New deadline, 2nd CFP: Re-spatializing Digital Labor (AAG 2021)

[ryan burns]

Dear colleagues,

Is this list being used any more? I hope so! We've extended the deadline to submit for our session on digital labor, following the AAG's extension. We will accept abstracts until November 12th. 

Re-spatializing Digital Labor

Organizers: Ryan Burns and Luke Bergmann

Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Seattle, WA, April 7-11, 2021

It is now an urgent moment for geographers to revisit how we think of the spaces of digital labor. By now, the platforms mediating and organizing work are well-known, and their implications increasingly theorized. UberEats, Lyft, Didi Chuxing, and Fiverr scaffold the gig economy wherein workers perform ad hoc jobs delegated through the platform; Yelp, Amazon, Baidu, and OpenStreetMap coordinate volunteered data production; and tech workers for major corporations like Google, Apple, Tesla, and Alibaba reshape regional political-economies. The geographies of this digital labor are critical to understanding its social, political, and economic implications, but scholars have primarily made sense of its geographies by engaging narrow conceptions of "space" and "labor" that obscure important relations and processes. Digital labor is often understood to occur within Euclidean geometries, under the premise of remuneration, and through Marxian conceptions of value. At the same time, digital labor discussions often under-theorize immaterial and affective labor, attentional economies, and moral economies. A more planetary view of digital labour would further draw out its uneven geographies -- with geopolitical implications -- and emphasize new empirical imperatives such as diversifying case studies or mobilizing comparative approaches. In short, broadening the purview of what digital labor is and where it happens can challenge some of the conceptual framings that have driven digital labor studies to date.

This session seeks to rethink the spatial frameworks through which geographers grasp work conducted in and through the digital. In turn, we hope to reclaim many forms of (digital) work whose spatialities have occluded them from our attention. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions from scholars looking broadly at the intersections of space, labor, and the digital, and their combined social, political, and economic implications. Themes of submissions could relate, but not be limited, to:

  -Relational, representational, networked, hybrid, or topological spaces of digital labor

  -Immaterial digital labor of affects, emotions, and "experiences"

  -Spaces of/in/for/through digital social reproduction

  -(Re)visualizing non-Euclidean geometries of digital labor

  -Moral economies producing spaces for digital labor and its commodification

  -Attentional economies and their spatialities, political-economies, and epistemological framings

  -Automation of digital labor: its spatial technologies, socio-political technologies, and the digital-material spaces for their manifestations

  -Valorized practices of non-work, like games, CAPTCHA, information search, play, and communication

  -Using digital labor to question static regional-geographic categories like "Global South" and "territory"

To be considered for inclusion in this session, please email your abstract of 250 words to ryan....@ucalgary.ca and luke.b...@ubc.ca by November 12, 2020. Please note that the deadline for registering and submitting your abstract in the AAG system is November 19th, 2020.

Best,
Ryan and Luke

--

Ryan Burns, PhD

Department of Geography

University of Calgary

http://burnsr77.github.io