This web site contains a selection of past and present writings, supported by picture galleries, videos and other material generated by my research. I am an urban ethnographer by trade and have worked mostly with young people and communities in East London, charting the impact of structural and demographic change on their everyday experience, and the stories they tell about the past, present and future of this area. My work draws on concepts and methods from a range of approaches in the human sciences, including anthropology, actor-network theory, psychoanalysis, narratology and cultural geography. I have always been concerned to relate my
research to educational and political issues, and to create a dialogic framework for the research process.
Please feel free to contact me using this link or the Contact Phil link above.
Phil now has a Wikipedia entry! Click here to view it.
My New Book!
New Directions in Radical Cartography
Why the Map is Never the Territory
EDITED BY PHIL COHEN AND MIKE DUGGAN
New Directions in Radical Cartography looks at the contemporary debates about the role of maps in society. It explores the emergence of counter-mapping as a distinctive field of practice, and the impact that digital mapping technologies have had on cartographic practice and theory. It includes original research, accounts of mapping projects and detailed readings of maps. The contributors explore how digital mapping technologies have sponsored a new wave of practices that seek to challenge the power that maps are commonly assumed to have. They document the continued vitality of analogue maps in the hands of artists and activists who are pushing the boundaries of what is mappable in different ways. New Directions in Radical Cartography draws on a rich body of mapping work that exists as part of community action, urban ethnography, environmental activism, humanitarianism, and public engagement.
Click here for more information.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
My Previous Book
A Long Life in the Making – My Father’s Memoir
My father was extremely well read, an influence from his early years growing up in a Jewish working-class culture which venerated book learning and those who had it, another family tradition passed on to me.[1] His main interest in his retirement was compiling a series of self-published bibliographies about major rivers. He did the Thames, The Clyde and the Delaware[2], and this hobby united his interest in boating, he kept a cabin cruiser on the Thames at Henley for many years and books, he was a keen collector of rare, mainly topographical, antiquarian literature. His research often took him to the British Library, just down the road from where he lived in Bloomsbury and occasionally I would see him in one of the reading rooms, immersed in a pile of ancient volumes and with an invisible sign on his desk: danger scholar at work, please do not disturb! He also wrote a series of articles about the history of surgery which he published in various medical journals and some short biographical sketches of doctors he had worked under, fortunately most of them deceased, as the accounts were often scurrilous, if not actionable!.[3] He was proud of these literary accomplishments and he never tired of telling me how much money he had made from his books, much to my chagrin.
Click here to read more about this book
The book is available from Eyeglass Books.
I would like to acknowledge those who have been essential to the creation of this website: Norman Dallura (Dallura Web Design), Donald Nicholson Smith (editorial consultant) and Jane Mullins (copy editing).
