Staff Profile
Dr James Ash
Reader in Technology, Space and Society
- Email: james.ash@ncl.ac.uk
- Telephone: 0191 208 5804
- Personal Website: http://www.jamesash.co.uk
- Address: School of Arts and Cultures,
Room 2.76
2nd Floor Armstrong Building,
Newcastle University,
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
Digital Health for Migrant Mothers Network: Maternal Care in Dadaab Camps (funded by EPSRC, value £108,783, 2020-21)
I am currently principal investigator on an ESRC project with Dr Sarah Mills (Loughborough University) that is examining gambling style systems in digital games.
The digital games industry (broadly encompassing mobile, PC and console games) is increasingly adopting gambling style systems in their games in order to increase revenue. These gambling style systems take many forms, but primarily work to encourage players to unlock digital content in games that can only be accessed through systems of chance, which are purchased with real currency.
As Griffiths and King (2015) argue, there is a number of similarities between the techniques and mechanisms involved in the design of gambling style systems such as loot boxes in digital games and regulated gambling. For instance, both are designed to exploit desires for ‘one more go’ and the hope that the next box will have the item the player is looking for, thus making up for previous ‘failed’ purchases, where no desired or valuable item was present (Schull 2012). But, unlike gambling, which is a highly regulated activity in the UK and limited to people over the age of 18, gambling style systems in digital games are unregulated and regularly targeted at children and young people under 18.
Focusing on children’s experiences and practices and also engaging families and games designers, the project seeks to understand how young people use, make sense of and respond to gambling style systems in digital games in their everyday lives. Moving beyond purely legal or formal analyses of these systems, the project addresses the key societal question of whether these systems encourage gambling like behaviour and if they do then how can these systems and services be regulated? In doing so, the project will produce evidence to inform regulatory debate and influence public policy around gambling systems in digital games and changing definitions of digital gambling more broadly.
Digital Interfaces, Credit and Debt (funded by ESRC, value £202,657, 2016-18)
I was primary investigator on an ESRC funded project entitled 'Digital Interfaces and Debt: understanding mediated decision making processes in high cost short term credit products’ with co-investigators Dr Ben Anderson, Dr Paul Langley and Dr Rachel Gordon that ran between 2016-18.
This 18 month project sought to understand how consumers access HCSTC (High Cost Short Term Credit), such as cash and pay day loans through digital interfaces, on personal computers and mobile devices and in turn how these interfaces shape decision making processes regarding the purchasing of credit. The project developed a novel approach to debt as an everyday phenomenon that is mediated through the relationship between technology and embodied practice. Understanding how people become indebted through digital interfaces is critical to analyzing and explaining contemporary indebtedness because 82% of cash and pay day loans, a key form of HCSTC, are now applied for and managed via digital interfaces on laptops, tablets and smart phones (Competition and Markets Authority, 2015). Through original empirical investigation with designers and users of mobile interfaces, debt support charities and financial regulators, the research generated new evidence about everyday experiences of debt and indebtedness and contributes to important societal and academic debates about emerging forms of credit and problematic forms of economic subjectivity.
The project produced a final report and policy recommendations, an educational smart phone app for Apple and Android devices and a range of academic publications including articles in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Cultural Geographies and Economy and Society (In Press).
Game Interfaces (funded by ESRC 1 3 PhD studentship, value £61,500, 2004-08)
My ESRC funded MSc and PhD research at Bristol University examined how videogame environments are designed to capture and hold attention and generate positive affective and emotional states for players. This research drew upon qualitative data including interviews, observant participation and video ethnography with players and games designers. Since completing my PhD in 2009 I have published a range of work on videogames and games design from the project. This concern with videogames has lead to a broader interest in the role of the digital interface in everyday life, which culminated in a monograph entitled 'The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power' published with Bloomsbury in 2015. The book develops a new theoretical model to understand how interfaces shape humans capacity to sense space and time. In doing so I argue interface designers attempt to manipulate spatio-temporal perception to generate new forms of affective value in the products they create.
Theorising Technology
Further to this, I have also become interested in theorising technology as a category of being that is distinct from either human or animal life. Drawing upon ideas from new materialist and continental philosophy I have published and am currently writing a number of papers on how a range of technologies, from mobile phones to speakers, generate and shape the spaces and times that humans find themselves in. Through this research, my work contributes to debates in media and cultural studies and human geography around the role that technology plays in everyday life as well as rethinking the status of technology in the social sciences more generally.
Module leader:
MCH1023 'Introduction to Media'
MCH3081 'Digital Culture in a Networked World'
MCH3073 'Themes and Issues in Media and Cultural Studies'
Contributor:
MCH8057 'Media Analysis'
MCH3073 'Research Dissertation'
MCH8199 'Research DIssertation'
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Articles
- Ash J, Gordon R, Mills S. Geographies of the event? Rethinking time and power through digital interfaces. Cultural Geographies 2022, Epub ahead of print.
- Ash J. Form and the Politics of World. Dialogues in Human Geography 2020, 10(3), 378-381.
