Below are all of the sessions I could find on critical approaches to computation, GIS & cartography, and digital geographies for the upcoming Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (April 3-7 in DC). Please let me know if I’ve missed anything!

I have also put together a more detailed schedule, which includes all presenters’ names and talk titles.

Schedules and rooms are subject to change, so check in with the official website for the latest.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3

8:00 AM – 9:40 AM
Political Economies of Geolocation I
8201, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

9:55 AM – 11:35 AM
Algorithms and Climate Change: Knowing Acting Governing 1
Empire Room, Omni, Lobby Level

Political Economies of Geolocation II
8201, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

12:40 PM – 2:50 PM
Algorithms and Climate Change: Knowing, Acting, Governing 2
Empire Room, Omni, Lobby Level

Digital Technology, Tourism and Geographies of Inequality
Calvert Room, Omni, Lobby Level

‘The other mining’: rural communities, autonomy and data production
Johnson, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

2:35 PM – 4:15 PM
Cognition, Behavior and Design 2
Embassy Room, Omni, Lobby Level

Critical Digital Geographies: Feminist, Queer, Postcolonial, and Critical Race Perspectives
Washington 3, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Defending Rural Autonomies in an era of Big Data and Financialization
Johnson, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

Digital Technology, Tourism and Geographies of Inequality II
Calvert Room, Omni, Lobby Level

THURSDAY, APRIL 4

8:00 AM – 9:40 AM
Creative GeoVisualisation – Creative Engagements with GeoSpatial Technologies
Ambassador Ballroom, Omni, Lobby Level

Critical Geographies of Education: Why bother with Educational Technologies?
8211, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

Digital Geographies Morning Networking Session
Washington 6, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Feminist digital geographies I: making spaces
Roosevelt 4, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Geographies of Digital Games I
Calvert Room, Omni, Lobby Level

9:55 AM – 11:35 AM
Creative Geovisualization – What is creativity with geospatial technologies?
Ambassador Ballroom, Omni, Lobby Level

Feminist digital geographies II: alternatives/methods
Roosevelt 4, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Geographies of Digital Games II
Calvert Room, Omni, Lobby Level

1:10 PM – 2:50 PM
Beyond Legal Recognition: Mapping Dispossession and Other Methodological Openings for Counter-mapping
Embassy Room, Omni, Lobby Level

#Cyberprotest and Internet Disruption: Critical Geographies of Digital Dissent and Suppression
Truman, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

Digital Enclosures
Palladian, Omni, Lobby Level

Feminist digital geographies III: bodies/subjectivities
Roosevelt 4, Marriott, Exhibition Level

3:05 PM – 4:45 PM
Critical engagements with creative geographies II
8226, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

Feminist digital geographies IV: care/intimacy
Roosevelt 4, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Financial Geography: State of the Art and Future Research Directions (Part 2)
8222, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

5:00 PM – 6:40 PM
Critical New Media and the Urban: Productive Tensions, or Conflicted Antagonisms?
Johnson, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

Geographical computation where human geography matters IV
Madison A, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

Immersive III: Eclectic Topics I – Immersive Experiences and Technologies
Stones Throw 1, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

FRIDAY, APRIL 5

8:00 AM – 9:40 AM
Impact and Engagement: Assessing the Geographical Film
8210, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

Messy Infrastructure, Digital Labor, and the Everyday City I: Labor and Practices
Washington 3, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Smart urban experimentation 1: Conceptualising urban knowledge politics & decision-making.
8222, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

Teaching the Anthropocene: New Visions, New Visualizations?
President’s Boardroom, Omni, Lobby Level

9:55 AM – 11:35 AM
Gendering the Smart City 1: Emerging (Gendered) Spaces of Smart Cities
Washington 2, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Messy Infrastructure, Digital Labor, and the Everyday City II: Territory and Authority
Washington 3, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Science and technologies of racial capitalism
Cabinet Room, Omni, Lobby Level

Smart urban experimentation 2: Opening the blackbox of knowledge politics & decision-making.
8222, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

