On the 23rd and 24th of September 22, we hosted an international workshop on political geography in the age of digital media at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). We discussed how digital media reshapes understandings of sovereignty and security, how geopolitical worldviews disseminate in online discourses, what it means to do be critical about and with digital media, what the (im)possibilities of resistance to surveillance, advertisement and propaganda are, and what theories and methods offer promising ways to engage with an increasingly digital world. We are extremely excited that we could welcome so many excellent scholars to Freiburg and engage with their work on digital media, politics and space. Contributions are currently being developeded into articles for a special issue – so stay tuned!
Workshop program
Friday, 23.9.2022
8:30–9:00 | Coffee and registration (FRIAS cafeteria) |
9:00–9:30 | Welcome & Introduction (Thilo Wiertz & Jason Dittmer) |
9:30–10:30 | Session 1 (Chair: Jason Dittmer) |
Recursive Terrains of Media and Politics (Andrew Dwyer) | |
Non-representational Politics of Virtual Environments (Claire Fitch) | |
10:30–11:00 | Coffee break (FRIAS cafeteria) |
11:00–12:30 | Session 2 (Chair: Annika Mattissek) |
Digital Sovereignty: The Influence of Chinese Digital Governance Discourse on Iran (Azadeh Akbari) |
|
Political Geographies of Digital Media (Georg Glasze) | |
The Visual as Infrastructure: Securitization and Popular Geopolitics (Vlad Strukov) |
|
12:30–13:30 | Lunch break (FRIAS cafeteria) |
13:30–15:00 | Session 3 (Chair: Elisabeth Militz) |
Digital Geopolitics of the Far-right and the Role of Conspiracy Myths (Tobias Schopper) |
|
The Territorialisation of Digital Space. Evidence from the “Gulfinization” of the Arab Twittersphere (Laura Schuhn) |
|
The Networked Imaginaries of the Far-right: Translations, Hybridizations, and Spatializations (Jason Luger) |
|
17:00–19:00 | Walk through the city and to the Kanonenplatz |
19:00 | Workshop dinner |
Saturday, 24.9.2022
9:30–10:30 | Session 4 (Chair: Georg Glasze) |
Re-rooting ‘critical’ digital geographies: Digital mediations as a politics of abundance (Sarah Elwood) |
|
Feminist political geographies on Instagram - examples from Kyrgyzstan (Elisabeth Militz) |
|
10:30–11:00 | Coffee break |
11:00–12:00 | Session 5 (Chair: Azadeh Akbari) |
Propaganda as a Service: Psychopower and the Political Geographies of Digital Advertising and Disinformation on Facebook (Bharath Ganesh) |
|
Disentangling: sociospatial strategies and surveillance capitalism (Paul Adams) |
|
12:00–12:30 | Lunch break (FRIAS cafeteria) |
12:30–13:30 | Concluding discussion, next steps, farewell |
16:00 | Trip to the black forest |