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.”

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Databodies

Session organisers: Juliane Collard (UBC) and Elliott Child (UBC)

Rebecca Lemov (2016) recently declared that ‘big data is people’. Although particularly intense in our petabyte era, data driven sciences have been ‘mining the intimate’ for over a century, reaching ever-deeper into our bodies, psyches, and subjectivities. Science studies scholars have paid critical attention to this phenomenon, tracing the spaces and times of ‘thick data’ (Murphy 2017) and its effects. This work has been rich and varied: from Lemov’s (2015) writing on the operationalization of subjectivity through the Cold War, to Michelle Murphy’s (2017) on the valuation of life in service of economic futures, and Catherine Waldby’s (2000) on bodies as medical databases. In geography, Amoore and Piotuk (2015) ask us to attend to the force ‘little analytics’ have on directing subjective attention within data infrastructure. These and other writers trace the situated and material origins of data, showing how it is less ‘extracted’ than made. In the process, they show how power operates and circulates with data along well worn lines of, inter alia, race, sex, gender, class, and ability.

In this session, we seek to develop the dialogue between geographers and those critical scholars who are exploring what ‘thick data’ is ‘made of and out of’ (Lemov 2016). Geographers have much to contribute to this stream of research, for example by examining how and why particular bodies and places become sites and sources of data, how and where data travels, and the multiple scales of datafication. In this vein, we are interested in papers that explore, among other themes, 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.

We want to cast a wide net in this speculative session. We welcome papers that are broadly attentive to the subjective, psychological, biological, and lively materials from which data is made by examining (among other topics):

• valuation, quantification, economization, and financialization of life
• new forms of (clinical) labour
• quantifications, measurements, and distributions of vulnerability
• data, experimentality, and biopolitics
• colonialism, post-colonialism, and the production of big data
• databanks and modern empire
• bodies as database

Please send a title and a brief abstract (no more than 250 words) to elliott.child //AT// geog.ubc.ca and juliane.collard //AT// geog.ubc.ca by October 15th, 2017.

References
Amoore, Louise. and Piotukh, Volha. 2015. ‘Life beyond big data: governing with little analytics’, Economy and Society, 44(3), 341-366.
Lemov, Rebecca. 2015. Database of dreams. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lemov, Rebecca. 2016. ‘Big data is people’. Aeon. June 16. Available: https://aeon.co/essays/why-big- data-is-actually-small-personal-and-very-human.
Murphy, Michelle. 2017. Economization of life. Durham: Duke University Press
Waldby, Catherine. 2000. The visible human project: Informatic bodies and posthuman medicine. London: Routledge.

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Building the Geo-Humanities: A Roundtable on Three Dimensions of Educational Practice

As the field of Geo-Humanities coalesces into a distinct scholarly agenda, faculty members have begun to translate its concepts and methods into three scales of leadership: classroom pedagogy, syllabus creation, and institutional curricular development. In particular, as instructors bring pedagogical approaches more frequently associated with the creative arts into geography departments, what is this doing to inherited classroom design, modes of assessment, and the building of degree programming? This roundtable discussion invites faculty and teachers at all levels (from high school to graduate school) to propose and flesh out a single discussion point, observation, or challenge from their own practice that helps us collectively articulate ways to ground Geo-Humanities scholarship in everyday institutional settings. One of the best ways to advance research in our sub-field is to gain clarity on how the act of “doing” Geo-Humanities is embodied and projected to students. Each participant’s discussion point will cue the group for a conversation with both breadth and depth. Discussion points might include, but are not limited to, participatory geography, media labs, critical GIS, data science, studio arts, instructional technology, classroom vibe, institutional program building, digital humanities, library partnerships, or extramural collaborations.

Sponsorship from the Cultural Geography Specialty Group, and the Digital Geographies Specialty Group will be sought for this panel.

To apply: Please email the conveners by October 20, 2017 with your CV and a paragraph (250 words max) describing 1) your role in teaching the GeoHumanities, and 2) your proposed single discussion point.

Conveners: Nicholas Bauch (University of Oklahoma / nbbauch //AT// ou.edu) and Garrett Dash Nelson (Dartmouth College / Garrett.G.D.Nelson //AT// dartmouth.edu)

Keywords: Geo-Humanities, pedagogy, curriculum, leadership, media lab

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Platform Urbanism

Organizers
Susan Moore (University College London)
Scott Rodgers (Birkbeck, University of London)

Sponsors
Digital Geographies Specialty Group
Media and Communication Geography Specialty Group
Urban Geography Speciality Group

Outline
Talk about ‘platforms’ is today all-pervasive: platform architecture, platform design, platform ecosystem, platform governance, platform markets, platform politics, platform thinking. But just what are platforms? And how might we understand their emergent urban geographies?

As Tarleton Gillespie (2010) argues, the term ‘platform’ clearly does discursive work for commercial entities such as Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb and Google. It allows them to be variably (and often ambiguously) described and imagined: as technical platforms; platforms for expression; or platforms of entrepreneurial opportunity. Indeed, as emergent spaces, platforms – both commercial and nonprofit – entail so many ambitions, activities, services, exchanges, forums, infrastructures, and ordinary practices that conceptualizing their general dynamics is difficult, perhaps even pointless.

Yet platforms do appear to have considerable implications, geographical as well as political. For Benjamin Bratton (2015), cloud-based platforms such as Facebook, Amazon and Google form a fundamental layer of what he calls planetary-scale computation, perhaps representing new forms of geopolitical sovereignty. This ‘sovereignty’ is, however, neither generalized nor homogeneous: in manifests in geographically uneven intensities and extents.

This session invites original research and conceptual reflections that explore, debate and critique the notion of an emergent ‘platform urbanism’. Recently, Nick Srnicek (2016) deployed the phrase ‘platform capitalism’ to encapsulate his argument that platforms not only mark a new kind of firm, but a new way of making economies. Here – in a move similar to Henri Lefevbre’s (1970/2003) in The urban revolution – we suggest a speculative substitution of ‘urbanism’ for ‘capitalism’, placing an emphasis on the possibility of irreducible, co-generative dynamics between platforms and the urban.

