[Air-L] CFP, ISA 2016 - Mapping and Meaning Making in the Crowded Networks of the Global South

[Nicole Grove]

Dear All,


Below please find a CFP for a panel I'm organizing on
crowdmapping/crowdsourcing for the International Studies Association Annual
Conference, held in Atlanta this year from March 16-19, 2016.  Hoping it
will be of interest to some…


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CFP: Mapping and Meaning Making in the Crowded Networks of the Global South



Discourses and representations of the new ‘population bomb’ in the global
South are no longer only organized around 20th century concerns over birth
rates and limited planetary resources; through advances in software, mobile
technologies, and geo-spatial data collection they are now also about the
visualization and digital agency of bodies deemed threatening, menacing and
violent.  These new digital cartographies of danger are facilitated by the
move of crowdsourced data and funding models from commercial enterprises to
international organizations and NGOs addressing a vast range of issues,
from development and disaster management, to human security governance and
sexual violence.  The proliferating used of crowd-technologies raises
important questions about how are bodies, experiences, and publics are
materialized through algorithms, statistics and the assembly and
organization of data provided by these self-selecting communities.



This panel invites papers that critically reflect upon the ways in which
crowdsourcing is altering international politics and publics, and how
discourses about the assumed utility and democratizing potential of
crowdsourcing filters in and through claims about ‘Western’ technological
superiority, progress, innovation, precision, and market-based ethics.  For
instance, how does crowdsourcing and crowdmapping speak to the relationship
between space and calculation?  How might crowdsourcing produce racialized,
class-based, and gendered exclusions through the assembly and organization
of data in the interest of particular communities and security paradigms?
How is crowdsourced data collected and assembled to present particular
cartographic representations of politics ‘on the ground’, thus making
certain visualizations of political life possible?  And how might the
resynthesizing of data to demonstrate large quantities or patterns of
violence determine the shape and effects of particular kinds of
international interventions?  Submissions can address these issues or other
related



Please email abstracts of no more than 200 words to Nicole Grove at
nsgrove at hawaii.edu by May 23th.


____________________________________________


Nicole Sunday Grove, PhD

Assistant Professor of Political Science

University of Hawai'i at Manoa

2424 Maile Way, Room 608

Honolulu, HI 96822

Web: www.nsgrove.com

Email: nsgrove at hawaii.edu