Special session 7:
Digital territoriality across scale
This session invites contributions exploring how the territorial dimensions of apps and platforms are evolving in the new era of digital geopolitics. The digital has become integrated into every aspect of society, from the app-mediated practices of everyday life to, increasingly, global realpolitik. This session seeks to investigate how the specificities of the digital—how apps are used, how APIs are configured, or how algorithms are implemented—produces and transforms territorities across multiple scales (Marston et al., 2005), dynamically generative of bodily, urban, national and global spaces.
Scholars in digital and political geographies, media studies, and allied fields have investigated how the digital shapes the spaces of cities and countries (Barns, 2020; Datta, 2023; Woods et al., 2023), as well as becoming a vital aspect of global politics and economics (Langley & Leyshon, 2017; van Dijck et al., 2018; Zhang & Morris, 2023). Digital infrastructures are reorganizing existing spatial entities such as cities, states and regions, and also creating novel spatial entities in the form of regionalizing platforms (Steinberg & Li, 2017) and national ‘stacks’ (Bratton, 2018; de Seta, 2021; Munn, 2023). Moreover, the digital is productive of space in its own right, generative of new subjects within novel milieus (Brady & Lin, 2023; Leszczynski, 2020; Rose, 2016; Tan, 2021). A single process of digitalization can consolidate power at one scale while vitiating it at another, and spurring resistance or disengagement at a third (Bissell, 2020; Datta, 2023).
​
This session aims to examine how the digital is intervening in ongoing struggles over territoriality—both as a tool of discipline and as a site of resistance and avoidance—between platforms, states, and multiple communities of users at multiple scales ranging from bodies, neighborhoods, cities, countries, and regions to the globe.