Geomedia 2023 International Conference

Digital Geographies of Hope

Tampere, Finland, 20-22 September 2023

In the current world of precarity, uncertainty and violence, digital media technologies and datafication have produced complex new forms of spatial and temporal connections, interactions and power dependencies. Digital media technologies are immersing in growing areas of urban environments, everyday practices and experience. Increasingly digital and data-driven media technologies are used to surveil, control, track, sensor, and manage everyday life and mobilities. New automated systems, from location tracking to facial recognition and language detection systems, have profoundly shaped migration and border practices. Data-driven systems of surveillance and automated decision-making have further enforced racialized inequalities, poverty categorizations, discrimination and algorithmic oppression.

At the same time, new avenues of hope arise in the everyday connections, intimacy, care and comfort. Digital media, as everyday infrastructure, may operate as a fragile bridge to sociality, imagination and joy, creating pathways to new forms of solidarity, resistance and witnessing. Digital technologies of community building, counter-mapping, artistic interventions and collective imagination explore original technologies to enhance both spatial and data justice. New intersectional and decolonial theorizations of digital geographies, datafication and AI are needed to provide critique as well as imaginations of alternatives to data universalism.

The 5th Geomedia conference explores Digital Geographies of Hope. We invite theoretical and empirical approaches to digital geographies. We encourage critical investigations that seek to identify hope and hopeful constellations in the current digitized world - related to imaginations and appropriations of different media in different places and spaces.

The term geomedia captures the conjuncture of mediated and spatial dimensions of the social world. The Geomedia conference, in turn, provides an interdisciplinary arena for research carried out at the crossroads of geography,communication, media, film and cultural studies. It also builds bridges to such fields as urban studies, rural studies, regional planning and tourism studies, media anthropology, critical data studies, STS, and gender, race and ethnicity research.

The theme will be addressed through invited keynote talks, a plenary panel and film screenings. Participants are also encouraged to submit proposals for paper sessions addressing the conference theme.

Keynote speakers:

The confirmed keynote speakers include:

Professor Sarah Elwood (University of Washington)
Associate Professor Sukhmani Khorana (Western Sydney University)
Professor Payal Arora (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Documentation from Digital Geographies of Hope 2023

Keynote lectures and the final plenary talk

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Selected photographs from the conference

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Dr. André Jansson, director of the Centre for Geomedia Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden, explains "Geomedia" and the theme of the conference

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“Utopia is one dimensional but Utopianism is anticipatory consciousness… for the next two days, we will explore geomedia constellations of hope,” Dr. Kaarina Nikunen, Professor, Communication and Media Research, Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University

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Dr. Karin Fast, associate professor in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, chairs the final plenary and gives her closing remarks at the 5th Geomedia Conference

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A panel discussion by Pablo Abend, Helena Atteneder, Hendrik Bender, Christoph Borbach, Max Kanderske and Karina Kirsten marked the end of the 5th Geomedia Conference

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Abstract submissions:

Geomedia 2023 welcomes proposals for individual papers as well as thematic panels in English through the conference submission system.

Conference submission system

Individual paper proposals: The authors submit abstracts of 250-300 words. Accepted papers are grouped by the organizers into sessions of 5 papers each according to the thematic fitting.

Thematic panel proposals: The panel chair submits a single pdf document consisting of 4 individual paper abstracts (200-250 words) along with a general panel presentation of 200-250 words.

Conference timeline

December 2022: Submission system opens
March 10th 2023: Deadline for thematic panel and individual paper proposals
May 12th 2023: Notes of acceptance and registration opens

Conference website

Digital Geographies of Hope

Contact

geomedia2023@tuni.fi

Organizers and venue:

The conference is hosted by the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication at Tampere University, Finland. It is organized in collaboration with the Centre for Geomedia Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden.

For the organizers:

Kaarina Nikunen, Professor of Media and Communication Research at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication, Tampere University, Finland

André Jansson, Professor in the Department of Geography, Media and Communication and Director of the Centre for Geomedia Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden

Cornelia Brantner, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Media and Communication and Coordinator of the Centre for Geomedia Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden

Local organizing committee:

Kaarina Nikunen, Asko Lehmuskallio, Anne Soronen, Saara Särmä, Sanna Valtonen and Kaisa Tiusanen