2nd Call for Papers: Intimate technologies, bodies and space
Symposium on Bodies, cultures and societies, Human geographies panel at the Swiss Geoscience Meeting 2019, 23rd November 2019, Fribourg (CH).
Organisers: Dr. Elisabeth Militz (University of Berne) and Dr. Karine Duplan (University of Geneva)
Worldwide, the smartphone becomes a crucial device in people’s everyday life, a daily, intimate technology that deeply enmeshes emotions, bodies and spaces (Truong et al. 2019). Yet, globally circulating and seemingly accessible technologies and material devices such as smartphones constitute and shape people’s lives in different ways at different places. While, for example, new reproductive technologies ‘have brought “new freedoms” in the form of opportunities for some […] they have also brought “new dependencies”’ (Gupta 2006, 28) for others.
Geographic scholarship interested in the socio-economic, political and cultural entanglements of technologies, bodies and everyday spaces examines, for example, heterosexual men’s increasing demand for human-sized commodity-dolls made of various synthetic materials (Nast 2016) or to what extents the criminal case investigation technology ‘purple packet’ can ensure evidence-based prosecution in case of intimate partner violence (Cuomo 2017).
Technologies are, however, not only entangled with the most intimate scale of all geographies, the body. Relationships between technologies, bodies and spaces also unravel power relations as they demonstrate ways in which the same technologies, for example reproductive technologies in the global market of infertility treatments, imply different costs, legal statuses and access for and to people at different places (Schurr 2018). Likewise, geopolitical technologies in the field of state security can make visible the racialized, gendered and sexualized logics inherent to and constitutive of surveillance instruments, when, for example, iris recognition biometrics identify and target the individual body as the site of a potential threat to the nation state (Fluri 2014). At the same time, new technologies, such as digital technologies, constituting and influencing everyday experiences and world making also fundamentally transform and reorganize social, emotional and material spaces (Nash and Gorman-Murray 2019).
This session seeks to build on recent geographic scholarship on digitalization, materiality, emotion and affect to contribute to the critical exploration of the different ways in which technologies, intimacy, bodies and space interconnect. Methodologically and/or conceptually and empirically grounded papers are invited, but not limited, to address one or more of the following themes:
- Globalized technologies and intimate everyday lives
- Mobility, movement and travel of intimate technologies
- Racialized, gendered and sexualized logics of intimate technologies
- Geographies of social media
- Geographies of the smartphone and other smart technologies
- Geographies of intimate body technologies
- Geographies of digital lives
Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words (excl. references)) by 5th July 2019 via e-mail to Elisabeth Militz ([log in to unmask]) and Karine Duplan ([log in to unmask]). We will inform all people interested in the session by the end of July 2019 about the final selection of papers. Final abstracts need to be uploaded electronically by 30th August 2019 on the conference website using the abstract submission form (https://geoscience-meeting.ch/sgm2019/abstracts/abstract-submission-form/).
References:
Cuomo, Dana. 2017. ‘Calling 911: Intimate Partner Violence and Responsible Citizenship in a Neoliberal Era’. Social & Cultural Geography 0 (0): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1392590.
Fluri, Jennifer L. 2014. ‘States of (in)Security: Corporeal Geographies and the Elsewhere War’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (5): 795 – 814. https://doi.org/10.1068/d13004p.
Gupta, Jyotsna Agnihotri. 2006. ‘Towards Transnational Feminisms: Some Reflections and Concerns in Relation to the Globalization of Reproductive Technologies’. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (1): 23–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506806060004.
Nash, Catherine Jean, and Andrew Gorman-Murray, eds. 2019. The Geographies of Digital Sexuality. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nast, Heidi J. 2016. ‘Into the Arms of Dolls: Japan’s Declining Fertility Rates, the 1990s Financial Crisis and the (Maternal) Comforts of the Posthuman’. Social & Cultural Geography 0 (0): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1228112.
Schurr, Carolin. 2018. ‘The Baby Business Booms: Economic Geographies of Assisted Reproduction’. Geography Compass 12 (8): e12395. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12395.
Truong, Jasmine, Florian Labhart, Darshan Santani, Daniel Gatica‐Perez, Emmanuel Kuntsche, and Sara Landolt. 2019. ‘The Emotional Entanglements of Smartphones in the Field: On Emotional Discomfort, Power Relations, and Research Ethics’. Area, March. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12548.