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Please find below a call for papers for the RGS-IBG conference in London,
2017. Apologies for cross-posting.



*Organisers*: Andrew Lapworth, Thomas Keating, Nina Williams



*Geography’s Technology: Conceptualising technology, technics and the
technological*

Geographers have long explored the ways technologies reconfigure the
production and experience of time and space. In doing so, notions of
‘technology’ or the ‘technological’ have been posited – though often
implicitly – in terms of the materialities of hardware and software
infrastructures, cyber- and virtual spaces, cloud computing, smart cities,
and through associations with technics and affective externalisations of
space-time. And recently, turns to technological and digital geographies
have raised a number of important questions about the dangers of
decontextualizing geographical engagements with technology within a
singular category of 'the technological’ or 'the digital’. Yet there has
been surprisingly little attention to how and whether technology explicitly
provides a conceptual basis to contextualise and invigorate geographical
research. However, beyond geography, philosophical and theoretical writings
have done much to highlight the shortcomings of a cultural theory that
subordinates or ignores notions of the technological. In such work,
technological processes and objects have been variously conceptualised both
in providing the basis for an entire new technical culture (Simondon,
forthcoming 2017), and in discussing how technologies of consumer
capitalism separate the subject from alternative circuits of knowledge and
desire (Stiegler, 2014; Lazzarato, 2014).

This session explores technology, technics and the technological as
concepts for geographical thought and research. We welcome contributions
intersecting theoretical, methodological, and philosophical questions.
These might include, but are by no means limited to, the following:


   - The promises and problems with technology as a concept for approaching
   questions of ethical and political significance
   - Critical examinations of technological processes and/or objects for
   geographical research
   - Different theories and concepts of technology, technics, and the
   technological as they are configured in the work of certain philosophers
   (e.g. Simondon, Stiegler, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Heidegger, Nancy)
   - Conceptually explicit approaches to technology for researching affect,
   nonrepresentational and creative geographies
   - Political economic analyses of technology, capitalism and the
   production of desire and subjectivity
   - Theoretical expositions of ideas such as subjectivation, technical
   mentalities, (dis)individuation, ontogenesis, the transindividual, tertiary
   retention, ecologies and geologies of media, modulation, control societies,
   dividual, machinism etc.

Please send abstracts (200 words) to Andrew Lapworth (
[log in to unmask]), Thomas Keating ([log in to unmask]),
Nina Williams ([log in to unmask]) by Monday 13th February 2017.



*References*

Lazzarato, M. (2014) *Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of
Subjectivity*, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e).

Simondon, G. (forthcoming, 2017) *On The Mode of Existence of Technical
Objects*, Minneapolis, Univocal.

Stiegler, B. (2014) *Re-Enchantment of the World: The value of the human
spirit vs. industrial populism*, Arthur, T. (trans.), Bloomsbury, London.



-- 

Tom Keating

Human Geography PhD Student
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
University Road
Bristol
BS8 1SS