Call for papers for the 2018 annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, April 10-14 in New Orleans. My City Is Smarter than Yours: Deconstructing the Buzzwords Open data are at the forefront of smart cities initiatives. In research on both open data and smart cities, however, scholars tend to take complex terms—such as transparent, open, accountable, democratic, empowerment, value, inclusive, and access—as self-explanatory and as inherently worthy objectives. This uncritical treatment of the terms leaves the multiple and contradictory meanings embedded within the terms unexplored and under-examined. This omission constitutes a politics that complicate simple notions around the normative value of the goals open data and smart city advocates laud. It raises fundamental questions, such as smart how? Open how? On whose terms? By what conceptualization? And, perhaps most importantly, raises critical considerations around the meanings attached at particular moments to attain very particular goals, such as private-sector profit, strengthened systems of governmentality, or attentional economy expansion. While there’s a growing number of resources from which we can draw, this remains an oversight within the overall research agenda. Making these considerations has at least three main goals. It can lend important theoretical insights into how smart cities function, particularly in relation to its attendant social and political process. As well, it can inform practitioners’ work as they consider the impacts and implications of open data platforms within smart cities initiatives, and the longstanding goals to which they aspire. It also contributes knowledge to activists’ work around “our digital rights to the city” (Shaw and Graham 2017) and the factors that enable or disable processes of empowerment. This is becoming especially important as smart cities increasingly align with open data and open government initiatives. To that end, we’re inviting paper submissions related to the following topics: - Discourse analysis of smart city or open data keywords - Omissions and strategic absences of “transparency” and “accountability” discourses - Gaps and inequalities in smart cities - What becomes open, and why? - What do prioritized open datasets tell us about social and political values? - How does smart cities or open data lead to open government? Please send your submissions by Friday, 10/13, to Victoria Fast ( victoria.fast@ucalgary.ca) and Ryan Burns (ryan.burns1@ucalgary.ca). Decisions will be made by Monday, 10/22. The abstract due date is 10/25, and the conference will be held April 10-14 in New Orleans, LA. Ryan Burns, PhD Dept of Geography, University of Calgary