I thought this CFP might be of some interest to folks on this list, especially folks in the bay area - let me know if you have any questions, no requirement to be a geographer to attend the AAG! But anybody thinking about technology and radical politics could be interested. Please let me know if you have any questions! *Queering code/space: difference, disorientation and the digital* 112th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers | San Francisco, CA | March 29 – April 2, 2016 Organizers: Lizzie Richardson (University of Cambridge) and Daniel Cockayne (University of Kentucky) In this session we examine the relationship between digital or code/spaces (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) and the orientation of bodies in, towards, and through these spaces. We are interested in how technologically attuned bodies might be read, sorted, included in or excluded from spaces saturated with digital technology (Ash 2013; Kinsley 2014; Rose 2015). We invite contributors to consider how the ‘binary’ constitution of the digital might intersect with forms of gendered performativity, viscosities of race and productions of sexuality (Saldana 2007; Giffney and Hird 2008; Colebrook 2009; Braidotti 2013; Barad 2014; Johnston 2015). How are bodies orientated through code/space and how does the body, embodiment, and subjectivity make a difference to code/space? The session builds on research exploring the ways that code/spaces remake bodies through the imposition of various forms of discipline, and how code/spaces offer forms of biopolitical securitization to manage those bodies through the production of machine-readable ‘appropriately orientated’ subjects via technological mediation and profiling (Adey, 2008; Martin, 2010; Klauser, Paasche and Söderström, 2014). Further, ‘online spaces’ offer particular ways of knowing the world (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2011; 2012), notably through online mapping technologies that produce selective ways of seeing urban landscapes, often resulting in the digital (in)visibility of certain individuals, populations, and spaces over others (Brown and Knopp, 2008). Drawing too on scholarship that has examined how embodied difference shapes and is shaped by processes of production (McDowell, 1991; 1997; 2015), the session considers the practices and imaginaries that inform the making of code/spaces. For example, high technology and digital media sectors have been critiqued for valorising a masculine entrepreneurial narratives that perpetuates a sexist and heteronormative work culture (Gill, 2002; Marwick, 2013; Massey, 1995) while maintaining allegedly ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ principles of horizontality, collaboration, sharing and openness (Ettlinger, 2014; Turner, 2004). How might a queering of code/space, or the creation of queer code/spaces, challenge such normative orders of production, potentially disorientating linear spatio-temporal narratives of digital technology as the necessary progenitor of development and progress? We want to explore the ambivalence and ambiguity of code/spaces as they pertain to bodily difference and orientation: their constitution as both an “informatics of domination” and an opportunity for cyborgian hybridity (Haraway, 1991). Code/spaces involve gradations of experiences that cannot be considered apolitical or gender neutral (Leszczynski and Elwood 2015), presenting the possibility of both a society of control (Deleuze, 1992) and the radical potential for a transformative disorientation of spaces and bodies (Ahmed, 2006). We invite speakers to think through the potential for code/spaces to both encourage and curtail various forms of difference and (hetero)normativity, through either *a queering of code/space*, or a *queer critique* of the cultures of whiteness, maleness, and straightness that code/spaces might perpetuate. Papers could explore but should not be limited to: - sorting, profiling and mapping/mediation of bodies through code/space - feminist, queer, anti-racist politics/activism and the digital - productions of difference and ‘digital divisions of labour’ - processes of making code/spaces - theoretical and empirical explorations of ‘net neutrality’ and ‘digital discrimination’ - differentiated experiences of (digital) platforms, intermediaries and ‘sharing’ - queering narratives/imaginaries of technological progress and disruption - gradations and differentiated experiences of connectivity - difference, performativity and anonymity in online contexts - the (dis)orientation of affective attunements (e.g. pleasure, desire, pain, boredom, distraction) through the digital For abstract submissions please email Lizzie Richardson (lizzie .richardson@geog.cam.ac.uk) and Daniel Cockayne (daniel.cockayne@uky.edu) before October 15th. The deadline to register abstracts for the conference is October 29th. *Selected References* Ahmed S (2006) *Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others*. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad K (2015) TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings. *GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies* 21(2-3): 387-422. Brown M and Knopp L (2008) Queering the map: the productive tensions of colliding epistemologies. *Annals of the Association of American Geographers* 98(1): 40-58. Colebrook C (2009) Queer vitalism. *New Formations* 68(1): 77-92. Elwood S and Leszczynski A (2011) Privacy, reconsidered: New representations, data practices, and the geoweb. *Geoforum* 42(1): 6-15. Ettlinger N (2014) The Openness Paradigm. *The New Left Review* 89: 89-100. Haraway D (1991) *Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature*. London: Routledge. Giffney N and Hird M (2008) *Queering the Non/human, Queer Interventions*. Hampshire: Ashgate. Johnston L (2015) Gender and sexuality I: genderqueer geographies? *Progress in Human Geography *OnlineFirst. Kitchin R and Dodge M (2011) *Code/Space and Everyday Life*. Cambridge: MIT Press. McDowell L (2015) The Lives of Others: Body Work, the Production of Difference, and Labor Geographies. *Economic Geography*, 91(1): 1-23. Saldanha A (2007) *Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosities of Race*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. -- Daniel Cockayne PhD Candidate Department of Geography University of Kentucky daniel.cockayne@uky.edu @insistondoubt