Augmented City

Call for papers – Digital geographies in the time of pandemic

DEADLINE FOR INITIAL DECLARATIONS EXTENDED TILL 24th MAY

Call for papers for Regional Development And Regional Policy (http://rr.home.amu.edu.pl/index_en.php) – 3rd quarter of 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is an undeniable tragedy for many people and a global drama taking place on many levels and on many geographical scales. For the academic world, it is also a period of surprising changes and challenges – in the areas of privacy, mobility, teaching and research. The daily negotiations of new spatial conditions of life is a struggle that absorbs large amounts of time and effort for many of us. At the same time however, I see in this situation the opportunity to look at it as a time of reflection and new possibilities of observing socio-spatial phenomena – also those previously unknown or hidden and now exposed or created by and through digital technologies. This call for papers aims to explore this possibility and invite you to think critically about one of the phenomena visibibly highlighted by social distance procedures – the ubiquity of digital platforms and technologies and their digital geographies.

Digital technologies entered the everyday world on an unprecedented scale during the pandemic, becoming an integral part of the daily life of many people – often in an forceful and uninvited manner. We now experience directly what Bernard Stiegler calls a pharmakon – a technology that is both a remedy for the current situation and a poison that brings new social challenges. But it can be seen as a unique opportunity to reflect on the way digital technologies shape, represent, create and mediate spaces and places. It is also an opportunity to take a new look at the digital geography of mobility and spatial behavior, work and leisure, countries and regions, social relations and class divisions, gender and race – and more. Finally, this could be a time to rethink the place of digital geography in social sciences – not in the context of the new subdiscipline, but in the spirit of the necessary presence of digital research problems in a broadly understood spatially oriented research (Ash et al., 2018).

Therefore I invite you all to send texts to a special issue of our journal. The range of themes include, but is not limited to:

  • space and place in a digitally mediated world
  • digital placemaking
  • locational data and society control mechanisms
  • digital economics and digital work in the world of isolation
  • issues of location privacy and freedom of movement
  • ethics of conducting digital research during social distancing
  • maps – cartographic representations of the global crisis
  • digital division and exclusion
  • smart cities – a technological mitigation of the pandemic

Due to the special nature of this issue, please send first a short pitch (just a short description) about your proposed paper to mrz@amu.edu.pl. After making sure it will fit the overall theme I will ask you to send the full text. I hope that this slightly different than usual form will allow us to create a coherent and intellectually stimulating collection of texts.

Deadlines and schedule:
by 24th May – sending initial declarations and acceptance
by 15th August – full texts
by 15th September – reviews
by 30th September– corrected texts

More about the journal: http://rr.home.amu.edu.pl/index_en.php

Editorial info:

  1. guidel lines for authors: http://rr.home.amu.edu.pl/wytyczneautor_en.php
  2. editorial questions should be directed to the Editorial Secretar – mgr Rafal Lemański rafale@amu.edu.pl
  3. we can accept texts in English and also in Polish!

Contact info:
Please send all questions and comments, as well as the initial declarations to my email address::mrz@amu.edu.pl

Michal Rzeszewski
Critical Geography Laboratory
Digital Geography and Geographic Information Systems Laboratory
Faculty of Human Geography and Planning , Adam Mickiewicz University

AR/VR equipment arrived

A first batch of equipment for our AR/VR lab has arrived. Headsets and smartphones will be used in field experiments we’ve planned for the future. In the meantime we have some software development to do 🙂

Two sets of Oculus Quest and 4 Google Pixels 3a – a small lab beginings