Contributions may address a wide range of commercial and nonprofit platforms – including those related to social networking, user-generated content, location-based technologies, mapping and the geoweb, goods and services, marketing, and gaming – and their relationships with various forms of urban living and urban spaces.
Expressions of Interest

We intend to organize 1-2 paper sessions, depending on quantity and quality of submissions, followed by a panel discussion session.

Expressions of interest must be emailed to both Susan Moore (susan.moore //AT// ucl.ac.uk) and Scott Rodgers (s.rodgers //AT// bbk.ac.uk) by 1 October 2017. Those proposing a paper presentation should send an abstract of 250 words; those interested in participating as a panellist should include a short outline of their intended contribution in their email.

References

Bratton, B. H. (2016). The stack: On software and sovereignty. MIT press.
Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of ‘platforms’. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347-364.
Lefebvre, H. (1970/2003). The urban revolution (originally published as La révolution urbaine). University of Minnesota Press.
Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform capitalism. John Wiley & Sons.
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The Abandoned Spaces of the Internet

Session Organizer: Vincent Miller (School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent)

Session Sponsor: Digital Geographies Specialty Group

In recent years, Geography has seen a rebirth of interest and appreciation of the abandoned, ruined and neglected spaces of modernity, particularly within the context of deindustrialisation. However, with a quarter of a century behind it, the ‘post-industrial’ space of the Web has itself already turned into a space of abandonment, ruin and blight. While much has been deleted over time (thus creating concerns over curation and archiving), many abandoned or neglected virtual spaces still remain, frozen in an eternal present. From the one billion inactive accounts on Twitter, to the recent unearthing of Tom Hardy’s MySpace profile, to abandoned virtual worlds, games, blogs, social media and dating websites, spaces of abandonment and neglect are endemic to the internet and, unlike the industrial ruin, remain mostly hidden from view, although never far away.

In the spirit of urban exploration and ‘ruin porn’, this session is devoted to an examination and appreciation of a variety of abandoned digital spaces, and from a variety of perspectives including:
• Aesthetic experiences of design, ruin, decay, abandonment
• Philosophical issues around time, identity, ephemerality and narrative
• Affective experiences of nostalgia, memory, loss, embarrassment and the uncanny
• Political-economic issues around digital capitalism, creative destruction and digital abundance

Anyone interested in participating in the session should send an abstract conforming to the requirements of the AAG (see http://annualmeeting.aag.org/ ) by October 10 to Vince Miller (v.miller //AT// kent.ac.uk). Please note that the deadline for abstract submission and fee payment for this conference is October 25, 2017.

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The Emergent Geographies of FinTech: Blockchain and Beyond

by Joe Blankenship (University of Kentucky) and Matthew Zook (University of Kentucky)

FinTech is a relatively new term for Geography and characterizes the application of information technologies to financial transactions and industries. The range of topics and use cases are broad including algorithmic and high frequency trading, mobile-based currencies, artificial intelligence advising, virtual world currencies, darknet and other anonymized transactions, micro-payments, and crowd-sourced financing.

We are particularly interested in the technology of cryptographically-secured blockchains first appearing in late 2008 in the form of Bitcoin. Almost a decade later, blockchain still elicits great interest within the financial industry seeking new methods and technologies to increase operational efficiencies. Several consortia, supported by big businesses, are developing a range of blockchain platforms with unique protocols and regulations. Expanding from the initial use as cryptocurrencies, use cases for blockchain technologies include data storage, identity management, and decentralized autonomous corporations. These financial technologies have the potential to shift long standing paradigms within globalization, digital divide, and numerous lived spaces and places.
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.

Possible Questions/Topics

• In what economic spaces are blockchains and FinTech currently being used? What is the intended/expected goal of these implementations? (e.g., banking, trading, securities, differentials, insurance, stocks, bonds, etc.)
• How are people enrolled in the use of these technologies? Has it changed their practices in work and everyday life? (e.g., social networks, media and communications, Internet of Things, payment, investment)
• Where are blockchains and/or cryptocurrencies being used or developed outside of financial applications? What are the implications of non-financial blockchain technologies? (e.g., data storage, cryptography, ID, education, health care, labor/employment, distributed computation, Merkle Web, DarkNets, hacker spaces)
• How is FinTech interacting with broad interests within economic geography on digital divides, neoliberal globalization, gendered work and economic practices, data ownership, privacy, security, and the internet writ-large?
• How do these technologies fit into existing theoretical frameworks such as code/space, network society, actor-network theory, game theory, etc? Do the current conditions of these technologies bolster and/or challenge these and other geographic concepts?
• How might current and future geographies be shaped or produced given the current state of FinTech, blockchain’s current implementations, and planned FinTech/blockchain projects?

Those with interest in joining these sessions should send an abstract (200-250 words) to Joe Blankenship (jrbl235 //AT// uky.edu) and Matthew Zook (zook //AT// uky.edu) by September 30, 2017. We plan to review and finalize session(s) by early October.

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Revolutionary Methodologies Revisited

Session Organizers: Margath Walker (University of Louisville), Priscilla McCutcheon (University of Louisville) Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah (SUNY Buffalo)

Following last year’s lively and successful series of sessions on “revolutionary methodologies”, (a provocative if contested term) and building upon recent discussions across the discipline related to decolonizing geographies, this session seeks papers critical of hegemonic approaches to knowledge production.

While the theme is purposefully broad, we are particularly interested in methodological interventions seeking to dislodge conventional ways of valuing and knowing the world.  Significant strides have been made to question or destabilize dominant representations across nearly all sub-fields of Geography.  These include but are certainly not limited to:  alternative mapping and feminist cartography (e.g. Kwan 2002); the ontological aspects of the co-production of knowledge (e.g. Jazeel and MacFarlane 2010); “lopsided” digital and real geographies (e.g. Wilson 2015); the politics of citation (e.g. Mott and Cockayne 2017); the prevalence of masculinist and white geographies (e.g. Faria and Mollett 2016; Ahmed 2007); and the politics of representation (e.g. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999).