11:45 AM – 1:00 PM
Digital Geographies Specialty Group Business Meeting
8229, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

1:10 PM – 2:50 PM
Current and Future Directions of Geography’s Role in Redistricting and Gerrymandering Studies
Maryland A, Marriott, Lobby Level

Gendering the Smart City 2: Between Top-down and Ground-up World-making
Washington 2, Marriott, Exhibition Level

3:05 PM – 4:45 PM
Digital Urban Revolutions I: Activating Theories & Imaginaries
Executive Room, Omni, Lobby Level

Immersive V: Digital Socialities – Immersive Technologies and Experiences
Stones Throw 3, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

Smart urban experimentation 3: Developments & resistances in knowledge politics & decision-making.
8222, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

5:00 PM – 6:40 PM
Digital Geographies Keynote Panel
Roosevelt 1, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Digital Urban Revolutions II: Digital Field Research -> Theories in Action
Executive Room, Omni, Lobby Level

Historical GIS (HGIS): approaches and methodologies for digital humanities
Delaware A, Marriott, Lobby Level

Missing Data: Conceptualizing and making sense of the absence of data in a data-abundant age
Hoover, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

Progress in Human Geography Lecture
Marshall East, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

SATURDAY, APRIL 6

8:00 AM – 9:40 AM
Creating a Soundscape of Radical Imagination: Podcasts as Scholarship
Roosevelt 5, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Geographical computation where human geography matters I
Council Room, Omni, Lobby Level

Realizing the value of interdisciplinary research: How can critical theory be ‘applied’ to smart cities? I – Paper Session
Washington 1, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Smart citizens creating smart cities: Locating citizen participation in the Smart City
8222, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

9:55 AM – 11:35 AM
Geographical computation where human geography matters II
Council Room, Omni, Lobby Level

Music, Sounds, Practices, Discourses: New Frontiers in Research, Pedagogies and Praxis in Geographies of Music – 2
Washington 6, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Realizing the value of interdisciplinary research: How can critical theory be ‘applied’ to smart cities? II – Panel Discussion
Washington 1, Marriott, Exhibition Level

Smart citizens creating smart cities: Locating citizen participation in the Smart City 2
8222, Park Tower Suites, Marriott, Lobby Level

Smart Environmental Technologies: Art, Design, and Political Ecology in the Expanded Field
Ambassador Ballroom, Omni, Lobby Level

Experimental and Speculative Political Ecology
Marriott Ballroom Salon 1, Marriott, Lobby Level

1:10 PM – 2:50 PM
Geographical computation where human geography matters III
Council Room, Omni, Lobby Level

Geographies of Media III: Internet and Society
President’s Boardroom, Omni, Lobby Level

5:00 PM – 6:40 PM
Reckless Ideas in Geography and GIScience
Ambassador Ballroom, Omni, Lobby Level

SUNDAY, APRIL 7

8:00 AM – 9:40 AM
Community Geography I: Thinking, Doing, and Teaching Community Geography
Maryland A, Marriott, Lobby Level

Robotocene: The political ecology of automation I; Production
Balcony 2, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

9:55 AM – 11:35 AM
Community Geography II: Reflections from #commgeog19
Maryland A, Marriott, Lobby Level

Robotocene: the political ecology of automation II; Conservation and Species
Balcony 2, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

3:55 PM – 5:35 PM
Police Geographies of Dispossession and Displacement
Johnson, Marriott, Mezzanine Level

It’s time to get your abstracts in for the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (April 9-14, 2018 in New Orleans, LA)! Below are all of the calls for papers I’ve seen related to digital geographies. Please let me know if I have missed any and I will add more as I come across them.

Please note that this is the inaugural year for the Digital Geographies Specialty Group (DGSG) of the AAG, which you can join when registering for the conference ($1 for students, $10 for everyone else).

And if you are organzing a session and would like the DGSG to sponsor it, please send an email to jethatch //AT// uw.edu and he will make it happen!

