CFP: Political Economies of Geolocation
American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting
3-7 April 2019, Washington, DC
Organizers:
Agnieszka Leszczynski, Western University
Will Payne, University of California, Berkeley
With sponsorship from:
Digital Geographies Specialty Group, Geographic Information Systems and Science Specialty Group, Economic Geography Specialty Group
Digital location - or ‘geolocation’ - is centrally important to the genesis and acceleration of the contemporary platform economy. Location-based services, location data, and location-enabled devices have given rise to a trillion-dollar industry globally (Henttu et al. 2012). A wide variety of venture capital-backed technology firms, from ride-sharing services like Uber to short-term accommodation platform Airbnb, depend on locational data and digital mapping for their manifold logistical operations, user interfaces, and advertising partnerships. Digital location affordances and spatial big data underwrite place-based review and recommendation platforms like Yelp and Foursquare (Payne 2018), the users of which produce reams of valuable geocoded content marketable to third-party platform developers and services. Elsewhere, speculative technologies like self-driving cars and increasingly precise forms of automated transportation and logistics technologies depend on ever more complex mapping practices (Mattern 2017).
While the political economies of geolocation and locational technologies are frequently identified as a priority for research, and locative technologies figure prominently in the flurry of activities crystallizing around an emergent ‘platform urbanism’ (Barns 2017), the ways that digital platforms’ affordances and business models are underwritten by geolocation have largely escaped scholarly attention. In this session, we invite papers that engage the intersections of geolocation, digital location technologies, and the platform economy. We welcome submissions that advance empirical, theoretical, historical, and experimental interventions that explore topics including, but not limited to:
• digital location data markets, financialization, and venture capital
• typologies and ecologies of geolocation apps & platforms , tech hubs, and startups
• histories, genealogies, and political economic analyses of location platforms, geolocation, and platforms
• geolocation and platform urbanism
• inequalities and exclusions in locational data economies
• digital location and ‘smart’ systems
Please submit abstracts to Agnieszka Leszczynski ([log in to unmask]) and Will Payne ([log in to unmask]) by October 20th. We will aim to respond to authors regarding their submissions by November 2nd.
References:
• Barns, Sarah. "FCJ-214 Visions of Urban Informatics: From Proximate Futures to Data-Driven Urbanism." The Fibreculture Journal 29: Computing the City. DOI: 10.15307/fcj.29.204.2017
• Henttu H, Izaret JM & Potere D (2012) Geospatial Services: A $1.6 Trillion Growth Engine for the U.S. Economy. The Boston Consulting Group. https://www.bcg.com/documents/file109372.pdf
• Mattern, Shannon. "Mapping’s Intelligent Agents." Places Journal (2017). https://placesjournal.org/article/mappings-intelligent-agents/
• Payne W (2018) "Crawling the City." Logic 05 (2018). https://logicmag.io/04-crawling-the-city/
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