Qualitative Research by Bryce Peake
This article examines the privatization of telegraphy in the British Empire from the perspective ... more This article examines the privatization of telegraphy in the British Empire from the perspective of Gibraltar, an overseas territory in the Mediterranean. While the history of international telegraphy is typically written from a world-systems perspective, this article presents a key methodological critique of the use of collections spread across many institutions and colonies: archival satellites are not simply reducible to parts of a scattered whole. Rather, archival collections are themselves curations of socially-positioned understandings of Empire. This is especially true of the " girdle round the world " that was British telegraphy. At a meta-historical level, individual archival collections of the global British telegraphy system can be read as histories of colonial administrators' geographically-and socially-situated perspectives on Empire—namely through what archives have, and have not, preserved. I demonstrate how the documents about telegraphy collected and maintained in the Gibraltar National Archives reflect pre-and post-World War I English, anti-Liberal colonial administrators' and military officials' fear that privatization was an opening salvo against the democratic web that held the last vestiges of Empire together.
This chapter provides an overview of the theories, insights,
and methodologies of media anthropol... more This chapter provides an overview of the theories, insights,
and methodologies of media anthropology. At the heart of
media anthropology is the assertion that media practices are not universal. Whether we are discussing how television is viewed, how public relations coordinators negotiate corporate hierarchies, how Facebook statuses are created and circulated, or how cellular towers are built, local context plays an important role.
The soundscape and essay presented here attempt to capture the sonic experience of civil rights r... more The soundscape and essay presented here attempt to capture the sonic experience of civil rights rallies from the position of anti-Black, white nationalists. Beneath these sonic experiences is what I call a standpoint acoustemology. Standpoint Acoustemology, broadly speaking, combines a classic sound studies concept with Black and Marxist (and Black Marxist) Feminist theorizations of knowledge. In total, this project allows listeners to inhabit this sonic world of white nationalism temporarily through understanding, not in order to amplify the hate espoused by these individuals as political ends, but to explore symptoms of structural suffering that yield some racist dispositions.
This article revolves around a deceptively simple question: why did the FBI investigate bandleade... more This article revolves around a deceptively simple question: why did the FBI investigate bandleader Duke Ellington, the African American capitalist, political conservative, and vocal Christian, as a communist threat in the 1930's through the Cold War? Answering this question involves situating the FBI's "domestic security" program as product and productive of overlapping racial and sexual politics, and investigating the FBI's anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Ellington's early-career promoter Irving Mills was a Jewish communist intent on capitalizing o the racial transgressions of jazz pleasures.
Cultural studies, 2014
NOISE A historical ethnography of listening, 5 masculinity and media technology in British Gibral... more NOISE A historical ethnography of listening, 5 masculinity and media technology in British Gibraltar, 1940Gibraltar, -2013 This essay develops a cultural materialist theory of listening through a historical ethnography of Gibraltarian men's contradictory sensitivity to the 'noise' of mass media and desensitization to the industrial soundscape of the state. I argue that 10 this contradiction can be historicized through close attention to the social antagonisms embedded in the history of noise ordinances, and the ways in which British colonial officials structured an idealized form of masculinity premised on the sonic relationships between bodies and technologies. Gibraltarian men reproduce this masculine disposition, and through it colonial hierarchies, in the 15 seemingly banal practice of listening to mass media, and ignoring the soundscape of the neoliberal, colonial state.
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2012
This essay explores the ways in which listening exists as a means for the maintenance and operati... more This essay explores the ways in which listening exists as a means for the maintenance and operationalization of power in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. On Main Street, a struggle between Spanish ways of practicing space and British ways of representing space is played out in a discourse between the soundscapes of spoken Llanito and British nationalistic parades. Utilizing ethnographic research gathered in 2009, and drawing on practice theory and semiotic approaches, I argue that an examination of how people listen on Main Street makes legible the complex power dynamics between Gibraltarians, Spanish-ness, and the British state.