Click on the title for the full call:

Databodies
“…the techno- and social-scientific techniques through which bodies and lives are rendered as calculable, objective data; how and where this data circulates, and with what effects; and how attempts at datafication are resisted or upended.”

Building the Geo-Humanities: A Roundtable on Three Dimensions of Educational Practice
“…collectively articulate ways to ground Geo-Humanities scholarship in everyday institutional settings.”

Platform Urbanism
“This session invites original research and conceptual reflections that explore, debate and critique the notion of an emergent ‘platform urbanism'”.

The Abandoned Spaces of the Internet
“…this session is devoted to an examination and appreciation of a variety of abandoned digital spaces…”

The Emergent Geographies of FinTech: Blockchain and Beyond
“With this call we seek papers focused on FinTech (broadly defined) and its implications for space, place, and scale within the financial industries, long standing labor practices and organizations, as well as everyday life.”

Revolutionary Methodologies Revisited
“…this session seeks papers critical of hegemonic approaches to knowledge production.”

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Symposium
“…devoted to the theory, methods, and applications of UAS in research as well as the emerging theme of UAS in the curriculum at the upcoming AAG.”

Mapping Urban In/justice
“This session seeks papers that demonstrate the utility of not only thinking critically about the intersections of mapping and urban inequality, but actually doing mapping and data analysis in order to reveal and better understand the variety of social and spatial forms these injustices take in contemporary cities.”

Anxious/Desiring geographies
“…we seek papers that deepen our geographical understandings of anxiety, desire and/or the possible relationship(s) between them.”

After the smart city?: The state of critical scholarship ten years on
“… we are interested in thinking through the ‘place’ of smart cities today: what have critical investigations of the topic achieved and where do we go from here?”

My City Is Smarter than Yours: Deconstructing the Buzzwords
“…raises fundamental questions, such as smart how? Open how? On whose terms? By what conceptualization?”

Making Smarter Environments: The Environmental Politics and Practices of Smart Cities
“…investigate the politics of urban environmentalism at the nexus of big data, smart technologies, and data-driven governance.”

Designing Politics | Politicizing Design – (In)visibilities of power through the urban and social fabric
“This session therefore seeks to raise attention within geography to the politics of design and critically engage with this trend by focusing on notions of ‘designing politics’ as well as ‘politicizing design’.”

Media and Disasters
“This session invites papers that explore the shifting meanings, representations and discourses of disaster in a variety of media and contexts.”

Digital Natures: Critical Practices of Environmental Modeling in the Age of Big Data
“…we aim to interrogate and draw attention to the roles of big data and modeling in the production of certain natures, human and more-than-human resistances to these processes and practices, and the conditions through which modeling transforms data into a resource.”

Connectivity within Place and across Space
“This session invites contributions that critically engage in understanding the relationship between different forms of connectivity, within place and across space.”

Theorizing Place and Space in Digital Geography: The Human Geography of the Digital Realm
“How are we to understand the digital geographies of platforms and the spaces that they give us access to?”

The Challenges and Potentials of Contemporary Atlases
“…we aim to bring people working and studying atlases, in both print and digital formats, together for a stimulating exchange of work and ideas…”

Story mapping for publicly-engaged geography
“…panelists will share and discuss their experiences using story mapping as a form of community engagement in a variety of mediums and settings.”

Network analysis and geography
“…explore the potentials and limitations of network analysis for geography.”

Space. Interaction, and Immersion: Expanding representations of geographic information

“This session will look at a variety of current and new approaches as they are being used to represent and understand the importance of space and place.”