- Ash J. Flat ontology and geography. Dialogues in Human Geography 2020, 10(3), 345-361.
- Anderson B, Langley P, Ash J, Gordon R. Affective Life and Cultural Economy: Payday Loans and the Everyday Space‐Times of Credit‐Debt in the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2020, 45(2), 420-433.
- Ash J. Post-phenomenology and space: a geography of comprehension, form and power. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2019, 45(1), 181-193.
- Ash J, Simpson P. Postphenomenology and method: styles for thinking the (non)human. GeoHumanities 2019, 5(1), 139-156.
- Langley P, Anderson B, Ash J, Gordon R. Indebted life and money culture: payday lending in the United Kingdom. Economy and Society 2019, 48(1), 30-51.
- Ash J, Anderson B, Gordon R, Langley P. Unit, vibration, tone: a post-phenomenological method for researching digital interfaces. Cultural Geographies 2018, 25(1), 165-181.
- Ash J. Smart cities and the digital geographies of technical memory. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 2018, 109(1), 161-172.
- Ash J, Kitchin R, Leszczynski A. Digital Turn, Digital Geographies?. Progress in Human Geography 2018, 42(1), 25-43.
- Ash J, Anderson B, Gordon R, Langley P. Digital Interface Design and Power: Friction, Threshold, Transition. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2018, 36(6), 1136-1153.
- Ash J. Visceral methodologies, bodily style and the non-human. Geoforum 2017, 82, 206-207.
- Ash J. Technology and affect: Towards a theory of inorganically organised objects. Emotion, Space and Society 2015, 14, 84-90.
- Ash J, Valiaho P. Interview with Pasi Valiaho on Video Games and Rhythm. Theory Culture & Society 2015, 32(7-8), 291-300.
- Ash J, Simpson S. Geography and Post-phenomenology. Progress in Human Geography 2014.
- Ash J. Technologies of Captivation: videogames and the attunement of affect. Body and Society 2013, 19(1), 27-51.
- Ash J. Rethinking affective atmospheres: Technology, perturbation and space times of the non-human. Geoforum 2013, 49, 20-28.
- Ash J. Technology, technicity, and emerging practices of temporal sensitivity in videogames. Environment and Planning A 2012, 44(1), 187-203.
- Ash J. Attention, videogames and the retentional economies of affective amplification. Theory, Culture and Society 2012, 29(6), 3-26.
- Ash J, Gallacher L. Cultural Geography and Videogames. Geography Compass 2011, 5(6), 351-368.
- Ash J. Teleplastic Technologies: charting practices of orientation and navigation in videogaming. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2010, 35(3), 414-430.
- Ash J. Architectures of affect: anticipating and manipulating the event in processes of videogame design and testing. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, 28(4), 653-671.
- Ash J, Trigg M, Romanillos J. Videogames, visuality and screens: reconstructing the Amazon in physical geographical knowledge. Area 2009, 41(4), 464-474.
- Ash J. Emerging spatialities of the screen: video games and the reconfiguration of spatial awareness. Environment and Planning A 2009, 41(9), 2105-2124.
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Authored Books
- Ash J. Phase Media: Space, Time and the Politics of Smart Objects. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
- Ash J. The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power. New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury, 2015.
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Book Chapters
- Ash J. Seeking Follows. In: Kitchin, R; Graham, M; Mattern, S; Shaw, J, ed. How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. London: Meatspace Press, 2019.
- Ash J. Architecture and its Co-existing Atmospheres. In: Hansmann, S; Geipel, F, ed. Raummaschine: Exploring Manifold Spaces. Berlin: Jovis Press, 2019, pp.114-117.
- Ash J. Theorizing studio space: Spheres and atmospheres in a video game design studio. In: Farias, I; Wilkie, A, ed. Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies & Displacements. New York, NY, USA: Routledge, 2016, pp.91-104.
- Ash J. Sensation, Affect and the GIF: towards an allotropic account of networks. In: Hillis, K; Paasonen, S; Petit, M, ed. Networked Affect. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015, pp.119-134.
- Ash J, Gallacher L. Becoming Attuned: Objects, Affects and Embodied Methodology. In: Perry, M; Medina, C, ed. Methodologies of Embodiment: Inscribing Bodies in Qualitative Research. London, UK: Routledge Publishing, 2015, pp.69-85.
- Anderson B, Ash J. Atmospheric Methods. In: Vannini, P, ed. Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research. London, UK: Routledge Publishing, 2015, pp.34-51.
- Ash J. Videogames. In: Dittmer, J., Craine, J., Adams, P, ed. Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013. In Press.
- Ash J. New Media and Participatory Cultures. In: Bragg, S., Kehily, M.J, ed. Children and Young People's Cultural Worlds. London: Policy Press, 2013, pp.219-268.
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Edited Book
- Ash J, Kitchin R, Leszczynski A, ed. Digital Geographies. London, UK: Sage Publications Ltd, 2018.