Following on from the proposed AAG annual conference 2017 sessions on ‘robots’, there’s another proposed set of sessions about labour/work and ‘the digital’… all the de rigueur concepts are in there*, yet it strikes me as a weird curious distinction between ‘digital’ and ‘human’, but there you go…
Tbh, readers of this blog have probably already seen the CFP but – anyway the whole thing is on Prof. Gillian Rose’s blog… Here’s a snippet:
digital \\ human \\ labour | session at AAG conference 2017
With Mark Graham and Jim Thatcher, I’m convening four sessions at the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers, which will be held in Boston, 5-9 April 2017. The tile of the sessions is digital \\ human \\ labour, and here is the call for papers:
The proposed Digital Geographies Working Group of the RGS/IBG and the proposed Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the AAG would like to invite submissions to a series of paper sessions and panels for the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston, MA. Reflecting the shared interests of these groups, and their mutual desire to facilitate conversations between a wide range of geographical scholarship, this call is for papers exploring specifically the various intersections of ‘digital’, ‘human’ and ‘labour’.
We will also convene a concluding panel session, and encourage interested participants to submit abstracts for any of these three paper sessions:
1 the human labour of digital work
…
2 the digital labour of being human
…
3 the algorithmic labour of being
…
Read the whole CFP on Visual/Method/Culture.
* mais tout va très bien madame la marquise.
Hi Sam. A “weird distinction”… hmm. I think I think that it’s important that we don’t lose a sense of a distinction between the two, otherwise it seems (on the evidence of a lot of scholarship in geography) that the ‘human’ starts to lose traction as a critical concept and as a site of critique (ie it disappears into the digital/technological). I also think though that we need to think very carefully about what kind of distinction that might be. Which is a really big, complex task, since clearly the human is also digitally mediated… it would be great to discuss this with you!
Hi Gillian, that was a quick reply..! I suppose I see it the other way round (if anything, the ‘digital’ disappears into the ‘human’), for – when is whatever we mean by ‘the digital’ not ‘human’? I guess I’m with Stiegler in the supposition of the co-constitutional nature of technics as a relation, thus I’m not clear if the (human/digital) distinction per se is useful. However, I hope and trust that your well-made points, both in your PHG lecture, in the above session CFP and in the comments you kindly took the time to offer here, will come through in the discussions of the session. I also hope that discussion is wider than what gets done by those with a stake in the terms (which probably includes me!). Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that I’ll be in Boston so I guess I’ll have to catch up with it all another time. All the best.