The promise and problematic of Technology: (Re)thinking bodies, spaces and times

For the RGS-IBG annual conference 2008 my colleague James Ash and I are proposing a session on understandings of technology in geography. We welcome expressions of interests. I include the abstract for the session below.

Recent geographical research has been haunted by the assumption of the increasingly integral concept of "Technology". This paper session offers a forum for critical discussion and theorisation of technology. Further, an opening is suggested to unpick how such theorisations are mobilised in geographical accounts of the world. Drawing on the ubiquity of technology in everyday life and its manifestation in particular commercial, political and cultural realms it seeks to interrogate how technologies shape times, spaces and bodies, whilst asking what is meant by the term "Technology" itself.

As such, this session asks how particular narratives and theorisations of technology are written into accounts of the world and the power and the potential of technology in constituting particular embodied subjects. The session therefore seeks to draw together empirical and theoretical accounts of technology to think through the blurred boundaries between the human and the technical, in both a performative, ontological and discursive sense.

The session then welcomes papers on a variety of topics including:

• Technologies as commodities, practices and things
• Critical theorisations of technology itself
• Performativity and technology
• The intersections between biology and technology
• Technology and temporality
• Gender and technology