Digital Geographies and the City: Methodologies of Hope Public Lecture by Professor Sarah Elwood, 23/24 Senior Global Fellow

About
In many places, digitally-mediated urbanism is ubiquitous, violent and unequal, as techno capitalist development processes and the platformization of everyday life produce racialized removal, surveillance, impoverishment, illegalization, even premature death – structural harms for which critical social science research has a well-developed conceptual-epistemological apparatus. Here, I make the case for an intentional turn toward methodologies of hope, a re-orientation toward apprehending creative politics that advance sociospatial relations of emplacement, collectivity, accountability, mutuality and thriving. I explore digital and emplaced tactics of mutual aid, direct action, and insurgent visual politics created by Stop the Sweeps, a horizontal network of local collectivities fighting public eviction of tent encampments of unsheltered people in cities and towns across the US. Hope is an animating force underlying these digital, material and ideological pathways toward staying put and living well in the city, yet ironically, hope is largely absent from the theoretical-epistemological fabric of ‘critical' social science research on digital cities. I argue for abundance-oriented analyses of the urban politics being forged by precarious communities and their allies, showing how this shift opens a vital window onto complex networks of solidarity and mutual support that are generating profound challenges to the circuits of harm that define life in the digital city.

Biography
Sarah Elwood is Professor and Chair of Geography at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on digital technologies, urban geographies, and creative politics forged by structurally disadvantaged peoples fighting for equity, self-determination and everyday thriving against steep odds, making contributions in relational poverty studies, urban and digital geographies, visual politics and mixed methods. She has studied the use of geographic information systems (GIS) by neighborhood groups fighting gentrification and racial dispossession, interactive online mapping by children whose spatial knowledge and agency often go unseen, digital apps used in low-barrier employment by unsheltered people living and working in public space, and visual poverty politics advanced by unsheltered people and their allies. She is past editor of Progress in Human Geography, co-author of Abolishing Poverty: Toward Pluriverse Politics and Futures (University of Georgia, 2023), and co-editor of Relational Poverty Politics (University of Georgia, 2018) and Qualitative GIS (Sage 2009).

All welcome. Refreshments served from 3.30 pm.