Practicing Abundance: Hope, Digital Geographies and the City
Channel: Geomedia Conference 2023
Date: 2023-10-16

Keynote address at the 5th Geomedia Conference 2023 by Dr. Sarah Elwood, Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. 

Keynote abstract: 
In many places, digital mediated urbanism is ubiquitous, violent and unequal, as technocapitalist urban development processes and the platformization of everyday life by public and private actors create sociospatial processes of racialized removal, surveillance, impoverishment, even premature death. Nonetheless, activists confronting these forces of removal through eviction, expensification, illegalization and precaritization are crafting digital tools and tactics that advance sociospatial relations of emplacement, collectivity, accountability, mutuality and thriving. Hope is an animating force underlying these digital praxes that forge material and ideological pathways for staying put and living well, yet ironically, hope is largely absent from the theoretical-epistemological fabric of ‘critical’ social science research on digital cities. Human geographers have studied deployments of digital technologies in urban justice struggles for nearly 3 decades, yet consistently return to a theoretical-epistemological skepticism that prefigures these kinds of digital politics as insufficient: Too small, unlikely to ‘scale’, not sufficiently ‘structural’. I will argue that apprehending hopeful digital geographies requires re-orienting our theoretical repertoires and analytic attentions toward geographies of abundance, a framework that I argue digital geographers can learn from Black and queer feminisms, abolition thought, liberation theologies and other heterodox traditions that refuse material and ideological relations of scarcity and deficit. I develop these arguments with case examples drawn from the Seattle metropolitan area, a site of intensive struggles over urban removals and a wellspring of creative digitally mediated counter-politics by mutual aid, collective action, and solidarity organizations.