Dear Crit-geog members,
(with apologies for cross-posting)
We are pleased to share our programme for our conference *‘Cities, infrastructure and the digital turn in the postcolony’ from 27-28 June 2019 in King’s College London*: https://disconnectedinfrastructures.wordpress.com/2019-conference/conference-schedule/
You can register asap via the Eventbrite link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cities-infrastructures-and-the-digital-turn-in-the-postcolony-registration-62743189569
******
The ‘digital turn’ in urbanism (Ash, Kitchin, & Leszczynski, 2016) adds a new dimension to discussions around the role of infrastructure and how it shapes everyday life in the postcolonial city. The shift toward digitalisation of bureaucracy through e-governance; retrofitting ‘smart’ technologies into existing physical infrastructures of lighting, water, sanitation and public transport; and increasing ‘ease of doing business’ through digital communication systems (digital identification, virtual payment systems) and infrastructures (smartphones, fibre optic cables and cell-phone towers) is often critiqued as driven by the logics of surveillance and corporate capital. In post-colonial contexts, the digital urban turn can overlook underlying infrastructural deficits and reinforce existing barriers to accessing infrastructures among traditionally marginalised groups (Datta 2018) leading to the creation of ‘premium networked spaces’ and the splintering of cities (Graham and Marvin, 2001). On the one hand, while urban infrastructures are often reconfigured by state priorities (Easterling, 2014), it can simultaneously induce technological and economic path dependencies in urban municipalities (Datta 2018). This has been conceived as a form of ‘infrastructural violence’ – “processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection” through infrastructure (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012: 401).
In this interdisciplinary conference, we seek to critically explore the connections between cities, infrastructures and the ‘digital turn’ in the postcolony. We will consider the different ways in how these (dis)connections manifest themselves and are measured across different scales and spaces, and across different social affiliations and embodied geographies. We aim to further develop existing socio-technical and political ecology debates on infrastructure, by considering questions of how urban infrastructures can be gendered, relational and temporal (Starr, 1999; Simone, 2004) and how the postcolonial city in particular, undergoes, resists and responds to technological experiments in the digital urban age.
Best,
Nabeela
________________________
Dr. Nabeela Ahmed
Research Associate
British Academy GCRF - DIVAW
Department of Geography
King’s College London
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CRIT-GEOG-FORUM&A=1
|