CFPs for AAG 2014 Meeting in Tampa

Though the deadline for abstracts for the 2014 Meetings of the Association of American Geographers isn't until December this year, we thought we'd get a jump on things and get our sessions organized early. Below are CFPs for two Floatingsheep-organized sessions, one by Mark and Matt on data shadows and another by Taylor on smart cities.

1) CFP: Data Shadows and Urban Augmented Realities  

Most parts of our urban areas have become both digitally connected and represented by digitalized information. Digital layers of geographic information (commonly referred to as "augmented reality" by computer scientists) can take myriad forms. The most visible of which are probably the digital maps that many people use to navigate through cities. Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Apple, OpenStreetMap, Baidu, and many other companies and organisations all host publicly accessible platforms that partially reflect parts of our world. These services also become the platform for an almost unimaginable amount of additional content that both reflects the materiality of cities and augments it with additional content. This additional volunteered (and emitted) geographic information is comprised of photographs, blogs, tweets, social media checkins, webcams, videos, and encyclopedia articles. These layers of digital representations are then further reproduced and repurposed in the ways that they annotate the urban environment

The ambition of this session is to interrogate the increasing prevalence of both geographically referenced digital information and the code through which it is regulated. By asking what these augmented realities are, where they are and where they are not, and how they are brought into being, we can both unpack the language we use to speak about digital augmentations and explore the ways in which digital extensions of place are becoming increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies.

This session seeks two kinds of papers. First it aims to provide space for papers that explore the ways in which we should imagine, describe, critique, and even name, the digital and informational augmentations of our lives. Second, the session seeks papers that critically examine information geographies and augmented realities in specific contexts. How do informational augmentations impact on how we bring our worlds into being? What and where do they exclude? What narratives and discourses do they allow, and what do they conceal? How are they governed, regulated, and challenged?

Please submit abstracts of less than 250 words to MarkGraham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk) and Matthew Zook (zook@uky.edu) before October 31, 2013.  We will review abstracts in order to form cohesive sessions.

2) CFP: Thinking the ‘smart city’: power, politics and networked urbanism

The fact that cities are increasingly being augmented by digital hardware and software, producing massive amounts of data about urban processes, has been well documented in recent years. Discourses around so-called ‘smart cities’ and tend to position them as either a panacea, an entirely new conceptual and material breakthrough, or as a kind of dystopian imposition of technological rationality onto cities, leaving the precise nature of this social and spatial reorganization unclear. This session will engage these issues through empirically-focused, but conceptually-rich, research on how digital information and communication technologies do not simply connect cities to distanciated networks, but also drive new forms of urban development and new methods of civic exchange and political contention between municipalities and their residents. 

This session seeks papers that document and analyze how these new socio-technical systems are reconfiguring the relationships of urban governance, and how these systems remain embedded in longstanding social structures at both local and global scales. We are also interested in how geographers might offer a unique perspective on the processes and outcomes of smart urbanism, especially given the dominance of computer scientists and management consultants in the making of these projects. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

-- Policy mobilities and the ‘smart city’ model
-- Politics of urban data
-- Smart cities and technocratic planning
-- Smart cities as new urban entrepreneurial assemblages
-- Virtual spaces in the networked city
-- Role of transnational corporations in promoting smart city developments
-- Smart cities and urban environmental sustainability
-- Smart cities in the Global South
-- Cybernetics and the intellectual history of smart urbanism

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Alan Wiig (alanwiig@temple.edu) and Taylor Shelton (jshelton@clarku.edu) by October 15th to ensure sufficient time for review.