Conference of Irish Geographers 2015, Queens University Belfast, 21-24 May 2015
This session aims to think through the complex relationship between space and technology. The proliferation of smart phones and city-scale embedded devices is reshaping homes, work places and cities. Rather than focus explicitly on how technologies might autonomously and automatically produce such spaces, our focus is the broader imaginaries which pre-empt and prefigure sociotechnical systems. We are interested in submissions that explore how space is produced or performed through contested relationships between technologies, imaginaries and situated practices. This might mean, on the one hand, to approach technologies by reflecting on cultural representations or utopian visions of the future. On the other hand, imaginaries might be understood through the ways communities, social groups or initiatives think about already existing technologies. We are open to a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches.
Contributions may respond to various topics, including but not limited to urban planning, surveillance, emergency response, energy management, sustainable transportation or everyday consumption and mobility. The following questions might be addressed:
- what kinds of urban futures are being imagined and what are the technologies mobilised for such imaginaries?
- how are technologies evoked as a solution to contemporary problems or perceived threats?
- what space-times are evoked or rearranged?
- what forms of resistance to dominant visions are being practiced or displayed?
- how are politics articulated within utopian and dystopian imaginations?
- how are the coupling of bodies, technologies and data imagined, planned and enacted?
- how is human and nonhuman agency perceived and practiced in relation to technological imaginaries?
Potential contributors are free to contact us prior to submission of their abstract. Contact email: james.white.2014@nuim.ie.
Abstracts must be submitted online at the Conference of Irish Geographers website.
Deadline: March 20, 2015.