[Air-L] CFP AAG2016: Queering code/space: difference, disorientation and the digital

[Daniel Cockayne]

We're extending the deadline for this call until Friday October 23rd. We've
had some great submissions so far, and we're looking for only one more
abstract - please contact us if you're interested!

*Queering code/space: difference, disorientation and the digital*
112th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers | San
Francisco, CA | March 29 – April 2, 2016

Organizers: Lizzie Richardson (University of Cambridge) and Daniel Cockayne
(University of Kentucky)

In this session we examine the relationship between digital or code/spaces
(Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) and the orientation of bodies in, towards, and
through these spaces. We are interested in how technologically attuned
bodies might be read, sorted, included in or excluded from spaces saturated
with digital technology (Ash 2013; Kinsley 2014; Rose 2015). We invite
contributors to consider how the ‘binary’ constitution of the digital might
intersect with forms of gendered performativity, viscosities of race and
productions of sexuality (Saldana 2007; Giffney and Hird 2008; Colebrook
2009; Braidotti 2013; Barad 2014; Johnston 2015). How are bodies orientated
through code/spaceand how does the body, embodiment, and subjectivity make
a difference to code/space?

The session builds on research exploring the ways that code/spaces remake
bodies through the imposition of various forms of discipline, and how
code/spaces
offer forms of biopolitical securitization to manage those bodies through
the production of machine-readable ‘appropriately orientated’ subjects via
technological mediation and profiling (Adey, 2008; Martin, 2010; Klauser,
Paasche and Söderström, 2014). Further, ‘online spaces’ offer particular
ways of knowing the world (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2011; 2012), notably
through online mapping technologies that produce selective ways of seeing
urban landscapes, often resulting in the digital (in)visibility of certain
individuals, populations, and spaces over others (Brown and Knopp, 2008).

Drawing too on scholarship that has examined how embodied difference shapes
and is shaped by processes of production (McDowell, 1991; 1997; 2015), the
session considers the practices and imaginaries that inform the making of
code/spaces. For example, high technology and digital media sectors have
been critiqued for valorising a masculine entrepreneurial narratives that
perpetuates a sexist and heteronormative work culture (Gill, 2002; Marwick,
2013; Massey, 1995) while maintaining allegedly ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’
principles of horizontality, collaboration, sharing and openness
(Ettlinger, 2014; Turner, 2004). How might a queering of code/space, or the
creation of queercode/spaces, challenge such normative orders of
production, potentially disorientating linear spatio-temporal narratives of
digital technology as the necessary progenitor of development and progress?

We want to explore the ambivalence and ambiguity of code/spaces as they
pertain to bodily difference and orientation: their constitution as both an
“informatics of domination” and an opportunity for cyborgian hybridity
(Haraway, 1991). Code/spaces involve gradations of experiences that cannot
be considered apolitical or gender neutral (Leszczynski and Elwood 2015),
presenting the possibility of both a society of control (Deleuze, 1992) and
the radical potential for a transformative disorientation of spaces and
bodies (Ahmed, 2006).

We invite speakers to think through the potential for code/spaces to both
encourage and curtail various forms of difference and (hetero)normativity,
through either *a queering of code/space*, or a *queer critique* of the
cultures of whiteness, maleness, and straightness thatcode/spaces might
perpetuate. Papers could explore but should not be limited to:
-   sorting, profiling and mapping/mediation of bodies through code/space
-   feminist, queer, anti-racist politics/activism and the digital
-   productions of difference and ‘digital divisions of labour’
-   processes of making code/spaces
-   theoretical and empirical explorations of ‘net neutrality’ and ‘digital
discrimination’
-   differentiated experiences of (digital) platforms, intermediaries and
‘sharing’
-   queering narratives/imaginaries of technological progress and disruption
-   gradations and differentiated experiences of connectivity
-   difference, performativity and anonymity in online contexts
-   the (dis)orientation of affective attunements (e.g. pleasure, desire,
pain, boredom, distraction) through the digital


For abstract submissions please email Lizzie Richardson (lizzie
.richardson at geog.cam.ac.uk) and Daniel Cockayne (daniel.cockayne at uky.edu)
before October 15th. The deadline to register abstracts for the conference
is October 29th.

*Selected References*
Ahmed S (2006) *Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others*.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Barad K (2015) TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political
Imaginings. *GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies* 21(2-3): 387-422.
Brown M and Knopp L (2008) Queering the map: the productive tensions of
colliding epistemologies. *Annals of the Association of American
Geographers* 98(1): 40-58.
Colebrook C (2009) Queer vitalism. *New Formations* 68(1): 77-92.
Elwood S and Leszczynski A (2011) Privacy, reconsidered: New
representations, data practices, and the geoweb. *Geoforum* 42(1): 6-15.
Ettlinger N (2014) The Openness Paradigm. *The New Left Review* 89: 89-100.
Haraway D (1991) *Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature*.
London: Routledge.
Giffney N and Hird M (2008) *Queering the Non/human, Queer Interventions*.
Hampshire: Ashgate.
Johnston L (2015) Gender and sexuality I: genderqueer geographies? *Progress
in Human Geography *OnlineFirst.
Kitchin R and Dodge M (2011) *Code/Space and Everyday Life*. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
McDowell L (2015) The Lives of Others: Body Work, the Production of
Difference, and Labor Geographies. *Economic Geography*, 91(1): 1-23.
Saldanha A (2007) *Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosities of
Race*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


-- 
Daniel Cockayne
PhD Candidate
Department of Geography
University of Kentucky
daniel.cockayne at uky.edu
@insistondoubt