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Please note the extended deadline of 15th November 2013
Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 2014, Tampa, Florida, April 8-12th
Organised by Matt Finn (Durham University, UK)
Data-based living: peopling and placing ‘big data’
Much attention has been given to the rise of ‘big data’, as a sizable opportunity, ‘a gold rush’ (Peters, 2012), or a growing threat (DARPA, 2013). However, what might it mean to people and place accounts of ‘big data’ and to do so at the scale of the human and in the timeframe of the everyday? Whether in education, healthcare, insurance, scientific research, shopping, policing, social media, fire and rescue services, or border control, the ubiquity of data and increasingly their purposive uses are reshaping various institutions and people’s lived experiences. But how do people come to know and interact with their various ‘data doubles’ (Clarke, 1994; Haggerty and Ericson, 2000)? What lives are being made possible by these data and what is constrained? How to people attempt to manage, contest or care for data and their effects?
Empirical and theoretical papers are welcomed which explore the following themes:
· The places and politics of data
· Subjectivity, the human and data doubles
· Interfaces and the intimate
· Data, affects and emotions
· Institutional change in relation to data
· Resistances to data-based living
· Critically (re-)conceptualising ‘big data’
· Data and futures
· Care for the life of data: as institutions, individuals, governments, families and so on
Abstracts with expansive interpretations of these topics and themes and in diverse contexts are welcome.
Please send proposed titles and abstracts of up to 250 words to Matt Finn ([log in to unmask]) by Friday 15th November 2013.
Clarke, R., (1994), “The digital persona and its application to data surveillance”, The Information Society: An International Journal, 10 (2): 77-92
DARPA. (2013). Defense Against National Vulnerabilities in Public Data. Available: http://www.zyn.com/sbir/sbres/sbir/dod/darpa/darpasb133-002.htm. Last accessed 21st October 2013.
Haggerty, K. D. and Ericson, R. V., (2000), “The surveillant assemblage”, British Journal of Sociology, 51 (4): 605–622
Peters, B. (2012). The Big Data Gold Rush. Available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/bradpeters/2012/06/21/the-big-data-gold-rush/. Last accessed 21st October 2013.
Matt Finn
PhD Student
Department of Geography, Durham University