Digital geographies, feminist relationality, Black and queer code studies: Thriving otherwise

Abstract

Digitality is deeply implicated in sociospatial processes of exclusion, adverse incorporation, impoverishment and enrichment. Theorizing digital practices of life and thriving is politically and epistemologically urgent, and more robustly intersectional theory in digital geographies scholarship offers crucial pathways. I argue for theorizing digital geographies at the intersection of feminist relationality and Black, queer and feminist code studies. I demonstrate these theoretical horizons through an analysis of ‘glitch politics’ that refuse normative digital-social-spatial relations of technocapitalist urban life, and catalyze sociospatial relations of thriving otherwise, drawing examples from digital practices of street newspapers sold by unsheltered people in cities worldwide.

Clashing cyphers, contagious content: The digital geopolitics of grime

“…Affective content is contagious content, meaning the content produced by grime artists provides unique insight into the ways in which "affect is central to an understanding of our information-and-image-based late capitalist culture" (Massumi, 2002, p. 27). In a more applied sense, this paper also demonstrates how grime artists use the digital tools at their disposal to overcome their once-marginal position in Britain, and thus responds to Elwood's (2020) recent call for digital geographies to more directly engage with issues of intersectionality.…”

“…Yet, the affectiveness of grime goes beyond representation and performativity; it emerges from the states of in‐betweenness that the digital domain gives rise to, and that grime artists actively reproduce by (de)territorialising the cypher. The digital geopolitics of grime can therefore be understood as a “digital practice of thriving” (Elwood, 2020, p. 2) that emerges from the digitally mediated lives of artists and audiences, the structural inequalities of inner‐city deprivation, and the ongoing need – and desire – to rework the boundaries of creative expression in response.…”

GIScience I: Social histories and disciplinary crucibles

“…These reports also represent the only authored by someone other than a white man after nearly 40 years of Progress in GIScience (see Table 1). Continuing today, Elwood (2020) charts and supports a series of escapes in GIScience (without naming ‘GIS’ as such); for instance, her invited Progress lecture at the 2019 AAG Meeting highlights a ‘thriving otherwise’ approach in digital geographies, ‘theorizing digital geographies at the intersection of feminist relational thinking and Black, queer/trans, and feminist code studies’.…”

Platform Urbanism: Technocapitalist Production of Private and Public Spaces

“…To date, there exist ample research on the dynamics of platform urbanism in North American cities (Elwood, 2020;Leszczynski, 2020). Research on both mobility platforms and care platforms has tended to focus on the North American urban context, although the latter also includes Asian, Australian and African cities (Flanagan, 2019;Hunt & Machingura, 2016;Kong & Woods, 2018;Strauss & Xu, 2018).…”