Welcome to Episode 5 of the Brutal South Podcast. My guest this week is Dr. James N. Gilmore, assistant professor of media and technology studies at Clemson University.
I met Jimmy at the University of South Carolina in the freshman Honors College dorm, which was an old building full of lovable weirdos. He had a film criticism blog going at the time that I really loved, and when I became an editor at the Daily Gamecock student newspaper, I convinced him to start writing reviews for us. I considered it a coup.
Jimmy went to grad school, then he went to more grad school, and he became an expert in subjects like wearable technology, digital infrastructure, and Southern cultural studies. Every few months now, it seems like, he announces the title of a new paper he's just published, and each one is a certified club banger.
I invited him onto the podcast to talk about wearable tracking devices, parenting, protest, and policing, all of which have surprising common threads. As a bonus, he sent me a recent article he had published about a Google data center that was built right in my backyard, and we talked about that too.
You can follow Dr. Gilmore on Twitter at @JamesNGilmore or visit his website at JamesNGilmore.com. One book he recommended during the podcast is The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames, which you can find at your local bookstore or via the Brutal South Bookshop page.
Here are the articles and papers we discussed in this episode:
Sen, Ari. “UNC Campus Police Used Geofencing Tech to Monitor Antiracism Protestors.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 21 Dec. 2019, www.nbcnews.com/news/education/unc-campus-police-used-geofencing-tech-monitor-antiracism-protestors-n1105746.
Gilmore, J. N. (2019). Securing the kids: Geofencing and child wearables. Convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519882317
Gilmore, J. N., & Troutman, B. (2020). Articulating infrastructure to water: Agri-culture and Google’s South Carolina data center. International Journal of Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920913044
The image at the top of the page is Colonial Policy by Pavel Filonov, c. 1926.
Episode 5: White picket geofence