Challenging journalistic assumptions about “mass shootings,” and as scholars committed to empiric... more Challenging journalistic assumptions about “mass shootings,” and as scholars committed to empirical understandings of the social world, we begin this paper with what we know: when news outlets cover suicide-mass shootings in the way that contemporary media cover them, they create conditions that ensure these events will happen again. Our deliberate use of the term “suicide-mass shootings” throughout this paper draws attention to this very fact. Of the sixteen suicide-mass shootings in the United States over the past five years, all of these male shooters intended their killing sprees to end with their own deaths, whether at their own hands or through “death-by-cop.” These events are best understood, as psychologist Antonio Preti puts it, as suicides located at the intersections of hostile intent and violent revenge fantasies, in which the desire for publicity is a crucial factor. We begin by examining the symbolic investments in masculinity that are made by a still largely male news force as they generate information about suicide-mass shootings. We argue that male and some female journalists have found themselves in ontologically complicit positions, publicizing the very details that experts suggest contribute to suicide contagion, while at the same time justifying their reporting of information that may well cause additional suicide-mass shootings by reference to “social responsibility.” This complicity provides fertile conditions for the reproduction of myths of violent masculinity. We then examine the ways journalism as an institution has resisted epidemiological public health frameworks for the coverage of crime, while also deferring to “mental illness” as an overriding causal agent rather than their own practices. Our emphasis throughout is on constructing practices that can intervene in and help to prevent recurring patterns of misogyny that culminate in suicide-mass shootings.
In the ethnographic intervention, “Viral Soundscapes in the Public Square: The Confederate Flag V... more In the ethnographic intervention, “Viral Soundscapes in the Public Square: The Confederate Flag Visits the U.S. Capitol,” Bryce Peake and Mark Auslander explore the aural dimensions of the struggles over the Confederate battle flag in the United States.
This adaptation, conversation, and op-ed focuses on how information becomes "factual information"... more This adaptation, conversation, and op-ed focuses on how information becomes "factual information" -- it's self a phrase that comes of age during the masculinist evolution of the cold war -- in the debates over gender and domination on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-08-19/Op-ed
This piece examines the ethical process of building Tinn, a data tracking app designed through re... more This piece examines the ethical process of building Tinn, a data tracking app designed through research collaborations with communities of color in Portland, OR living with Tinnitus. If the entangled histories of self-help and racial uplift weren’t fraught enough in a project that revolves around health improvement via data tracking, then the tracking of indigenous and underserved users' phone use habits and behaviors as a supplement if not replacement for participant-observation pushes us into ethically and politically dangerous territory. http://blog.castac.org/2015/04/designing-tinn/
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, Jun 10, 2015
This paper explores the ways in which "scientism" is deployed on English Wikipedia to exclude ins... more This paper explores the ways in which "scientism" is deployed on English Wikipedia to exclude instances and practices of gender domination from the category of "factual information." Furthermore, I argue that this exclusion is maintained through a consensus process shaped by deference to policy in the face of ethical arguments (cf. Aaron James' asshole), and Wikipedians' own understanding of how such deference creates an online climate defined by violent retribution.
Every October, the dead rise in Toronto; approximately 3,500 to 5,000 individuals take to the str... more Every October, the dead rise in Toronto; approximately 3,500 to 5,000 individuals take to the street as a unified social body of death through dressing as zombies. In this essay, I explore the affective state of men in the Toronto Zombie Walk from a feminist psycho-semiotic perspective. I emphasize the ways in which costumes and space allow for the embodiment of various metaphors, which are always polysemic-simultaneously metaphors of death, metaphors of birth envy, and metaphors of the unconscious rising. I conclude by bringing these points together in understanding the Zombie Walk, for men, as a ritual of working out the meaning of death, the meaning of birth, and what it means to be alive.
AnthropologyNOW, May 2010
Syllabi by Bryce Peake
A Syllabus for a pilot seminar in data humanities organized around mis-, dis-, and non- informati... more A Syllabus for a pilot seminar in data humanities organized around mis-, dis-, and non- information in digital media. Project files and in-class data sets available on github. Funded by a Pedagogy and Teaching Grant from the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences @ UMBC.
This course guides students through developing their internship experience into a successful job ... more This course guides students through developing their internship experience into a successful job application package that balances specialized skills to a generalized audience.
Syllabus for my writing-intensive senior seminar
Fall 2015 Syllabus for Media Theory Course
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Qualitative Research by Bryce Peake
and methodologies of media anthropology. At the heart of
media anthropology is the assertion that media practices are not universal. Whether we are discussing how television is viewed, how public relations coordinators negotiate corporate hierarchies, how Facebook statuses are created and circulated, or how cellular towers are built, local context plays an important role.
Syllabi by Bryce Peake
and methodologies of media anthropology. At the heart of
media anthropology is the assertion that media practices are not universal. Whether we are discussing how television is viewed, how public relations coordinators negotiate corporate hierarchies, how Facebook statuses are created and circulated, or how cellular towers are built, local context plays an important role.