Fundamental to this work is the dual move of incorporating theoretical critiques and moving beyond debates to include alternative methodological tools and practices in the production of geographic knowledge.  Equally pressing is the need to bring these sometimes disparate discussions into conversation with one another.  This session hopes to offer such a forum.
We will consider both exploratory and pragmatic contributions which treat opportunities for resistance and/or present distinctive optics or re-mappings seeking to disrupt conventional methods and epistemologies of knowledge production. We also welcome any of the following topics:

Metrics to resist cooptation
Grass-roots methods
Embodied counter-performativities
Methodological intersectionality
Gathering and presenting data in more equitable ways
Defining decolonization with methods
Critical reflexivity during data collection
Relationality and visual representation of in-betweenness
The political economy of academic publishing
The construction of indicators which reflect social justice
Alternative measurements of intellectual labor
Academic capitalism and value

Please send an abstract by October 13th, 2017 of no more than 250 words to:
margath.walker //AT// louisville.edu

 

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Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Symposium

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are revolutionizing how remote sensing activities are undertaken in geography and beyond. With increased spatial and temporal resolution, new UAS methods and techniques are rapidly being implemented in a variety of fields and disciplines to improve our understanding of the earth system. However, the uncertainties surrounding data capture also create challenges for traditional digital image processing workflows. These challenges require a reexamination of existing workflows to develop methodological approaches suitable to UAS captured datasets. We are organizing a set of sessions 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. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Method development for UAS image capture, processing, and analysis
• Emerging theories surrounding platforms and sensors
• UAS Applications in agriculture, forestry, geomorphology, etc.
• Research challenges to implementing UAS in fieldwork
• Participatory mapping with UAS
• The ethical use of ‘drones’
• UAS in the curriculum

We welcome all types of submissions related to UAS and aim to organize several sessions within the symposium related to the topic. If you are interested in presenting in this symposium, please send your title, abstract and PIN to Amy Frazier (amy.e.frazier //AT// okstate.edu), Kunwar Singh (kksingh //AT// ncsu.edu), Adam Mathews (adam.mathews //AT// okstate.edu), or Britta Ricker (bricker0 //AT// uw.edu) no later than October 25, 2017. If you are interested in organizing an entire session related to UAS, please also contact the organizers as soon as possible.

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Mapping Urban In/justice

Organizers: Taylor Shelton (Mississippi State University) and Dillon Mahmoudi (University of Maryland Baltimore County)

How can mapping reveal previously unseen urban injustices or misunderstood phenomenon?

In 1973, David Harvey remarked that “mapping even more evidence of man’s patent inhumanity to man is counter-revolutionary in the sense that it allows the bleeding-heart liberal in us to pretend we are contributing to a solution when in fact we are not.” But rather than simply documenting these inhumanities, examples abound of mapping and data being used to actively challenge entrenched forms of inequality and the processes that produce them. Building on the power imbued in maps and data by powerful institutions, mapping is increasingly leveraged as a key means of drawing attention to, and developing new understandings of, urban inequality. While there is a persistent challenge in ensuring that cartographic visualization and quantitative data analysis do more than just “expiate guilt without our ever being forced to face the fundamental issues,” these tools and methods have just as much potential to advance a substantive, radical critique of the status quo as any other approach.

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. While the utility of maps and data to bring attention to urban injustices is powerful in its own right, these kinds of representations can not only help to prove that such injustices exist, but also allow us to develop new ways of conceptualizing and addressing them.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
Use of novel datasets or visualization techniques to understand urban injustices
Inequalities in housing, transportation, infrastructure, etc.
Counter-mapping as an activist strategy
Participatory and community-based mapping
Mixed-methods mapping (e.g., mental and cognitive mapping, qualitative GIS)
Mapping that redraws boundaries
Power and il/legibility in mapping
Interested participants should send abstracts of 250 words or less to Taylor Shelton (taylor.shelton //AT// msstate.edu) and Dillon Mahmoudi (dillonm //AT// umbc.edu) by October 11.

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Anxious/Desiring geographies

Organizers: Jeremy W. Crampton (Kentucky, USA), Nick Robinson (RHUL, UK), Mikko Joronen (Tampere, Finland)

At this political moment we seem beset by anxieties from every direction. Automation is identified as an existential threat to jobs. Vulnerabilities from political violence increase anxieties of the subaltern. Climate change and the inauguration of the Anthropocene threaten our wellbeing. Nast (2017) credits the financial crisis with being “psychically traumatic.”

At least since Gregory’s identification of the inadequacy of representation, which he dubbed “cartographic anxiety” (Gregory, 1994), geographers have meaningfully contributed to understandings of the affective politics of anxiety. Attention has been paid to a geopolitics of fear that is experienced on both an everyday and global level (Pain and Smith, 2008), and to sexual desires and identities (Bell and Valentine, 1995). Brown and Knopp (2016) have identified a biopolitics of the state’s anxieties in the governance of the gay bar.

In this session we seek papers that deepen our geographical understandings of anxiety, desire and/or the possible relationship(s) between them.

Is anxiety a mental disease that can be diagnosed and treated (APA, 2013), founded on lack, or can it be deployed more positively (Robbins and Moore, 2012)? Is anxiety the only affect that does not deceive (Lacan, 2014)? What is the relation between anxiety, desire and place? What might a politics of locationally affective resistance look like (Griffiths, 2017)? How is desire productive of spaces? How do anxiety and desire circulate and relate to subjectivities and the material body? Are there particular places and spaces that are invested in anxiety or desire, and what is the lived experience there?

Topics that address these questions include but are not limited to:

• Places of anxiety and desire
• Surveillance anxiety (eg., geosurveillance, automated facial recognition)
• Automation anxiety and desires
• The affective politics of policing
• Living in code/space & the smart city and becoming the data subject
• Everyday anxieties
• The biopolitics of anxiety and desire
• The anxious/desiring/desired body
• Affective resistances
• Governing through desire
• Anxieties from political violence
• Affective relations of anxiety/desire to pain, grief, worry or fear

Please send a title and abstract of 250 words to jcrampton //AT// uky.edu, nicholas.Robinson.2014 //AT// live.rhul.ac.uk, and Mikko Joronen mikko.joronen //AT// uta.fi by October 15th.

