Campus
- Scarborough (UTSC)
Fields of Study
- Culture & History
- Economic Geography
- Urban
Areas of Interest
Cities, culture and consumption, retail gentrification, hipster geographies, digital platforms, geographies of social media influencers and content curation
Supervisor
Zachary Hyde
Cohort
2023-2024
Biography
I am an urban geographer who studies contemporary urban cultures. My research pays particular attention to the relationship between neighbourhood change, consumer culture, and digital platforms. My previous graduate work investigated the geographies of hipster retailing looking specifically at the dynamic between social media promotion, anxiety, and the phenomenon of “queuing” at an independent ice cream boutique on Ossington Avenue in downtown Toronto. My doctoral research ethnographically examines the spatiality of algorithms and the geographies of content curation and social media influencers in the gentrifying Instagrammable city.
Publications
Bain, A.L. and Mark, B. (2020) Re-imaging, re-elevating, re-placing the urban. In M. Moos, R. Walker, and T. Vinodrai (eds) Canadian Cities in Transition: Understanding Contemporary Urbanism. Sixth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 277-291.
Mark, B. (2023) Aestheticizing hipster retail infrastructure: from Neapolitan to cosmopolitan. In Alison L. Bain and Julie A. Podmore (eds) The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing.