Curating (in)security: Unsettling Geographies of Cyberspace
Call for Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-9, 2017)

In calling for the unsettling of current theorisation and practice, this session intends to initiate an exploration of the contributions geography can bring to cybersecurity and space. This is an attempt to move away from the dominant discourses around conflict and state prevalent in international relations, politics, computer science and security/war studies. As a collective, we believe geography can embrace alternative perspectives on cyber (in)securities that challenge the often masculinist and populist narratives of our daily lives. Thus far, there has been limited direct engagement with cybersecurity within geographical debates, apart from ‘cyberwar’ (Kaiser, 2015; Warf 2015), privacy (Amoore, 2014), or without recourse to examining this from the algorithmic or code perspective (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011; Crampton, 2015).

As geographers, we are ideally placed to question the discourses that drive the spatio-temporal challenges made manifest though cyber (in)securities in the early 21st century. This session attempts to provoke alternative ways we can engage and resist in the mediation of our collective technological encounters, exploring what a research agenda for geography in this field might look like, why should we get involved, and pushing questions in potentially unsettling directions. This session therefore seeks to explore the curative restrictions and potentials that exude from political engagement, commercial/economic interests, neoliberal control and statist interventions. The intention is not to reproduce existing modes of discourse, but to stimulate creative and radical enquiry, reclaiming curation from those in positions of power not only in terms of control, but by means of restorative invention.

We intend to have an interactive and lively discussion that we hope will be productive for a growing field of inquiry between disciplines. In light of this, potential contributions could combine or exceed those outlined below:

·         Algorithms and algorithmic governance
·         Alternative theories of space / cyberspace / cybersecurity
·         Artistic interventions / performances
·         Big data
·         Cyber / digital finance
·         Disciplinarity and knowledge production
·         Hackers and activism
·         Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
·         Materiality and virtuality
·         More-than-human agency
·         Networks
·         Power and resistance
·         Precarity, affect and vulnerability
·         Privacy and surveillance
·         Surveillance and encryption

Session Guide

To submit a contribution, please contact one of the panel organisers. Abstracts should be no longer than 200 words and should be submitted by October 7th 2016.

Panel Organisers
Andrew Dwyer (University of Oxford, UK)
Email: andrew.dwyer@cybersecurity.ox.ac.uk

Pip Thornton (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Email: pip.thornton.2013@live.rhul.ac.uk

In addition, if you wish to offer contributions that are not in a conventional lecture mode, please provide a brief description of what your output intends to be in addition to the 200 word abstract.