Digital turn, digital geographies?

Abstract

Geography is in the midst of a digital turn. This turn is reflected in both geographic scholarship and praxis across sub-disciplines. We advance a threefold categorization of the intensifying relationship between geography and the digital, documenting geographies produced through, produced by, and of the digital. Instead of promoting a single theoretical framework for making sense of the digital or proclaiming the advent of we conclude by suggesting conceptual, -disciplines.

Feminist legal geographies of intimate-image sexual abuse: Using copyright logic to combat the unauthorized distribution of celebrity intimate images in cyberspaces

“…Nor is permanent retreat online a practical maneuver when our lives are so interlinked with online function. Ash, Kitchin, and Leszczynski (2018) describe how the omnipresence of the internet in the spaces and practices of everyday life fosters a certain dependency.…”

Attending to others: how digital technologies direct young people's nightlife

“…Our understanding of urban night-time activities is dominated by a strong emphasis on alcohol and drug use (Wilton and Moreno, 2012), including the nightliferelated online activities. A growing scholarship is concerned with the "intoxigenic digital spaces" (Griffiths and Casswell, 2010:525) produced through ICTs (Griffiths and Casswell, 2010;Brown and Gregg, 2012;Niland et al, 2014;Lyons et al, 2017); it draws on the "pathologizing of alcohol consumption" (Jayne et al, 2008:249) and predominant understandings of young people as vulnerable and in need of protection (Valentine, 1996;Aitken, 2001). Through the lens of Ahmed's phenomenological reading and reflections on orientation, I have found that young people orientate themselves in much broader ways towards ICTs.…”

“…The omnipresence of ICTs within young people's nightlife can encourage what Abbott-Chapman and Robertson (2009:247) call an "'always-on' imperative"; technologies reorientate young people, but these reorientations are at this moment in history sometimes still unfix and fragile. Geographers' discussions on the "digital turn" (Ash et al, 2016) have invoked fundamental questions of reorientation, rethinking, and reframing our being in the world. The moments of disorientation that I have discussed in these micro-geographies of young people's nightlife are vital to negotiating which directions we want to follow when ICTs co-constitute the spaces we inhabit.…”

Data Derives: Confronting Digital Geographic Information as Spectacle

“…Whether data sweat or data fumes (Thatcher 2014), Gregg correctly notes the need to move beyond a singular visual metaphor by which Big Data visualizations function. Something more is occurring with respect to the data created by and through the quotidian practices that have developed around smart-device use (Ash et al 2016.…”