References
American Psychiatric Association. 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association.
Bell, D. and Valentine, G. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge.
Brown, M. & L. Knopp. 2016. Sex, drink, and state anxieties: governance through the gay bar. Social & Cultural Geography, 17, pp. 335-358.
Gregory, D. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Griffiths, M. (2017) Hope in Hebron: The political affects of activism in a strangled city. Antipode, 49, 617-635.
Lacan, J. 2014. Anxiety. Seminar Book X. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nast, H. J. (2017) Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates, the 1990s financial crisis and the (maternal) comforts of the posthuman. Social & Cultural Geography, 18, 758-785.
Pain, R. and Smith, S. (Eds) 2008. Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Robbins, P. and Moore, S.A. 2012. Ecological anxiety disorder: diagnosing the politics of the Anthropocene. cultural geographies, 20(1) 3–19.
Sioh, M. 2014. A small narrow space: postcolonial territorialization and the libidinal economy. In P. Kingsbury and S. Pile (Eds), Psychoanalytic Geographies. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

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After the smart city?: The state of critical scholarship ten years on

Today, the smart city imaginary is a recurring theme within critical urban geography and implies a particular set of rationalities. While it tends to centre upon digital technologies as a means to solve complex urban problems, it is also an entrepreneurial branding and boosting technique for cities. The implementation of smart city strategies transforms how cities operate and has resulted in an array of well-documented critiques around control, privacy, and technological determinist or solutionist visions of the urban. Furthermore, these data and software-driven solutions are often instrumental: merely treating symptoms, while failing to address the underlying problem. This has led to the idea that smart technologies are a solution looking for a problem.

This session seeks papers that explore approaches, policies, and practices that actively invoke and negotiate these issues, while also situating the smart city within wider, ongoing debates in and beyond urban geography. Thus, this session is not prescriptive and welcomes scholars interested in the smart city, data and digital transformations, digital infrastructure, technocratic and algorithmic governance, and the political economy of cities. In particular, 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?

Areas of potential interest for research papers may include, but are not limited to:

• The nexus between governance, policy, technological innovation, and power;
• How smart city initiatives are placed upon existing urban infrastructure and service provisions and the resulting consequences.
• The role of the smart citizen.
• The splintering effects of digital technologies.
• The effects of technologies on everyday processes and environments.
• Urban entrepreneurialism and the Smart City.

Please send titles and proposed abstracts (250 words max) to Aoife Delaney (Aoife.delaney //AT// mu.ie) and Alan Wiig (alan.wiig //AT// umb.edu) no later than Friday 6 October 2017.
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My City Is Smarter than Yours: Deconstructing the Buzzwords

Open data are at the forefront of smart cities initiatives. In research on both open data and smart cities, however, scholars tend to take complex terms-such as transparent, open, accountable, democratic, empowerment, value, inclusive, and access-as self-explanatory and as inherently worthy objectives. This uncritical treatment of the terms leaves the multiple and contradictory meanings embedded within the terms unexplored and under-examined. This omission constitutes a politics that complicate simple notions around the normative value of the goals open data and smart city advocates laud. It raises fundamental questions, such as smart how? Open how? On whose terms? By what conceptualization? And, perhaps most importantly, raises critical considerations around the meanings attached at particular moments to attain very particular goals, such as private-sector profit, strengthened systems of governmentality, or attentional economy expansion. While there’s a growing number of resources from which we can draw, this remains an oversight within the overall research agenda.

Making these considerations has at least three main goals. It can lend important theoretical insights into how smart cities function, particularly in relation to its attendant social and political process. As well, it can inform practitioners’ work as they consider the impacts and implications of open data platforms within smart cities initiatives, and the longstanding goals to which they aspire. It also contributes knowledge to activists’ work around “our digital rights to the city” (Shaw and Graham 2017) and the factors that enable or disable processes of empowerment. This is becoming especially important as smart cities increasingly align with open data and open government initiatives.

To that end, we’re inviting paper submissions related to the following topics:

• Discourse analysis of smart city or open data keywords
• Omissions and strategic absences of “transparency” and “accountability” discourses
• Gaps and inequalities in smart cities
• What becomes open, and why?
• What do prioritized open datasets tell us about social and political values?
• How does smart cities or open data lead to “open” government? How are these processes limited, framed, or contested?

Please send your submissions by Friday, 10/13, to Victoria Fast (victoria.fast //AT// ucalgary.ca) and Ryan Burns (ryan.burns1 //AT// ucalgary.ca). Decisions will be made by Monday, 10/22. The abstract due date is 10/25, and the conference will be held April 10-14 in New Orleans, LA.
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Making Smarter Environments: The Environmental Politics and Practices of Smart Cities

Within smart cities debates, the dominant discourse suggests that smart technologies will improve sustainability, efficiency, and environmental control, yet much of these claims have been taken for granted, furthering post-political urban environmentalism. We see this as an opportunity for critical geographers and political ecologists to investigate the politics of urban environmentalism at the nexus of big data, smart technologies, and data-driven governance.

Recent work has brought attention to these issues. For example, Gabrys (2014) identifies the ways in which smart cities enroll environments – surroundings, natural processes, and technological milieu – to shape the range of possible ways of being in the city. Likewise, Luque-Ayala and Marvin’s (2016) work on urban atmospheric control and “nowcasting” shows how computational power extends a logic of control onto natural processes, such as storm surges and flooding in the city. Recent work on “environmental big data” has also pushed forward concerns about the practices, devices, and subjects involved with environmental monitoring, raising new questions about epistemologies and ontologies of nature in the city as well as the politics of socio-environmental control (Gabrys 2016; Lippert 2016; Garnett 2016; Fortun et al 2016).

Critical questions are still to be answered, however, as smart cities and IoT agendas proliferate. They include questions of the decision-making practices around the geographic-ecological placements of data centers, the implications of sensors for real-time monitoring of air and water pollution, and the nature of the performativity and social construction of open data categories such as “environmental” data.

To this end, we are soliciting abstracts for a series of organized sessions to be held at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, to be held April 10-14 in New Orleans, LA. We would be particularly interested in work addressing the following topics, although we are in no way limiting our solicitation to this list:

• How do smart cities and/or urban data mobilize particular conceptions of “the environment”, and what are the implications of this process?
• What are the politics and environmental considerations/limitations around the locations of data centers or other data infrastructures?
• What sorts of more-than-human assemblages are enrolled to understand, manage, and respond to smart cities’ environmental implications?
• What roles do smart infrastructures play in the production, management, representation, extraction of value, and economies of “natures”?
• How does “environmental stewardship” and “corporate responsibility” play into discourses of smart cities’ environmental implications?
• How are particular publics “called into being” by smart infrastructures in response to socio-environmental concerns?
• How are environmental justice movements mobilizing smart technologies or environmental data to fight injustices?