Continue reading »

Next week I’ll be at the North American Cartographic Information Society’s (NACIS) wonderful Annual Meeting in Colorado Springs. I’ll be showing a map (see the teaser above), participating in a panel, and giving a talk about the software I co-wrote to produce the above map:

Friday, October 21 • 10:40am – 12:00pm

Critical Cartography, Critical Data: Confronting New Forms of Geospatial Information

Spatial data, of one form or another, inform, shape, and define our everyday lives and choices. Generated through a host of quotidian acts, such as credit card purchases, smartphone application use, and surveillance systems, spatial data is increasingly and continuously fed into massive data systems that collect, aggregate, and analyze it in powerful, new ways. Access to and use of such data demarcates the limits and possibilities of cartographic visualization, shaping world views and popular imaginations. How we see the world through the mediation of cartographic images of spatial data has tremendous impacts on how we perceive ourselves and how we act in the world. In this panel, we ask what it means to confront, to contextualize, and to question spatial data and cartographic representation in the myriad of forms they take. How can we differentiate between the multiple subject positions that constitute a given map? What are the historical precedents for today’s conceptions and practices of data? What is the value and what are the implications of doing so for critical cartography as praxis? Drawing together academics and practitioners, the panel addresses not only what it means to think new forms of data and their representation, but also what it means to act with said data.

Organizers:
Jim Thatcher, University of Washington-Tacoma
Craig Dalton, Hofstra University

Panelists:
Susan Schulten, University of Denver
Ladona Knigge, California State University Chico
Jessica Breen, University of Kentucky
Luke Bergmann, University of Washington
Nick Lally, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Friday, October 21 • 2:00pm – 3:30pm, Rethinking the Map Session

Introducing Geographical Imagination Systems
Luke Bergmann, University of Washington
Nick Lally, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Spatial theory in human geography often describes space as situated, dynamic, processual, relational, and contingent, suggesting non-Euclidean topological theories for grappling with the complexities of space. How, then, can cartography contribute to bringing these spatial imaginaries to fruition without reinscribing an understanding of space as a static, empty container waiting to be filled with points that precisely locate discrete objects within it? In this talk, we present a prototype of a Geographical Imagination System (GIS)–a web-based interface that encourages the interpretative construction, collision, and collaging of relational and absolute spaces. Our software prototyping both draws from and extends work in cartography, moving past the limits of familiar software packages, and opening up new possibilities for cartographic work and understandings of space.

Calls for papers for the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (April 5-9, 2017 in Boston, MA) have been circulating online and there are a bunch of them! I’m happy to see a number of sessions focus on software, technology, and/or digital objects in a number of different contexts. I have listed all of the ones I know of below. Please let me know if I have missed any and I will add more as I come across them.

Click on the title for the full call:

digital \\ human \\ labour
“this call is for papers exploring specifically the various intersections of ‘digital’, ‘human’ and ‘labour’.”

Urban-economic perspectives on technology
“In this session we seek to bring together papers focussed on the topics of urban and economic geography that take up critical perspectives on technology.”

Cities & Data Beyond Smart Urbanism
“We… invite empirical and theoretical contributions that conceptualize and/or extend current perspectives on the co-articulation of data and cities beyond narratives of smart urbanism.”

Real Estate Technologies: Genealogies, Frontiers, & Critiques
“We seek papers which address discursive and/or material relationships between technology, broadly defined, and real estate in its many forms.”

Curating (in)security: Unsettling Geographies of Cyberspace
“In calling for the unsettling of current theorisation and practice, this session intends to initiate an exploration of the contributions geography can bring to cybersecurity and space.”

Is another smart city possible? Sharing cities and the urban commons in a digital age
“We welcome papers addressing these themes in general, or with reference to specific urban commons including: open data commons, open source apps, community wifi, alternative energy, housing, food sharing, transportation (bike share, ride share), public spaces, community gardens, planning, PPGIS etc.”

Mobile bodies, technologies and methods: critical perspectives
“The focus will be on how these technologies can be engaged with by critical geographers to bring new perspectives to their analysis of everyday embodiment.”

Robotic futures
“What does the growing integration of robots and robotic technologies into everyday life do and/or mean for the theorization of sociospatial relations?”

Data Infrastructures, Nature, and Politics
“This session explores the making and un-making of data infrastructures by which conservationists and corporations – as well as development practitioners, scientists, and state planners – generate scaled, uneven, and actionable knowledge about the environment.”

