[Air-L] CFP AAG 2017: Digital\\Human\\Labour

[Jim T]

*Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual
Meeting. April 5-9, 2017, Boston, MA*

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 for the 2017
meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston, MA.
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 workDiscussant: Mark Graham*
[image: image]

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 effect 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 humanDiscussant: Gillian Rose*
[image: image]

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?  What are their temporalities and
spatialities, and what hierarchies of power and difference do they enact?


*The algorithmic labour of beingDiscussant: Jim Thatcher*
[image: image]

Alongside the rise in access to internet technologies and the quotidian
uses of said technologies, 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.