Fortun, K., Poirier, L., Morgan, A., Costelloe-Kuehn, B., & Fortun, M. (2016). Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 2053951716668903.
Gabrys, J. (2014). Programming environments: environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(1), 30-48.
Gabrys, J., Pritchard, H., & Barratt, B. (2016). Just good enough data: Figuring data citizenships through air pollution sensing and data stories. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 2053951716679677.
Garnett, E. (2016). Developing a feeling for error: Practices of monitoring and modelling air pollution data. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 2053951716658061.
Lippert, I. (2016). Failing the market, failing deliberative democracy: How scaling up corporate carbon reporting proliferates information asymmetries. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 2053951716673390.
Luque-Ayala, A. & Marvin S. (2016). Urban Atmospheric Control: Nowcasting and the Modulation of Infrastructure. Presentation at 2016 AAG.

Participants should send abstracts to both Anthony Levenda (anthony.levenda //AT// ucalgary.ca) and Ryan Burns (ryan.burns1 //AT// ucalgary.ca) by October 6th. We will send out notifications of acceptance by October 13th.

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Designing Politics | Politicizing Design – (In)visibilities of power through the urban and social fabric

Gabriele Schliwa, The University of Manchester (gabriele.schliwa //AT// manchester.ac.uk)
Mark Usher, The University of Manchester (mark.usher //AT// manchester.ac.uk)

Sponsors:

Digital Geographies Specialty Group
Political Geography Specialty Group
Urban Geography Specialty Group

Summary:

Whilst urban design and political organization have always been linked through the material fabric of the city, from the Baroque aesthetics of the absolutist era to the Fordist functionalism of the International Style, this relationship has become increasingly ambiguous, sophisticated and discreet. At the same time, we have witnessed an ever increasing visibility of ‘design’ in popular and academic discourse, which tends to circumvent or downplay questions of the political in favor of technical and environmental concerns (Montgomery 2013; Tonkiss 2013; Armstrong 2014). This suggests that the ways in which design plays out in contemporary society is undergoing a number of transformations with profound implications for urban and political life, from the decentralization of government through integrated infrastructural management systems to the affective and behavioral manipulation of the population via smart technologies. However, current understandings and debates on design in the urban context, and their political and cultural implications, are still poorly developed and theorized. This represents an academic as well as practical challenge in need of an interdisciplinary field of study, which calls for critical geographical inquiry into design research, political theory, human-computer interaction, smart cities and urbanism.

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’. Enthusiastically celebrated initiatives aimed at developing cities at the ‘human scale’ through participation in various ‘co-processes’ (co-design, collaboration, co-production etc., see Bason 2014; Manzini 2015; Concilio and Rizzo 2016) can also result in enhanced social control and governmental techniques, and processes of de-politicization (Swyngedouw 2005). At the other end, how can we conceive and enact alternative forms of design politics to that of capitalist modes of production and create new types of collective commons (Boehnert 2014)? What kinds of ‘wicked problems’ (Buchanan 1992) may arise when thinking design politically? How does the design discourse relate to ontological shifts towards contingency and complexity (Machard 2007)? Can new ways of living together be designed from below? And how can the public realm be designed along more democratic or radical lines?

We welcome empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions that critically engage with designing politics | politicizing design in an urban context. We intend to explore the relationship between design and politics from multiple perspectives, therefore we invite submissions that may include, but are not restricted to, the following themes:

– Theoretical and methodological developments on design and politics
– Designing in relation to crisis and austerity (Armstrong et al. 2014)
– The public realm, the state and design politics
– Designing and the new military urbanism (Graham 2010)
– Biopolitics and governmentality through design
– Designing subjectivities and cyborg citizens
– Resilience thinking, governance and design thinking (Chandler and Reid 2016; Cowley 2017)
– History and the genealogy of design (Mareis 2011; Halpern 2014)
– Digital and smart urbanism (Marvin and Luque-Ayala 2015)

Please can those interested in contributing to the session send an abstract conforming to the requirements of the AAG (see annualmeeting.aag.org) by October 13 to Mark Usher (mark.usher //AT// manchester.ac.uk) and Gabriele Schliwa (gabriele.schliwa //AT// manchester.ac.uk).

Selected references:
Armstrong, L., Bailey, J., Julier, G., & Kimbell, L. (2014). Social Design Futures: HEI Research and the AHRC.
Bason, C. (2014). Design for Policy (Design for Social Responsibility). Routledge, London.
Boehnert, J. (2014) Design vs. the Design Industry. Design Philosophy Papers, 12:2, 119-136. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/144871314X14159818597513
Buchanan, R. (1992). ‘Wicked Problems in Design thinking’. Design Issues, 8(2), 5-21.
Chandler, D. and Reid, J. (2016). The Neoliberal Subject. Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Roman & Littlefield International, London.
Concilio, G. and Rizzo, F. (2016). Human smart cities – Rethinking the interplay between design and planning. Springer, London.
Cowley, R. (2017). Resilience and design: an introduction. In: Robert Cowley , Clive Barnett , Tania Katzschner , Nathaniel Tkacz & Filip De Boeck (2017): Forum: resilience & design, Resilience, DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2017.1348506
Graham, S. (2008). Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. Verso, London.
Halpern, Orit (2015). Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Experimental Futures
Luque-Ayala, A. & Marvin, S. (2015). Developing a Critical Understanding of Smart Urbanism?. Urban Studies. 2015;52:2105-2116.
Machard, O. (2007). Post-Foundational political thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh University Press.
Manzini, E. (2015) Design, when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Mareis, C. (2011) Design as knowledge culture. Interferences between design and knowledge discourses since 1960. Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld.
Montgomery, C. (2013) Happy city: transforming our lives through urban design. Penguin, London.
Swyngedouw, Erik (2005). ‘Governance innovation and the citizen: the Janus face of governance-beyond-the-state’. Urban studies 42 (11), 1991- 2006
Tonkiss, F. (2013) Cities by design: the social life of urban form. Polity, Cambridge.

