Please see below our final call for papers for the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2022: "Digital enclosures: governance technology and infrastructure in the South". Please send abstracts of maximum 250 words to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by Wednesday 23rd March 2022.

Digital Enclosures: governance, technology and infrastructure in the South  

This session examines the deployment of digital governance technologies in the Global South, with a particular interest in how data-systems, devices, platforms and digital infrastructures are shaping new forms of statecraft and collective politics. Recent scholarship has usefully drawn attention to the ‘digital turn’ (Datta 2018) in the South, sharpening our focus on forms of digital citizenship, civil society and policy emerging from the southern ‘smart’ city (Datta 2019; Guma 2019; Irazábal, C. and Jirón 2021). 

In this session we seek to build upon this existing research, by exploring the technological and infrastructural practices powering digital geographies in the South. First, we are interested in how logics of calculation, simplification and aggregation, enacted by new governance technologies and data-systems are producing novel, often unstable, forms of property, governance, and personhood (Cowan 2021; Dattani 2019). Digital governance technologies in the South are frequently called upon under developmentalist narratives of ‘efficiency’ and ‘participation’ to reform post-colonial bureaucratic systems, more efficiently delineate registers of identity, property, labour and sociality; and remedy disorderly relations of post-colonial ‘political society’ (Chatterjee 2004). These registers seek to render complex social worlds as stable and measurable, in order to enable quiet discipline, and distribute access to state and private sector services in ways that produce differentiated ‘resolutions’ of personhood (Singh and Jackson 2021). In this session we are interested in the calculative and abstractive practices deployed by digital governance technologies and infrastructures, and the ways state actors and subjects wrestle with these infrastructural practices. We seek to explore the kinds of power and conflict that cascade from the epistemologies of digital governance infrastructure. 

Second then, we are interested in how digital systems are designed and performed in ways that enable certain kinds of market and political action, increasingly tied to privatised governance, capital accumulation and authoritarian nationalism (Chopra 2008). Digital infrastructures and data-systems are not neutral arbiters of an inert social and material world. Not only are these systems designed to reify particular kinds of state authority, they are consistently deployed to facilitate more manageable, entrepreneurial citizens and more fungible, sensible commodities (Dattani 2019). And yet, digital infrastructures frequently fail, are suspended, hacked and rewired in ways that frustrate this recalcitrant techno-utopian capitalist vision (Leszczynski 2020). This session is interested in exploring the new political geographies enabled and sometimes frustrated by digital infrastructures.

Finally, we are interested in how these infrastructures are wired into and mediative of contested earthbound and analogue political geographies. Emerging digital governance technologies not only graft onto historic material infrastructures, they rely upon the labours of different stakeholders that shape the distribution, practice and reach of these infrastructures. These include bureaucrats, engineers, computer-operators and service users who are each embedded in institutions and socio-political contexts. The entanglement of digital and analogue technologies, human and automated labours, open up new spaces for political deliberation, popular claim-making and contestation and can fundamentally alter state-citizen relations.  Paying attention to the entanglement of infrastructural practices composed through devices, switches and screens, and practiced by clerks and engineers  , this session aims to explore the political, ethical and social dilemmas that cascade from digitised governance infrastructures (Mattern 2021). 

In the session we seek to bring together work on digital geographies, postcolonial geography, science and technology studies, and digital anthropology, to explore the social and material life of digital governance infrastructures.

Possible contributions may speak to: 
•	State identification systems
•	PropTech (digitised titling; blockchain; drone surveys asset-management platforms) 
•	Fintech(e.g. payment systems, blockchain)
•	COVID-technologies
•	Healthtech 
•	Good governance and bureaucratic reform
•	Migration and bordering technologies
•	Digital-analogue data systems
•	Policing and Surveillance systems
•	Green and carbontech

Please send abstracts of maximum 250 words to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by Wednesday 23 March 2022.

Works cited
Amoore, L., 2020. Cloud ethics. Duke University Press.
Chopra, R., 2008. Technology and nationalism in India: Cultural negotiations from colonialism to cyberspace. Cambria Press.
Cowan, T., 2021. Uncertain grounds: Cartographic negotiation and digitized property on the urban frontier. International journal of urban and regional research, 45(3), pp.442-457.
Datta, A., 2018. The digital turn in postcolonial urbanism: Smart citizenship in the making of India's 100 smart cities. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43(3), pp.405-419.
Datta, A., 2019. Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India’s smart urban age. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(3), pp.393-410.
Dattani, K., 2020. “Governtrepreneurism” for good governance: The case of Aadhaar and the India Stack. Area, 52(2), pp.411-419.
Guma, P.K., 2019. Smart urbanism? ICTs for water and electricity supply in Nairobi. Urban studies, 56(11), pp.2333-2352.
Irazábal, C. and Jirón, P., 2021. Latin American smart cities: Between worlding infatuation and crawling provincialising. Urban Studies, 58(3), pp.507-534.
Leszczynski, A., 2020. Glitchy vignettes of platform urbanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(2), pp.189-208.
Mattern, S., 2021. A city is not a computer: Other urban intelligences (Vol. 2). Princeton University Press.
Singh, R. and Jackson, S., 2021. Seeing Like an Infrastructure: Low-resolution Citizens and the Aadhaar Identification Project. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), pp.1-26.

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