The Digital Geography Research Group of Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG) invites submissions for its annual symposium 2025 on the theme "Global Digital Geographies: Digitalising the Territorial and Territorialising the Digital".
By global digital geographies, the organizers aim to foreground two interconnected dimensions of the global. First, they engage with the long-standing critique of the binary conception of territory and network in the context of globalization—a debate that has gained renewed urgency and complexity with the advent of digitalisation and information technology. Second, they envision this as a global platform for scholarly exchange, bringing together diverse perspectives and insights on these topics from different regions around the world.
This symposium aims to serve as a global platform for such exchanges, emphasizing the importance of scholarly dialogue across diverse parts of the world. The organizers invite papers that investigate the mutually constitutive processes of digitalising the territorial and territorializing the digital, as these unfold across different scales and are shaped by a variety of actors. Contributions are welcome on, but not limited to, the following themes:
· Digital sovereignty, cybersecurity, and data governance
· Digital technologies and their re-presentation of territories
· Digital infrastructures
· New patterns of territorial development (circulation, logistics, and enclosure ) shaped by digitalization
· Techno-nationalism and digital statecraft on all fronts, from the jurisdiction of data and digital infrastructure to citizen-subjects
· Ontological approaches to digital territories and (geo)politics
The following types of contributions to the symposium are sought:
· Individual Paper –please compose your abstracts of 250–300 words that outline the paper’s core arguments, methods, and contributions. Please include the paper title, author name(s), and affiliations.
· Practice-based Session – An opportunity to showcase innovative and alternative approaches. These may be interactive, skills-based, practical or workshop-type contributions.
· Pre-organised Panel/Session – Three to five individual papers speaking to a coherent theme concerning digital territories. Or combined Practice-based Sessions, run by three to six attendees.
· Digital shorts – digital shorts are short videos (between 2 and 5 minutes in length) that introduce, or summarise, an aspect of your research. Your recorded video could discuss:
o Recent research findings
o An emerging research idea or interest
o A new or upcoming research output, publication, creative work, etc.
o Research methodology
o Approaches to teaching
o Uses of digital technologies within academia
This format has been deliberately designed to require limited preparation, so is ideal for postgraduates, early career researchers, those with caring responsibilities, or other commitments. You can view examples of digital shorts on the DGRG YouTube channel. For accessibility purposes, please provide a transcript when submitting a digital short so that your video can be accurately subtitled.
Deadline for Abstracts/sessions/digital shorts: April 14 2025, Monday
Notification of Acceptance: April 21 2025, Monday
Symposium Date and Venue: 19-20 June 2025, online
Symposium Organising Committee of DGRG
June Wang, Tess Osborne, Sammia C Poveda Villalba, Adam Packer, Harrison Smith, Sam Kinsley, Olivia Fletcher
Submissions and Inquiries:
Please submit your abstract to the link below:
https://qualtricsxmn4sh2rv6f.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9YuL5yhVu5fhhyK
Please send questions to June.wang@cityu.edu.hk.
For details, visit https://digitalgeographiesrg.org/digital-geographies-research-group-annual-symposium-2025-cfp