[Air-L] 4S Open Panel CFP: (Im)material streams in the city: ecologies, economies, electrons

[ryan burns]

Dear colleagues,
Morgan Mouton and I welcome submissions for our 4S Open Panel
<https://www.4sonline.org/3-immaterial-streams-in-the-city-ecologies-economies-electrons/>
"(Im)material
streams in the city: ecologies, economies, electrons". The conference
<https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/> will be a hybrid online and in-person
in Toronto on October 6th-9th. To submit to this session by the 4S deadline
of *March 8*, please submit your abstract in the 4S submission site here
<https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/call-for-submissions/>. Please feel free
to reach out to me or Morgan if you have any questions.

*3. (Im)material streams in the city: ecologies, economies, electrons*

The deepening datafication of urban life has had profound impacts on the
organization, exploitation, and circulation of natural, social, economic,
and political resources. These impacts are often material—for example in
the extraction of minerals required to build digital devices or in the
siting of data centers—and often discursive—as digitization becomes a
rationale and logic guiding urbanization and new forms of data colonialism.
What underlies them all is a unique set of circulations, movement, flows,
and streams.

In particular, streams of data make the circulations visible and
governable. The datafication of urban services (e.g., energy,
transportation, water, and waste) allows for real-time, fine-grained
identification, quantification, and spatialization of all sorts of flows
running across urban space. This key idea behind “smart city” discourses
promises more control over urban space, urban metabolism, and streams of
privately-held revenue.

This panel explores how data capture, channel, and tame streams,
circulation, and flows across urban space. We are especially (but not
exclusively) interested in empirical and theoretical contributions from the
Global South, and studies attuned to human and non-human relations.

Questions
1. How has datafication, and the processes necessitating, facilitating, and
emanating from it, transformed the ecologies and resources subtending urban
space and urbanization?
2. How are flows initiated, maintained, and terminated for particular
political and economic interests?
3. How do digital and analog urban infrastructures slow, accelerate, or
direct these flows?
4. What sorts of knowledges and epistemologies are possible within this
milieu, and how can we politicize them?

Contact: ryan.burns1 at ucalgary.ca, morgan.mouton at u-pem.fr

Keywords: Datafication, circulation, urban studies, capitalism, political
ecology

Best,
Ryan Burns


-- 
Ryan Burns, PhD
Department of Geography
O'Brien Institute for Public Health
University of Calgary
Book Review Editor, *The Canadian Geographer*
Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley

http://burnsr77.github.io