AAG 2013 CFP: Digital Divides, Digital Domination, and Digital Divisions of Labour

Call for papers: Digital Divides, Digital Domination, and Digital Divisions of Labour

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

9-13 April 2013

Los Angeles, CA

Organizers:

Monica Stephens, Department of Geography, Humboldt State University
Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Alan McConchie, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

The Web is massively uneven in terms of participation and representation. A small number of people are both powerful gatekeepers and produce the bulk of content, while the voices of the majority are largely left out. These phenomena are not unique to the geoweb; geographies of information and knowledge have always been uneven and have always been produced by (and have been producers of) power and privilege.

Although many speculated that the Internet would offer the potential for reconfigurations of these patterns, we increasingly see that digital divides often just reproduce, replicate, and reinforce earlier offline geographies. This unevenness increasingly matters as online information augments and is woven into everyday life.

However, the particular asymmetries in the representation and production of spatial information on the geoweb remain opaque and often hidden. This session will focus on the geographies, networks, and power relations of the digital inequalities of the geoweb. We hope to attract research at a range of scales (from the household to the national level) and contexts. Possible topics could include:

- Gatekeepers of digital information

- Demographic or geospatial inequalities

- Invisible exploitation of virtual labor

- Quantitative studies of geoweb representation

- Qualitative studies and virtual ethnographies

- Studies of normative assumptions built into geoweb tools and platforms

- Studies of racialized, gendered, or otherwise exclusionary geoweb spaces

- Differences in internet accessibility (i.e. mappings of broadband or wireless penetration)

Please email abstracts of 250 words to Mark Graham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk), Monica Stephens (Monica.Stephens@humboldt.edu), and Alan McConchie (alan.mcconchie@geog.ubc.ca) before October 10th, 2012.