[Air-L] ** Digital\\Human\\Labour ** Call for papers at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting. April 5-9, 2017, Boston, USA

[Mark Graham]

*Digital \\ Human \\ Labour
<http://zerogeography.net/post/149997132008/digitalhumanlabour-call-for-papers-at-the>*

Organisers: Jim Thatcher <http://directory.tacoma.uw.edu/employee/jethatch>
 (Washington), Mark Graham <https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/mark-graham/>
 (Oxford), Gillian Rose <http://www.open.ac.uk/people/gr334> (Open
University)

The proposed Digital Geographies Working Group of the RGS/IBG and the
proposed Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the AAG would like to
invite submissions to a series of paper sessions and panels
<http://zerogeography.net/post/149997132008/digitalhumanlabour-call-for-papers-at-the>
for
the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston, USA.
Reflecting the shared interests of these groups, and their mutual desire to
facilitate conversations between a wide range of geographical scholarship,
this call is for papers exploring specifically the various intersections of
‘digital’ and ‘labour’ in diverse meanings of both.

We will convene a concluding panel session, and encourage interested
participants to submit abstracts for any of these three paper sessions:

*The human labour of digital work*
*Discussant: Mark Graham*

The spread of the internet to three and a half billion people around the
world has significant implications for the human labour. It is now
relatively straightforward to outsource business processes to anyone,
anywhere, that has a digital connection. This session aims to bring
together scholarship that explores the human labour of this digital work.
Who carries it out? How does it affect the livelihoods of workers? What
sorts of political and organisational governance regimes bring it into
being? And what are the ethical, spatial, social, and economic implications
of a world in which human labour is increasing disembedded into digital
networks?

*The digital labour of being human*
*Discussant: Gillian Rose*

Digital technologies are now embedded in many aspects of everyday life in
many places, mediating everyday experiences of embodiment, mobility, and
communication.  It is clear that many of these mediations are reproducing
existing ways and forms of ‘being human’, but it is also clear that new
forms of (post)humanities are emerging, co-produced with, for example, VR
headsets, big data, and social media platforms.  This session aims to bring
together scholarship that addresses these monadic emergences.  What new
forms of distributed agency, performative gestures and navigational
orientations could and should be mapped, and in what ways?  What are their
temporalities and spatialities, and what geometries of power and difference
do they enact?

*The algorithmic labour of being*
*Discussant: Jim Thatcher*

Alongside the rise in access to internet technologies and their everyday
usage, has come an entwined rise in the analysis and manipulation of
digital information through algorithms. Just as new technologies introduce
interfaces, mediations, and affordances to (re)produce representations of
self, so too do the algorithms which sort, select, and present information
constrain what can be done and known through the use of said devices.
Similarly, even as the very real geography of the labor of digital work
shifts and extends across the globe, algorithms increasingly insert
themselves betwixt and between laborers, customers, and corporate
interests, altering traditional employment relations through the mediation
of technology. Building from the themes of the previous two sessions, this
session aims to bring together research on the many ways in which
algorithms and quantification function in the world. Questions of interest
include, but are not limited to: What sorts of new spatial relations are
possible through the algorithmic mediation of labor relations? Where is the
work of algorithms done? What are the historical roots of this process?
What new forms of knowledge and power have been enabled (and constrained)
by these systems?

If you have any additional questions, please contact Jim Thatcher (
jethatch at uw.edu), Mark Graham (mark.graham at oii.ox.ac.uk) or Gillian Rose (
gillian.rose at open.ac.uk).

For consideration of inclusion, please submit abstract to jethatch at uw.edu
by October 15th, 2016.  Please format your abstract in a text file of no
more than 250 words, including a title, your name, institutional
affiliation and email address in the document.
------------------------------------------
Mark Graham

Professor of Internet Geography
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford

Faculty Fellow
The Alan Turing Institute

Research Affiliate
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford

Visiting Fellow
Department of Media and Communications
London School of Economics and Political Science

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