[Air-L] CFP AAG 19: Gendering the Smart City: Towards just and feminist urban futures

[Ryan Burns]

We welcome submissions for the 2019 American Association of Geographers meeting in Washington, DC April 3-7. This large interdisciplinary conference regularly attracts 6-8,000 attendees across a broad spectrum of disciplinary homes.

Gendering the Smart City: Towards just and feminist urban futures
Organisers: Ryan Burns, Ayona Datta, Nabeela Ahmed, Max Andrucki

The critical smart cities research agenda continues to develop insights into evolving relations between the digital, the urban, and socio-political process. Attention has broadened from taxonomies and ontological questions, to ideal-types and dominant epistemologies, to interrogating the “actually-existing smart city”. This trajectory has brought to the fore variegations and fissures in the politics of the smart city within which elements of social justice can appear, where smart city visions can adapt to and address low-tech infrastructures and where populations can contest the smart city’s often business-friendly, empiricist, governmentalizing, and neoliberal tendencies. Researchers have, indeed, recently illuminated smart city models that might contain necessary conditions for making strides toward more just, accessible and participatory urban life. However, in all this literature, researchers have neglected the underlying gendered dynamics of these processes.

Feminist and queer theory can provide productive new ways forward in critiquing smart cities agendas globally. Such theoretical frameworks can illuminate how bodies, subjectivities, labour, aspirations, anxieties, temporalities, in/visibilities, and social time are colonized and silenced in smart cities. From critical GIS to critical data studies, to digital geographies and through creative digital practices, researchers have leveraged these frameworks to show the uneven and gendered impacts that digital technologies have across a range of metrics of difference. Applying these frameworks to smart cities can illuminate the ways new forms of technological urbanism subtend socio-political inequalities, epistemological legitimacies, and sustained social injustices. Even further, doing so may deepen our understandings of how gender, sexuality, race, class and geopolitical power frame the imagination and governance of smart urban futures.

To this end, we welcome abstract submissions related to a range of related feminist, queer, and critical theories, that deepen our understanding of smart cities as theory, policy and lived practice. Such topics include, but are not limited to:
• Uneven gendered geographies of smart technologies
• Hetero-normativity of smart cities
• The colonization of bodies and time in smart cities
• Spaces and flows of gender and sexuality within the smart city
• Materiality and semiotics of gender, subjectivity, bodies in smart cities
• Gender and social justice in the smart city
• Intersectionality and the digital-urban
• Post-colonial and feminist urban futures in the smart city
• Situated knowledges and epistemologies in the smart city
Please submit paper abstracts to Ryan Burns (ryan.burns1 at ucalgary.ca<mailto:ryan.burns1 at ucalgary.ca>) and Ayona Datta (ayona.datta at kcl.ac.uk<mailto:ayona.datta at kcl.ac.uk>) by October 19th.

Cheers,
Ryan

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Ryan Burns, PhD
Department of Geography
Engaging Open Data Research
O'Brien Institute for Public Health
University of Calgary

http://burnsr77.github.io<http://burnsr77.github.io/>