[Commlist] CFP for digital geographies 2025 Data Voids

CFP for digital geographies 2025, Lisbon November 4-5


*Data Voids: Understanding Digital Geographies of the Built Environment 
through Negativity and Refusal*

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Emerging work in cultural geography has called on researchers to 
consider the (im)potential of ‘negative’ spaces and affects, asking what 
can be done with voids, limits and (in)capacities of different kinds 
(e.g. Bissell et al, 2021). Meanwhile, across media and cultural 
studies, critical data studies and feminist and political geography 
there is growing attention to the possibilities of refusal (e.g. James 
et al., 2023), particularly refusal as a collective and generative 
response to datafied systems. Both bodies of work are concerned with 
gaps, absences, silences and negation, though with varied foci and 
orientations toward action.


Our session seeks to bring these literatures into conversation, with a 
particular focus on digital data and the built environment.


The governance of built environments is increasingly informed and 
narrated through digital data – from ‘evidence-based’ planning, to the 
modelling of land/housing markets, and uses of ‘proptech’ to facilitate 
investment or discipline tenants, data seem almost as foundational as 
bricks and mortar. Yet such data are often characterised by absences, 
gaps and silences. Such absences prompt initiatives to fix, ‘free’ 
and/or repurpose the data in order to enhance access and transparency. 
However, recent work problematises transparency as a universal response 
to data-driven systems, pointing to refusal and data justice as 
approaches pursuing a structural shift relative to data harms.

The session will seek theoretical and empirical contributions pertaining 
to questions including, but not limited to:


·What might an attention to data voids from the perspective of negative 
geographies and refusal illuminate?

·How do absences of data shape the built environment?

·How do acts of refusal in the face of data-driven governance generate 
meaningful political and spatial alternatives?

·How might methodological approaches to data be developed or reconceived 
through working with refusal and negativity?

·How do we reckon with refusal alongside the politics of data suppression?

·How do we register what or who is left absent (unbuilt, unseen or 
unheard) by/through data in its shaping of built spaces?

Papers from this session will be considered for a potential Special 
Issue in a relevant journal.

Submit abstracts (max 250 words) by *April 30, 2025* _here 
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfA3KwwzulWPBEubfIyP3ZAsmeGN8KXebDhAoWborY-eulusQ/viewform>_, 
selecting Special Session 8.

More information about the conference can be found _here 
<https://ceg.igot.ulisboa.pt/digitalgeographies/>_.


Notifications of acceptance will be sent by *May 15, 2025*.

Session Organisers:

Danielle Hynes & Samuel Mutter (National University of Ireland, Maynooth 
- _Data Stories <https://datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie/>_project)


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