Call for papers: Digital Divides, Digital Domination, and Digital Divisions of Labour Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 9-13 April 2013 Los Angeles, CA
Organizers: Monica Stephens, Department of Geography, Humboldt State University Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford Alan McConchie, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia The Web is massively uneven in terms of participation and representation. A small number of people are both powerful gatekeepers and produce the bulk of content, while the voices of the majority are largely left out. These phenomena are not unique to the geoweb; geographies of information and knowledge have always been uneven and have always been produced by (and have been producers of) power and privilege. Although many speculated that the Internet would offer the potential for reconfigurations of these patterns, we increasingly see that digital divides often just reproduce, replicate, and reinforce earlier offline geographies. This unevenness increasingly matters as online information augments and is woven into everyday life. However, the particular asymmetries in the representation and production of spatial information on the geoweb remain opaque and often hidden. This session will focus on the geographies, networks, and power relations of the digital inequalities of the geoweb. We hope to attract research at a range of scales (from the household to the national level) and contexts. Possible topics could include: - Gatekeepers of digital information - Demographic or geospatial inequalities - Invisible exploitation of virtual labor - Quantitative studies of geoweb representation - Qualitative studies and virtual ethnographies - Studies of normative assumptions built into geoweb tools and platforms - Studies of racialized, gendered, or otherwise exclusionary geoweb spaces - Differences in internet accessibility (i.e. mappings of broadband or wireless penetration) Please email abstracts of 250 words to Monica (monica.steph...@humboldt.edu), Mark (mark.gra...@oii.ox.ac.uk), and Alan (alan.mcconc...@geog.ubc.ca) before October 10th, 2012. This session will be part of #GEO/CODE 2013: Geoweb, Big Data and Society organized by the New Mappings Collaboratory. ------------------------------------------ Mark Graham, Ph.D. Research Fellow Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford 1 St Giles Oxford OX1 3JS United Kingdom Telephone +44 (0) 1865 287 203 Fax +44 (0) 1865 287 211 www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/graham www.geospace.co.uk www.wikichains.org twitter.com/geoplace
