Moving Image brings together scholars from film and architecture backgrounds in a collection of case studies which eschew the usual suspects (such as film noir) for a startlingly varied and original range of material... There is a refreshing eclecticism in the kinds of film covered in this book... As a central interest in film studies, the experience of city life and its spaces can lead to more grounded, historicized analysis and a political reinvigoration of the discipline. This book contains promising glimpses of such an engagement, and showcases some of the myriad forms it might take."
Screen 52 (4), 2011.
In this chapter, which bases its analysis on the case study of the city of Liverpool in North West England, I set out some preliminary steps towards the development of what might be referred to as a ‘spatial anthropology’ (Roberts 2015) of film-related tourism. This takes as its modus operandi the need for a more holistic and anthropologically grounded approach to film and media tourism practices which critically foregrounds the role of film and television locations in the wider production and consumption of space and place in an urban context...
References
Abbas, A. 2003. ‘Cinema, the City and the Cinematic’, in L Krause and P Petro (eds.), Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age. (London: Rutgers University Press).
Bonnett, A. 2009. ‘The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography’, in Theory, and Culture Society 26 (1): 45–70.
Highmore, B. 2005. Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Keiller, P. 2007. ‘Film as Spatial Critique’, in J Rendall et al (eds.), Critical Architecture. London: Routledge.
Roberts, L. 2012a. Film, Mobility and Urban Space: a Cinematic Geography of Liverpool. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Roberts, L. 2012b. ‘Cinematic Cartography: Projecting Place Through Film’, in L. Roberts (ed.), Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave (2012).
In setting out to explore the violence of non places the aim of this chapter is not to contribute towards a spatial taxonomy of violence insofar as, symbolic or otherwise, it might be held to constitute one of the defining attributes of non places (as if it was somehow imprinted into the architectural DNA of spaces such as airports, service stations, or modes and types of transport). Nor is it to sketch or identify a ‘canon’ of narratives and symbolic events in which the themes of violence and non places come together in some ill-defined or arbitrary way. Its altogether less concrete objective is to contribute towards a space of reflection given over to a critical archaeology and spatial anthropology of these landscapes as spaces and (non)places of violence. As such it sets out to tap (or map) their imaginary and affective potency as spaces where violence (and the violent) remains a latent but frequently active energy that haunts and commingles with the everyday rhythms of travel and tourism. Drawing on a selection of textual and cinematic spaces , and leavened with ethnographic reflections of motorways and ‘driving spaces’ (Merriman 2007), this chapter offers a tentative and impressionistic investigation into the violence of non places.
""
Derek Jarman, whose The Last of England (1987) taps the psychogeographic frenzy of London’s post-industrial docklands, wove his own brand of cinematic bricolage around an often abrasive lyricism that drew its potency in part from the entropic slipstream of deregulation and de-industrialisation: two defining totems of post-Thatcherite political economy. With its memorably apocalyptic images of Tilda Swinton’s Thames-side ‘dervish dance’, as Iain Sinclair described it in 2009, The Last of England is a film that many could be forgiven for thinking was shot solely in London, rather than, as was in fact the case, also in parts of an equally ravaged-looking Liverpool...."