[Air-L] CFP AAG 2021: Re-spatializing Digital Labor

[ryan burns]

*Re-spatializing Digital Labor*
Organizers: Ryan Burns and Luke Bergmann
Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Seattle, WA,
April 7-11, 2021

It is now an urgent moment for geographers to revisit how we think of the
spaces of digital labor. By now, the platforms mediating and organizing
work are well-known, and their implications increasingly theorized.
UberEats, Lyft, Didi Chuxing, and Fiverr scaffold the gig economy wherein
workers perform ad hoc jobs delegated through the platform; Yelp,
Amazon, Baidu, and OpenStreetMap coordinate volunteered data production;
and tech workers for major corporations like Google, Apple, Tesla, and
Alibaba reshape regional political-economies. The geographies of this
digital labor are critical to understanding its social, political, and
economic implications, but scholars have primarily made sense of its
geographies by engaging narrow conceptions of "space" and "labor" that
obscure important relations and processes. Digital labor is often
understood to occur within Euclidean geometries, under the premise of
remuneration, and through Marxian conceptions of value. At the same
time, digital labor discussions often under-theorize immaterial and
affective labor, attentional economies, and moral economies. A more
planetary view of digital labour would further draw out its uneven
geographies -- with geopolitical implications -- and emphasize new
empirical imperatives such as diversifying case studies or mobilizing
comparative approaches. In short, broadening the purview of what digital
labor is and where it happens can challenge some of the conceptual framings
that have driven digital labor studies to date.

This session seeks to rethink the spatial frameworks through which
geographers grasp work conducted in and through the digital. In turn, we
hope to reclaim many forms of (digital) work whose spatialities have
occluded them from our attention. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions
from scholars looking broadly at the intersections of space, labor, and the
digital, and their combined social, political, and economic implications.
Themes of submissions could relate, but not be limited, to:

  -Relational, representational, networked, hybrid, or topological spaces
of digital labor
  -Immaterial digital labor of affects, emotions, and "experiences"
  -Spaces of/in/for/through digital social reproduction
  -(Re)visualizing non-Euclidean geometries of digital labor
  -Moral economies producing spaces for digital labor and its
commodification
  -Attentional economies and their spatialities, political-economies, and
epistemological framings
  -Automation of digital labor: its spatial technologies, socio-political
technologies, and the digital-material spaces for their manifestations
  -Valorized practices of non-work, like games, CAPTCHA, information
search, play, and communication
  -Using digital labor to question static regional-geographic categories
like "Global South" and "territory"

To be considered for inclusion in this session, please email your abstract
of 250 words to ryan.burns1 at ucalgary.ca and luke.bergmann at ubc.ca by *October
19, 2020*. Please note that the deadline for registering and submitting
your abstract in the AAG system is October 29th, 2020.

Best,
Ryan and Luke

-- 
Ryan Burns, PhD
Department of Geography
Engaging Open Data Research
O'Brien Institute for Public Health
Book Review Editor, *The Canadian Geographer*
University of Calgary

http://burnsr77.github.io