Continue reading »

The schedule is out for the series of sessions Ryan Burns and I have organized for the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in San Francisco, March 29-April 2, 2016. All sessions are on March 30th in Union Square 16, Hilton Hotel Union Square, 4th Floor:

Toward a Geographical Software Studies 1: Political economy and infrastructures
Wednesday, 3/30/2016, from 10:00 AM – 11:40 AM

Laura Beltz Imaoka (University of California, Irvine), The Immaterial Value of Proprietary Software: Platforming ArcGIS

Ashwin Jacob Mathew (University of California, Berkeley/Packet Clearing House), Protocol as a Fieldsite

Till Straube (Goethe University Frankfurt), Seeing Like a Stack

Will Payne (University of California – Berkeley), What’s in a (Neighborhood) Name? Location-Based Services and Contested Delineations of Place

Discussant: James Thatcher (University of Washington – Tacoma)

Toward a Geographical Software Studies 2: Language and tools
Wednesday, 3/30/2016, from 1:20 PM – 3:00 PM

Matthias Plennert (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Analyzing the hidden backbone of an open-data-project: a genealogy of the OpenStreetMap data model

Warren SACK (University of California – Santa Cruz), Out of Bounds: Language Limits, Language Planning, and Linguistic Capitalism

Luke R. Bergmann (University of Washington), Speculative computing: toward Geographic Imagination Systems (GIS)

Pip Thornton (Royal Holloway, University of London), The Production of Context and the Digital Reconstruction of Language

Discussant: Cheryl Gilge (University of Washington)

Toward a Geographical Software Studies 3: The visual and control
Wednesday, 3/30/2016, from 3:20 PM – 5:00 PM

Craig M. Dalton (Hofstra University), Seeing with Software: Mobile device users’ geographic knowledges

Aaron Shapiro (University of Pennsylvania), The Surface of Things: Google Street View, Computer Vision, and Broken Windows

Louise Amoore (Durham University)

Teresa Scassa (University of Ottawa), Mapping Crime: Civic Technology in the Emerging Smart Cities Context

Discussant: Clare Melhuish (University College London)

Toward a Geographical Software Studies: methods and theory
Wednesday, 3/30/2016, from 5:20 PM – 7:00 PM

Elvin K. Wyly (University of British Columbia)

Pip Thornton (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Daniel G. Cockayne (University of Kentucky)

Keith Woodward (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Monica Degen

Discussant: Matthew W. Wilson (Harvard University)

Session Description: A growing body of recent geographic scholarship has focused its attention on software and algorithms. Some of these studies analyze geographic technologies —GIS and the geoweb, for example— as such, while others investigate a myriad of digital technologies that have become ubiquitous within the spaces of everyday life. These software/code objects interact with and modulate the world in complex ways, enact processes that connect humans and nonhumans, and become entangled with social, cultural, political, and economic systems. Moreover, software created to visualize data is used to produce knowledge about urban environments and everyday life, but obscure the processes and contexts which underlie its development. Engaging these topics, geographers have developed concepts like the “automatic production of space” (Thrift and French 2002), “software-sorted geographies” (Graham 2005), and “code/space” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011) to describe how software and space are co-constituted in the contemporary world. Productive research is building on these topics to explore new ways geographies are produced (Rose, Degen, and Melhuish 2014), governed (Amoore 2011), materialized, represented (Woodward et al. 2015), and lived through software (Kinsley 2014).

This session seeks to bring together a range of spatial thinkers who are producing new studies, theories, and methods for understanding and producing software. We welcome submissions that address all facets of software: the context of its production, its internal operational logics, the material work it does in the world, and its spatial distribution of social and political effects.