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Media and Disasters

Convened by Kevin Glynn (Northumbria University) and Julie Cupples (University of Edinburgh)

Disasters, like other events, don’t come pre-equipped with meanings, but must be put into discursive and narrative frameworks before they can be made sense of and understood. In the current conjuncture, characterized by increasingly acute and widely felt crises of the global neoliberal economy, climate systems, and political institutions, the discourses and knowledges through which disasters are known and understood are themselves shifting and mutating. Such shifts and mutations are abetted by the fact that, in the contemporary technological environment, the victims and survivors of disasters often have direct access to the means of media production and distribution in ways that were once all but unimaginable. This has created possibilities for the amplification and circulation of alternative and socially marginalized knowledges, voices, and perspectives capable of challenging the most established representational conventions, narrative frameworks, tropes and discourses for the signification of disaster. This session invites papers that explore the shifting meanings, representations and discourses of disaster in a variety of media and contexts. We are particularly interested in media practices through which indigenous, black, working-class, queer and women’s knowledges and experiences of disaster contest familiar discourses of vulnerability and resilience and challenge forms of inequality and dispossession that structure the uneven impacts of disasters.

We also invite papers that explore topics that might include (but need not be limited to) the following:

• Disasters and media convergence
• Disaster and the Trump presidency
• Disaster journalism
• Disasters and “fake news”
• Disasters and austerity politics
• Social media and disasters
• Disasters in film and television
• Disasters and community media
• YouTubing disaster

Please email paper titles and 200-word abstracts to Kevin Glynn (kevin.glynn //AT// northumbria.ac.uk) and Julie Cupples (julie.cupples //AT// ed.ac.uk) by October 25, 2017. Potential panelists should also submit their abstracts directly to AAG by October 25, 2017.

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Digital Natures: Critical Practices of Environmental Modeling in the Age of Big Data

Session Organizers: Eric Nost (University of Wisconsin) & Lily House-Peters (California State University, Long Beach)

Aiming to confront coastal wetlands loss, Louisiana’s 2017 Coastal Master Plan presents an explicitly data-driven and model-based framework to guide future environmental decision-making, taking advantage of big environmental data sets and tools powerful enough to mine and process them. Louisiana’s Master Plan is hardly unique in this regard; in fact, it is emblematic of a growing trend. The proliferation of big environmental data and powerful modeling tools is rapidly rescripting how we understand and govern environments, and may be casting environmental data itself as a (new) resource. In this session, we explore what such “data-driven” governance and environmental data as resource mean for environments and their inhabitants around the world. We are especially interested in understanding the practices by which actors make data available to “drive” governance.

Associated with the rise of big data is the birth new discourses: “data as the new oil”, data as a hoard, data as a resource to be “mined” (e.g. Toonders 2014). Increasingly, data managers believe there is value in data just waiting to be realized, like oil waiting in the ground, ready to be extracted, refined, transported, and consumed to realize its value. But as (resource) geographers and political ecologists have long shown, resources become useful only in relation to what they are asked to do and the practices that make them legible within particular governance regimes. This implies actors must work with the data, and this is no more evident than in environmental modeling. On the one hand, big data discourse disavows modeling when it emphasizes automaticity, unsupervised algorithms and machine learning, and the “end of theory.” On the other hand, modeling – practiced with people – is fundamental to producing and making sense of data in the first place.

The work of having to sort through big data and determine appropriate models can just as easily inspire dread for analysts as it can inspire hopeful visions of data-driven decision-making. In this way, modeling represents an important moment where both fractures and opportunities in the project of data-driven governance may become legible – through modelers’ practice or the technology itself. For instance, resource geographers have shown how resources themselves can be resistant to extraction and other aims of their users (Bakker and Bridge 2006; also, Kinsley 2014). And while digital technologies are often promoted as “disruptive,” scholars emphasize the conservative dimensions of modeling, including “algorithmic injustices” that reinforce racism, sexism, and other kinds of discrimination (Crawford 2016). At the same time, certain kinds of modeling, like simulations, can generate abundant representations of possible, even radical, futures.

In this session, 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.   Seeking to bridge political ecology and digital geography, we welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that bring diverse perspectives and approaches to examine a series of critical questions:

Who models?

• Given the neoliberalization of science (Lave et al. 2010), what are the political economic arrangements by which modeling is organized?
• In what ways can political ecologists employ modeling?
• How do modelers navigate working under increasingly constrained budgets that limit data collection and tool development?
• What are the affective dimensions of modeling? How do modelers bring not just “values” but emotional investments to bear in making models work?

How does big data drive decisions?

• How exactly do decision-makers learn with models? In what ways are decisions algorithmic or not?
• What roles do (geo)visualization and representation play in translating modeling into policy?
• In what ways are models contested?

What are the landscape effects?

• How do modelers understand the relationships between models and real world systems in a big data era? (Salmond et al. 2017)
• How do different ecosystems enable or resist modeling?
• In what ways does modeling and and data-driven environmental governance shape landscape outcomes? What natures are produced?

Those who would like to participate in the session should contact us by October 20 with a brief statement of interest and/or a title & abstract (250 words). Session participants will need to submit an abstract and register for the conference by October 25.

Contact Info: Eric Nost (nost //AT// wisc.edu) & Lily House-Peters (lily.housepeters //AT// csulb.edu)

References

Bakker, K., and G. Bridge. 2006. Material worlds? Resource geographies and the `matter of nature’. Progress in Human Geography 30 (1):5–27.
Crawford, K. 2016. Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem. NYT.com. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html (last accessed 20 September 2017)
Kinsley, S. 2014. The matter of “virtual” geographies. Progress in Human Geography 38 (3):364–384.
Lave, R., P. Mirowski, and S. Randalls. 2010. Introduction: STS and Neoliberal Science. Social Studies of Science 40 (5):659–675.
Salmond, J. A., M. Tadaki, and M. Dickson. 2017. Can big data tame a “naughty” world?: Environmental big data. The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 61 (1):52–63.
Toonders, J. 2014. Data is the New Oil of the Digital Economy. Wired.com. https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/07/data-new-oil-digital-economy/ (last accessed 20 September 2017).

