Practising geography in/with technical worlds

Abstract

Over the past decade, geographical scholarship has grown steadily enamoured with all things technical. In some ways, such a focus is an outflow of the recent philosophical turn towards critical realism, which has encouraged a keener eye on more-than-human worlds. It demands careful delineations and understandings of the multi-stranded relationships between humans, technical objects, organisms, energies, and artificial intelligences that exceed anthropocentric epistemologies. This commentary seeks to address the challenges of studying the ‘technical’ in relation to the futures of geographical thought and praxis by proposing three strategies that might be developed in geographical research. These are, namely, the acquisition of a stronger grasp of technoscience expertise, care in following non-human things over time, and openness to interdisciplinary research. As more geographers enter into the fold of investigating ‘technical’ things, developing these skills would be invaluable to producing innovative spatial knowledge about these cryptic worlds.

Situating and expanding the scope of dispositions towards automation

“…It requires a commitment to attune to the myriad agencies that impress upon automated systems, as well as a pursuit of flexible modes of engagement to capture them in the past, present, and future. As one of us has argued elsewhere, technoscience unfolds ‘as a dynamic skein of activities and sequences, rather than a time-limited snapshot of fixed relations’, having ‘no set paths as to what might happen, or how things might accrete’ (Lin, 2023: 3). This is exactly the kind of ambiguity and fraught relations that we had wished – albeit, it appears now, in very small part – to foreground through the idea of dispositions in design.…”