'Digital Territories' CfP at the RGS-IBG, London 2024
Digital Territories
RGS-IBG Annual Meeting, London 2024
Session Organisers:
Prof Ayona Datta, UCL Department of Geography, a.datta@ucl.ac.uk
Dr Fenna Hoefsloot, UCL Department of Geography, f.hoefsloot@ucl.ac.uk
Dr Mariana Reyes, UCL Department of Geography, m.carranza@ucl.ac.uk
Format: In-person paper session
Session outline:
Current notions of ‘digital territory’ (Möllers 2021) refer to a statecraft of reproducing national borders in global information infrastructure. Whether this is through ‘infrastructure territorialisation projects’ (Möllers 2021) or attempts by the state to ‘digitally displace’ (Morris 2022) Indigenous, racialised, gendered or minority users, digital territory provokes a rethinking of the dynamic relationships between state, territory, and digital space. On one hand, technoscientific developments in the calculative logics of digital cartography enable legitimacy and visibility of national territories, and on the other hand, territory as a political-technology of land and terrain (Elden 2010) shapes the land-bound nature of digital space.
In this session, we call for papers exploring the dynamics of new and emergent digital territories that de/re-border the nation and other political bodies. From James Scott’s (1998) classic work on the legibility-making schemes deployed by the state to make space, resources, and people governable, to decolonial scholarship which highlights the calculability of territory to create the conditions for colonisation as well as providing Indigenous peoples tools for liberation, claiming land back, and engaging everyday knowledge with terrain, we are interested in scholarship that extends our understanding of the wide diversity and multiplicity of digital territories beyond the nation. We argue that digitalisation enables diverse forms of territoriality across multiple scales that is changing how ordinary citizens produce digital territories from the body to the global in order to claim justice, rights, and freedom.
We welcome contributions that include but are not limited to answering the following questions:
How are digital territories produced through policy, infrastructural, and digitalisation initiatives?
How do digital territories produce land-based politics of re/settlement, displacements, and erasures?
How are digital territories produced, contested, and negotiated through Indigenous, Black and feminist struggles?
How do emergent digital territories shift the dynamics of power across state, non-state, and civil society actors?
To submit an abstract, please email the title, presenter information and abstract (max 300 words) to Ayona Datta (a.datta@ucl.ac.uk), Fenna Hoefsloot (f.hoefsloot@ucl.ac.uk), or Mariana Reyes (m.carranza@ucl.ac.uk) by Friday 23rd February 2024.
References
Elden, Stuart. 2010. ‘Land, Terrain, Territory’. Progress in Human Geography 34 (6): 799–817. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510362603.
Möllers, Norma. 2021. ‘Making Digital Territory: Cybersecurity, Techno-Nationalism, and the Moral Boundaries of the State’. Science, Technology, & Human Values 46 (1): 112–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920904436.
Morris, Carwyn. 2022. ‘Digital Displacement: The Spatialities of Contentious Politics in China’s Digital Territory’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47 (4): 1075–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12559.
Scott, James C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.