Geographies of science and technology 1: Boundaries and crossings

Abstract

In a world of accelerating environmental crises, global pandemics and seemingly unstoppable datafication of anything that moves, thinks or feels, the politics of science and technology are pervasive. In this first of three progress reports on the geographies of science and technology, I home in on some definitional questions which an account of anything like a new or emerging subfield must necessarily concern itself. I examine how geographers have addressed the spatial effects of the making and unmaking of boundaries between science, technology and their various outsides. While work on historical and contemporary geographies of technoscience has often pulled in slightly different directions, I identify some promising convergences around questions of political economy and on the topic of scale as an emergent property of technoscientific practices. New attention is also falling on the spatial practices through which technoscience gets plugged into wider worlds, such as politics and policymaking, while geographers have also been busy disrupting, in a more experimental mode, conventional boundaries and hierarchies of technoscientific practice. Finally, the report examines recent and welcome efforts to convene new conversations around the geography of technology but cautions against the potential seduction of the new, the innovative and the ‘disruptive’. Important recent work in cultural geography has purposively unsettled assumed hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ tech, new and old, and suggests that any nascent subfield of ‘geography of technology’ needs to reflexively attend to how boundaries get drawn around ‘technology’, and with what effects.

Intimate technologies: Towards a feminist perspective on geographies of technoscience

“…The study of technology has been ‘a characteristic of geography throughout much of its disciplinary history’ (Dixon and Whitehead, 2008: 603). The first progress report on geographies of science and technology shows that geography and technology studies have emerged as a lively field of research (Mahony, 2021). This scholarship has considered interactions between technology and space, including geographic information systems and spatial knowledge (Bagheri, 2020; Kwan, 2007; Pavlovskaya, 2016; Schuurman, 2002; Whitesell and Faria, 2020), interrogations of smart city concepts and platform urbanism (Bauriedl and Strüver, 2020; Datta, 2018; Leszczynski, 2020a; Rose et al, 2021), the global distribution of information and communication technology, the digital divide of an uneven, digitally informed development (Ash et al, 2016; Kleine, 2013; Kleine and Unwin, 2009), and networks of techno-political infrastructures (Barry, 2013; Calzada, 2018; Pilo, 2019).…”

Research progress and prospects of digital restructuring of global-local interactions

“…的表现与演化机制， 空间性被不断生产和再生产 [5] ， 地理学的空间观受到挑战。Ash 等 [6] 性趋同等极端的全球主义式论调， 到 90 年代末关于 流空间与场所空间交互的观点 [7] ， 地理学者对数字 化影响下的空间认识不再局限于探讨物理距离的 重要性， 而是倾向于辩证地分析全球力量与国家、 地方力量的交互作用 [8] 。同时， 为了界定数字化影 响下的空间性， 有学者提出赛博空间(cyberspace) [9] 、 代码/混合空间(code/hybrid spaces) [10] 、 网络空间(network space) [7] 等概念， 认为信息化催生了一种基于 经验的虚拟空间， 并将原本独立的实体相互联系 起来。 进入 21 世纪之后， 一些学者对上述抽象的空间 认识进行了批判。一方面， 上述概念定义了全新 的、 无位置的、 非物质的空间， 割裂了虚拟空间与 实体空间的界限， 掩盖了二者相互作用的复杂关 系 [11] 。事实上， 数字化已经深刻交织在日常生活和 经济实践中， 虚拟空间与物理空间不断融合， 线上 与线下空间日益重叠， 逐渐打破了传统的二元空间 性 [4] 。基于此， 新的理论认识被不断提出， 如数字场 所(digiplace) [12] 、 网络场所(net locality) [13] 、 中介空间 性(mediated spatiality) [14] 治、 社会和历史等地理环境之间的关系 [15][16][17] 。这些 研究表明， 数字化的空间影响仍然具有显著的非均 衡性， 在多尺度空间上呈现出核心-边缘格局 [18][19] 略、 过程或模式 [1,6,20] 。 由于信息技术的不断发展， 学者们对数字化的 理解也在不断发生变化。最初， 数字化更多地被限 定在以信息和通信技术、 硬件设施或数字计算等物 理集合为核心的技术范畴之内。在传统的全球生 产与贸易研究中， 数字化相关要素被移植到各个生 产环节， 成为提高生产效率、 促进价值获取的重要 工具手段 [21] 。这种认识建立在技术中心主义的基 础之上， 数字化处于被动或中立的状态， 并被排除 在社会关系建构之外。借鉴社会学中的社会技术 体系理论， 地理学者开始关注数字化的社会性和关 系性 [22][23][24] 。一些学者对技术中心导向的城市研究展 开了批判 [23][24][25] ， 认为技术的开发、 创新和应用是社会 建构的过程， 且根植于特定的地方经济、 制度、 文 化背景以及社会关系网络 [26] 。基于这种认识， 有学 者将数字技术纳入至全球生产的行动者关系网络 中 [1,22,27] ， 例如， Foster 等 [1]…”

Situating Data

“…For example, Mark Ward has studied the organizational and technical texts of the Nazi SS underpinning its genocidal project as boundary objects, which include "formatted documents, official stationery, preprinted forms, filing codes, organizational nomenclature and bureaucratic catchphrases" (2013, xv). In the field of critical sociology, the concepts have been deployed to study the impact of digitization and datafication on workers' digital labor (e.g., Zhao 2020), while in cultural geography, they are embraced to study the spatial distribution, appropriation, and situatedness of technologies (e.g., Mahony 2021).…”