Call for Papers: Digital Geographies and the Everyday

RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Midterm Conference, 19^th – 23^rd April 2021

Date and time: Thursday 22^nd April 2021, 1500 – 1700 BST, via Zoom

Sponsored by the Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG)

As digital technologies have become increasingly and unevenly entangled in everyday life on a global scale, so has their influence on the everyday phenomena we might participate in and choose to study as geographers. The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the ways digital technology can shape what we research, how we do research and how we share research, perhaps more than we might have intended. Inequalities in everyday access to digital tools can create ‘digital divides’ at both local and global scales, while the diverse application of digital technologies has influenced a wide range of cultural practices across the world. These may be mundane, creative, ethically problematic, violent, innovative – sometimes many of these words at once, and others besides.

This centrality of the digital to today’s geographical praxis has been illustrated evocatively by Ash, Kitchin and Leszczynski (2016), who have charted the current ‘digital turn’ as one provoked by engagement with geographies through the digital, geographies produced by the digital, and geographies of the digital. With this same broad scope, we invite proposals for digital shorts (videos summarising research in 2-5 minutes) that engage with a range of everyday geographies through, produced by, and of the digital.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

·  Research methods involving digital technology

·  Creative practices using digital technology

·  Digital infrastructures

·  Regional digital geographies – particularly perspectives from the Global South

·  Forms of digital labour

·  Digital technologies, health and wellbeing

·  Digital arts and entertainment

·  Digital access and digital divides

·  Social media and sharing (dis)information online

·  Forms of digital mapping

The digital shorts will be pre-recorded by participants and then watched live on Zoom during the session, followed by questions and discussion. The format of the discussion will be decided once we have received submissions.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Jack Lowe (jack.lowe.2017@rhul.ac.uk) and Daisy Curtis (d.curtis@exeter.ac.uk) by 5^th March 2021.