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Connectivity within Place and across Space

Organizers: Lauren Andres, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, UK); L.Andres //AT// Bham.ac.uk; John Bryson. City-Region Economic Development Institute, University of Birmingham, UK; j.r.bryson //AT// bham.ac.uk

Connectivity is central to all geographic processes that link people, organizations infrastructures, technologies and places. There are many dimensions of connectivity including an individual’s friendship and work-related networks, but also organizational connectivity and various types of relationships between physical and virtual objects. Proximity and distance are two key components of connectivity, but the experience of both is mediated by technology, trust and repetition. It is timely to bring together a set of papers that explore the relationship between the different forms of connectivity and associated processes in place and across space. This includes a focus on understanding connectivity and interrelationships between people, organisations, technologies and places.

Connectivity, in relation to distance and proximity, includes economic, social, technical and political aspects. It also includes Tobler’s (1970) “first law of geography; everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” (1970: 236). This “law” emphasizes the importance of distance. Now, current geographies of connectivity embrace technological innovations which have transformed the relations between individuals, firms, places, infrastructures and of course communications. Connectivity is thus also facilitated by the evolving relationship between satellites, technology, people and organizations. For example, where fibre optics and cables are unavailable, satellite broadband can ensure communication and connectivity via the internet, as well as, navigation. Telecommunications satellites help international business to overcome distance, as they enable the transfer of knowledge and information (for example, via video conferencing), without the need for face-to-face exchange.

Given the importance of social connectivity in economic and political processes, it is timely to explore the multiple ways in which different forms of connectivity shape economic, social and political relationships and their spatial outcomes. This session invites contributions that critically engage in understanding the relationship between different forms of connectivity, within place and across space. Papers may examine topics including, but are not restricted to:

• Theoretical and methodological developments and the geographies of connectivity.
• Different forms of connectivity and their impacts.
• Connectivity, proximity and distance.
• Technology, Smartphones and connectivity or connected lifestyles.
• Connected communities, connected regions, connected cities, connected rural areas.
• Connectivity and disconnections, or connectivity on the margins.
• Social networks and connectivity including different forms of social embeddedness.
• Connectivity and global or international processes.
• Connectivity and spatial planning.
• Differential connectivity.

Anyone interested in participating in the session should send an abstract conforming to the requirements of the AAG (see http://annualmeeting.aag.org/) by September 30 to Lauren Andres (L.Andres //AT// Bham.ac.uk) and John Bryson (J.R.Bryson //AT// bham.ac.uk).

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Theorizing Place and Space in Digital Geography: The Human Geography of the Digital Realm
Session Organizer: Carwyn Morris (Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics)
Session Sponsor: Digital Geographies Specialty Group
Session Type: Paper Session (5 Papers)
Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting (New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018)

In 1994 Doreen Massey released Space, Place and Gender, bringing together in a single volume her thoughts on many of the key discussions in geography in the 1980s and early 1990s. Of note was the chapter, A global sense of place, and the discussion on what constitutes a place. Massey argues that places, just like people, have multiple identities, and that multiple identities can be placed on the same space, creating multiple places inside space. Places can be created by different people and communities, and it is through social practice, particularly social interaction, that place is made. Throughout this book, Massey also argues that places are processional, they are not frozen moments, and that they are not clearly defined through borders. As more and more human exchanges in the ‘physical realm’ move to, or at least involve in some way, the ‘digital realm’, how should we understand the sites of the social that happen to be in the digital? What does a human geography, place orientated understanding of the digital sites of social interaction tell us about geography? Both that in the digital and physical world.

Massey also notes that ‘communities can exist without being in the same place – from networks of friends with like interests, to major religious, ethnic or political communities’. The ever-evolving mobile technologies, the widening infrastructures that support them and the increasing access to smartphones, thanks in part to new smart phone makers in China releasing affordable yet powerful smartphones around the world, has made access to the digital realm, both fixed in place (through computers) and, as well as more often, through mobile technologies a possibility for an increasing number of people worldwide. How do impoverished or excluded groups use smart technologies to (re)produce place or a sense of place in ways that include links to the digital realm? From rural farming communities to refugees fleeing Syria and many more groups, in what ways does the digital realm afford spatial and place making opportunities to those lacking in place or spatial security?

How are we to understand the digital geographies of platforms and the spaces that they give us access to? Do platforms themselves even have geographies? Recently geographers such as Mark Graham have begun a mapping of the dark net, but how should we understand the geographies of other digital spaces, from instant messaging platforms to social media or video streaming websites? What is visible and what is obscured? And what can we learn about traditional topics in social science, such as power and inequality, when we begin to look at digital geographies?

In this paper session for 5 papers we are looking for papers exploring:

• Theories of place and space in the digital realm, including those that explore the relationship between the digital and physical realms
• Research on the role of digital realm in (re)producing physical places, spaces and communities, or creating new places, spaces and communities, both in the digital realm and outside of it.
• Papers considering the relationship between physical and digital realms and accounts of co-production within them.
• The role of digital technologies in providing a sense of space and place, spatial security and secure spaces and places to those lacking in these things.
• Research exploring the geographies of digital platforms, websites, games or applications, particularly qualitative accounts that examine the physical and digital geographies of platforms, websites, games or applications.
• Research examining issues of power, inequality, visibility and distance inside of the digital realm.

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Anyone interested in participating in the session should send an abstract conforming to the requirements of the AAG (see http://annualmeeting.aag.org/ ) by October 10 to Carwyn Morris (c.j.morris //AT// lse.ac.uk). Please note that the deadline for abstract submission and fee payment for this conference is October 25, 2017.

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The Challenges and Potentials of Contemporary Atlases

Benjamin Hennig
University of Iceland

Francis Harvey
Leibniz Institute for Regtional Geography/Leipzig University

Abstract
Atlases are evolving into culturally significant works for narratives and multiple forms of analyses. In this session we aim to bring people working and studying atlases, in both print and digital formats, together for a stimulating exchange of work and ideas at this panel. Through discussions of work and ideas regarding these developments the panel session should take up questions that directly engage atlases as cultural and scientific phenomena. In this sense, the session goes further than traditional conceptual issues about how to construct accurate representations of the world, produce it in book form and market it. Considerations of the diverse narrative forms taken by atlases requires reflections about the intended audience and the appropriate forms of representation. Following a consistent concept for narration, curation of the full range of maps and the subsequent process of data acquisition, processing and visualization are central in the creative productive process. Even after an atlas has been completed, ensuing work arises following an open access strategy regarding its data, ideally updated to changing content and knowledge about the world. Questions about analysis are linked to these conceptual questions. The complex challenges for the creation of a modern atlas are unique. From narration, curation and data/process access many questions occupy the creator of an atlas product. This session aims to continue discussion started in 2017 at AAG sessions on atlases and facilitate continuted discussions about these different challenges. The panel session should also include anyone working on the creation of modern atlases, whether these are an actual atlas, atlas-like products in form of curated printed or digital forms of map-collections.

