Digital Geographies, Otherwise?

In an era of political, economic and environmental instability, geographical imaginations of an implicitly digital future are increasingly framed through foreclosure: techno-authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, digital statecraft, attention economies, failure, obsolescence, consumption and waste (Gabrys, 2011; Datta, 2023; Curran, 2023; Liu, 2023). At the same time, the focus on theories of (digital) worlding, affect, ontologies and capitalism typically disengage more radical traditions of critical inquiry, including social and cultural theory more broadly (Attoh et. al. 2024).

If, as Maalsen (2024) argues, we are all digital geographers now, then as existing academic framings speak directly to ongoing concerns surrounding rising inequality and polarisation (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Mattern, 2017) we might also argue that, for many, digital technologies are experienced as simply the latest iteration of a long-enduring alliance between technology and capitalism and colonial regimes of dispossession, displacement and erasure (c.f. Rivera, 2023; Whyte, 2018) - an alliance which has been continuously resisted, speculated upon, and repurposed (Brown, 2022, Attoh et. al, 2024).

To facilitate ‘alt’ readings of digital geographies, this call for papers seeks to investigate “the digital” as mode of spatial and social production which opens as well as closes; which offers alternatives and alterity, even as it shuts down possibilities for resistance, and even limits forms of existence. We might think, here, of the ‘techno-vernacular’ which Rayvon Fouché argues as a mode of technical experimentation which resists the whiteness inherent in techno-imaginaries by rejecting productivity as central to technology (2006: see also, Gaskins, 2016). We would also point to the demands for technological multiplicity against the limitations of western rationalisms and techno-utilitarianism by the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group (2020), or cyberfeminist collectives like VNS Matrix (1991) which sought to undermine the patriarchal frameworks of the early internet through play and vulgarity.

Following Elwood (2020), we ask: what might digital geographies be, otherwise? This call for papers invites presenters who reconsider the formulation of digital geographies as a discrete object or site of study, instead engaging the ways in which digital spatialities are entangled with practices of experimentation, play, resistance, repair and reparation, technovernacular cultures, appropriation, speculation, hope and melancholy, social reproduction and destruction.

Cited Sources

Attoh, K., Dalton, C., Fraser, E., Thatcher, J., & Crampton, J. (2024). Speculative geographies: Fictions and futures. Dialogues in Human Geography, 14(2), 371-380. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206241242470 (Original work published 2024)

Brown, J. (2022). Redreaming the Human and the Ethics of Terraformation. In N. Williams & T. Keating (Eds.), Speculative Geographies (pp. 35–50). Springer Nature Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_2

Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. A. (2019) Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject. Television & new media. 20 (4), 336–349.

Curran, D. (2023). Surveillance capitalism and systemic digital risk: The imperative to collect and connect and the risks of interconnectedness. Big Data & Society, 10(1).

Datta, A. (2023). The digitalising state: Governing digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south. Progress in Human Geography, 47(1), 141-159.

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Fouché, Rayvon. 2006. “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud: African Americans, American Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular Technological Creativity.” American Quarterly 58 (3): 639–61.

Gabrys, Jennifer (2011) Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor

Gaskins, Nettrice. 2016. “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space.” In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, edited by Anderson Reynaldo Jones Charles, 2:27–44.

Lewis, Jason Edward, Angie Abdilla, Noelani Arista, Kaipulaumakaniolono Baker, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Michelle Brown, Melanie Cheung, et al. 2020. “Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper.” Edited by Jason Edward Lewis. https://doi.org/10.11573/spectrum.library.concordia.ca.00986506.

Liu, C. (2023). The digitalisation of consumption and its geographies. Geography Compass, 17(7), e12716.

Maalsen, S. (2024). Digital geographies 1: Reality bytes. Progress in Human Geography, 48(6), 912-921. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325241273906 (Original work published 2024)

Mattern, Shannon (2017). Code + Clay ... Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Rivera, I. (2023), Undoing settler imaginaries: (Re)imagining digital knowledge politics. Progress in Human Geography, 47(2), 298-316. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325231154873

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Whyte, Kyle P. 2018. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (1–2): 224–42.