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DEEP MAPPING, edited by Les Roberts. Special Issue of Humanities journal and  e-book publication (forthcoming 2015/16).

 

 

SITES OF POPULAR MUSIC HERITAGE, edited by Les Roberts, Sara Cohen, Marion Leonard and Rob Knifton, (New York: Routledge, 2014).

 

 

LOCATING THE MOVING IMAGE: NEW APPROACHES TO FILM AND PLACE, edited by Les Roberts and Julia Hallam, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

 

"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 Crain, California State University, Northridge.

 

 

FILM, MOBILITY AND URBAN SPACE: A CINEMATIC GEOGRAPHY OF LIVERPOOL, Les Roberts, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). Also published as an e-Book with Oxford Scholarship Online (Oxford University Press, 2013).

 

"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.

 

 

MAPPING CULTURES: PLACE, PRACTICE, PERFORMANCE, edited by Les Roberts, (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2012). 

 

"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.

 

 

LIMINAL LANDSCAPES: TRAVEL, EXPERIENCE, AND SPACES IN-BETWEEN, edited by Les Roberts and Hazel Andrews, (Abingdon: Routledge 2012). 

 

"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: URBAN PROJECTIONS, edited by Les Roberts and Richard Koeck, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010).

 

"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.

 

 

CITIES IN FILM: ARCHITECTURE, URBAN SPACE AND THE MOVING IMAGE, edited by Les Roberts, Julia Hallam, Richard Koeck, and Robert Kronenburg, (Liverpool: Liverpool School of Architecture, 2008). ISBN 978–0–9557884– 1–3. [DOWNLOAD HERE]

 

 

 

 

UTOPIC HORIZONS: CINEMATIC GEOGRAPHIES OF TRAVEL AND MIGRATION, Les Roberts, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Middlesex University, 2005. [DOWNLOAD HERE]

BOOKS