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Story mapping for publicly-engaged geography

Organizers: Julian Barr (University of Washington) and Lauren Drakopulos (University of Washington)

We are seeking panelists that use story mapping as a tool for community engagement. Please send a brief description of your story mapping project (with examples or links if relevant) to either Julian Barr (jubarr //AT// uw.edu) or Lauren Drakopulos (drako //AT// uw.edu) by October 31, 2017. Works in progress are welcome.

Panel Session Abstract

Maps are cultural artifacts that, through visual representation, tell stories that “both reflect and create reality” (Gibson as cited in Caquard 2011, 140) and in so doing reproduce (or contest) dominant power structures (Wood 2010). With the emergence of cartography as a science, maps increasingly became either naturalized as depictions of reality, or viewed as instruments of science, obscuring their role as storytelling devices (Wood 2010). Critical mapping practices such as story mapping imbue maps once again with their storytelling capacity with attention to how maps serve to construct places for the map’s public. Further, such explorations in the spatial humanities have allowed for a more dynamic and interactive engagement with place as a conceptual object by inscribing places with emotive experiential narratives (Bodenhamer, Corrigan and Harris 2010; Caquard 2011). Through stories, communities develop collective narratives of shared experience and identity, situated in place. The act of place-making through storytelling, produces counter-narratives which challenge hegemonic discourses about places that dictate access and control, making visible the histories of marginalization and/or colonization as well as the ongoing experiences of those who have been invisibilized. Additionally, mapping and story mapping in particular allow geographers and the public to interact and engage with histories and pop/literary culture (Caquard and Cartwright 2014). This shows the variety of topics story mapping can engage with and its wide potential as a tool.

As geographers developing a publically-engaged praxis, story mapping is an excellent tool for facilitating community processes of narrative place-making and sharing stories with wider audiences. In this session panelists will share and discuss their experiences using story mapping as a form of community engagement in a variety of mediums and settings. Examples may include:

Mayan communities’ story map to make visible the loss of culture and histories: https://www.aaas.org/page/maya-atlas-struggle-preserve-maya-land-southern-belize

Pop culture inspired story-map showing the connections of a fictional world: https://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2017/marvel-origins/

Published in the Minnesota Post, this story map connects the history of hip-hop and public transit:

https://www.minnpost.com/stroll/2014/06/hockey-hip-hop-and-other-green-line-highlights

Interactive story map about the Whisky Rebellion: http://maptherebellion.com/interactive-map

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Network analysis and geography

Organizers: Walter J. Nicholls, Justus Uitermark, Michiel van Meeteren

Geographers have conceived of networks as a foundational spatial concept (e.g. Jessop et al 2008; Leitner et al 2008). In spite of this recognition, the adoption of network analysis within contemporary geography has been varied across geographical subdisciplines. This session departs from the conviction that network analysis heralds considerable promise to develop theoretical notions as well as methods that allow us to better understand how spaces are constituted and contested. This session therefore explores the potentials and limitations of network analysis for human geography.

Demonstrating the relevance of networks as theoretical constructs, scholars like Michael Mann (1986) and Manuel Castells (1996, 2009) have shown how networks of various kinds are constitutive of social power. Networks of people, corporations, and government officials agglomerate in specific locations, with some agglomerations concentrating more resources and power than others.

Network analysis further provides a rich array of techniques and methods that can capture relations in places and across space. Despite the early adoption of network-analytical techniques by both physical and human geographers during the heyday of the spatial science era (e.g. Haggett and Chorley, 1969), contemporary geographers only make limited use of such technological affordances, with notable exceptions of research on city networks (e.g. Taylor and Derudder, 2016) and digital geographies (Crampton et al. 2013).  The growing availability of digital data and the development of advanced techniques for network analysis provide many new opportunities for geography while also raising new issues with respect to research ethics and data validity.

Lastly, network analysis can facilitate conversation across disciplines and subdisciplines. Network analysis provides theoretical notions and techniques that can be used to capture phenomena ranging from social movements and corporate networks to the diffusion of innovation or road infrastructures. Because it provides a common vocabulary, network analysis has the potential to highlight patterns and mechanisms that operate across different fields. While the reduction of complex social relations to a standardized vocabulary offers exciting opportunities, the imposition of network categories can also result in theoretical and political blinders.

The session aims to encourage and inspire scholars to theoretically, methodologically, and empirically explore the potentials and limitations of network analysis for geography. We invite papers from various geographical specializations (e.g. economic, political, social, cultural, transportation, physical and environmental geography) to compare network approaches and build a more comprehensive and dynamic theory of networked geographies.

We particularly welcome contributions that focus on:
–       networks as building blocks of place, territory, scale
–       networks and power
–       the geographical unevenness of network structures
–       the sources of cooperation and conflict within networks
–       the interconnection of networks across domains (e.g. economic, political, environmental and cultural)
–       digital data
–       qualitative and quantitative methods to measure networked geographies

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, names, affiliations and contact information to justusuitermark //AT// hotmail.com, wnicholl //AT// uci.edu and michiel.van.meeteren //AT// vub.be by October 14, 2017 at the latest.

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

Call for Papers

Please email an abstract for your proposed presentation for the session to Sue Bergeron (sbergero //AT// coastal.edu) and Jesse Rouse (jesse.rouse //AT// uncp.edu).

Description

The role of space and place has traditionally been conveyed through the use of description and maps. However, as the information landscape continues to shift, we are moving forward from traditional cartographic images to modern interactive data visualizations, utilizing multidimensional representations. The addition of 3D visualizations to geospatial products, the experience of space in immersive, dynamic video game environments, and expounding on content as a visual story are all examples of the ways that the representation of geographic information is evolving. 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.

Papers are sought for this session on these and related topics:
Environmental Storytelling
Place-making
Storytelling through navigation and interaction
Experience through virtual landscapes
Video Games and geographic representation
Virtual Reality
Augmented Reality
3D visualization in the browser