CALL FOR PAPERS - Geographies of the body and technology
RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2017: ‘Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world’. London, 29th August – 1st September 2017
Session Convenors:
Lizzie Richardson, Durham University
Cordelia Freeman, University of Nottingham
Session Sponsor: Social & Cultural Geography Research Group
Research foregrounding the body has served to challenge and re-orientate geographical scholarship. Within political geography, a focus on bodies has opened up alternative sites and senses of the geopolitical (Martin 2010; Pain 2015; Smith et al 2016). In geographical research on economy, emphasis on the body has illustrated alternative locations and experiences of work (McDowell 2015), as well as providing a lens to view the circulations associated with everyday consumption practices, such as clothing and food (Crewe and Martin 2016; Slocum 2008). Broadly, in such scholarship the body poses questions of where the limits of ‘political’ and/or ‘economic’ activity are drawn; which movements across and within these boundaries count, and how such borders and their transgressions are rendered visible. These two strands of geographical thought on the body are influenced by (and in turn influence) cultural geographies that have stressed the relational emergence and leaky constitution of forms of embodiment (Bissell 2015; Colls and Fannin 2013). Therefore this ‘cultural’ scholarship on the body might be framed as beginning with a different question. Rather than asking how the body changes geographical understandings of geopolitical and economic space, the question becomes how does the body ‘itself’ change in relation to a variety of spaces and spatial senses.
In this session we seek to interrogate this problem of how bodies question geographies and how geographies challenge bodies through a focus on technology. This builds on research examining embodied spatial experience with technologies, perhaps through considering how (digital) technologies can be understood as (‘subject’-producing) ‘objects’ of study (Kinsley 2012; Ash 2013), but also accounts of technology as, or in interaction with, ‘backgrounds’ of everyday life, such as on transport, in the home, at work (Bissell 2010; Dodge and Kitchin 2009; Valentine and Hughes 2012, Richardson 2016). Building on this scholarship, we are interested in how geographies of the body and geographies of technology might intersect, and thus more broadly, what geographical accounts might bring to understandings of contemporary forms of social life with technologies.
We seek contributions that examine theoretical and/or empirical intersections between bodies and technologies across human geography, and that might engage with (but are not limited to) one or more of the following themes:
- The limits/extensions/(dis)abilities of bodies through/with technology
- Experiences and reconfigurations of intimacy, orientation and familiar location through/with technology
- The role of embodied experiences in definitions and accounts of technology/technological objects
- The sorts of spatial imaginaries suited to relationships between technologies and bodies (e.g. logics of borders, circulations, ecologies, networks)
- Performativity and technology (e.g. accounts of agency through processes of body and border co-production with technologies)
This session is being organised by Cordelia Freeman (University of Nottingham – [log in to unmask]) and Lizzie Richardson (Durham University – [log in to unmask]). Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words and full contact details to both organisers by 6th February 2017.
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