Sponsorships: Geographic Information Science and Systems Specialty Group
Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group
Political Geography Specialty Group

A fetus “testifies” in the Ohio legislature via ultrasound (From http://www.npr.org/2011/03/16/134425357/states-abortion-legislation-questioned-by-critics)

Later this week, I’ll be in Denver to participate in the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting. On Thursday (4:00 to 5:30pm, Denver Sheraton, Plaza Ballroom D), I will be presenting a paper co-authored with Jennifer Denbow that outlines some of our recent research on ultrasound. Our abstract reads:

Developments in ultrasound software continue to produce new representations of bodily interiors, profoundly influencing medical, popular, and political understandings of pregnant bodies. While numerous feminist STS studies have explicated the importance of the resultant images, none have examined how legal regulations and economic interests interact with software production to produce these images. In this paper, we examine the development of ultrasound software through interviews with computer programmers, technical documentation, academic articles, and federal regulations. We explore how three different academic ultrasound laboratories conceptualize their work in relation to regulatory frameworks. These three sites, and the researchers within, are part of complex assemblages that influence the design choices and assumptions that go into producing ultrasound software. Through an examination of the technical and regulatory frameworks, as well as the software that laboratories produce, we argue that the regulatory and economic structures affect what software is produced and thus what images are possible. Thus, we argue that the production and use of ultrasound software is co-constitutive with legal regulations, economic interests, and understandings of reproductive bodies.

I haven’t gone through the program closely yet, but someone pointed me to a panel titled “Make Kin Not Babies: Toward Feminist STS Pro-Kin and Non-Natalist Politics of Population and Environment,” which looks fantastic. It includes contributions from Donna Haraway, Adele E. Clarke, Michelle Murphy, Kim TallBear, Alondra Nelson, and Chia-Ling Wu (Thursday, November 12, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Denver Sheraton, Governor’s Square 15). The abstract reads:

Feminist STS scholarship has long and richly addressed biogenetic reproduction, focusing on race, region, sexuality, class, gender, and more. However, feminist STS has also largely been silent about reducing the human burden on earth while strengthening ecojustice for people and other critters as means and not ends. Can we develop anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, STS-informed feminist politics of peopling the earth in current times, when babies should be rare yet precious and real pro-family and community politics for young and old remain rare yet urgently needed? How can we develop collaborative politics recognizing that peoples subjected to (ongoing) genocides may need more children? How can we intervene in the relentless glut of attention devoted to problematic, costly “rights” and “needs” for (mainly richer) women to have babies as an individual “choice”?

Questions: How to nurture durable multi-generational non-biological kin-making, while humans everywhere transition to vastly less reproduction? What alternative ways of flourishing can be nurtured across generations and across cultures, religions, nations? How to deter on-going anti-feminist population control efforts while generating innovative discourses that legitimate non-natalist policies and choices? How to promote research on forms of contraception women and men want (and can use under diverse circumstances) and reproductive services that actually serve? How to build non-natalist kin-making technologies and sciences in housing, travel, urban design, food growing, environmental rehabilitation, etc.?

Where are the feminist utopian, collaborative, risky imaginings and actions for earthlings in a mortal, damaged, human-heavy world? Why hasn’t feminist STS taken the lead in such fundamental endeavors?

On Thursday at 10:30am, I will be talking about maps and art at the Annual Meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). My abstract read:

Remapping Spatial Sensibilities
In a number of recent articles, scholars have drawn connections between cartography and the visual arts. These connections are usually confined to questions of aesthetics and representation, eschewing larger conceptual and historical connections. In this paper, I deploy Jacques Rancière’s concept of the “distribution of the sensible,” which he uses to describe how art changes what we are able to perceive. Using a number of maps as examples, I use this concept to trace a history of cartography concerned with changing understandings of space. This periodization, I argue, suggests a path forward for cartographic work concerned with developing new spatial cognizance, or using Rancière’s terms, re-distributing what is spatially sensible. This path, informed by art theory, opens up exciting new possibilities for cartographic work to exist as an independent knowledge-producing practice, intersect with theories in human geography, respond to the current moment, and produce new representations of space.

The conference schedule looks excellent and people keep telling me good things about past meetings, so I’m excited to be participating.