RGS-IBG AC 2024 – Call for Papers
The proposed session aims to bring together feminist geopolitical perspectives on smart interventions in homes in contemporary smart cities. Homes are increasingly emerging as sites of “smart” interventions. State as well as corporate actors put forward many imaginaries of the home that is supposedly smart, futuristic and overall ‘good’ for the smart city, which encompasses interventions in areas of, for instance, energy efficiency (Tetteh & Amponsah 2020), security and surveillance (Maalsen and Sadowski 2019), care work (Kong and Woods 2018), and housing design.
Existing research demonstrates that smart interventions in homes produce particular corporealities and ideologies. Recent works highlight how, for example, smart homes designs produce “dominant masculine and colonising narratives” (Pink et. al. 2022:117) and “new white futurism” (Rottinghaus 2021). Similarly, Jackman and Brickell (2022) point out the interconnections of everyday practices of “droning-home” with military and militarized geographies of the world. Smart home technologies, such as for eldercare, are also rooted in dominant practices and discourses of the nation-state (Kong and Woods 2018). These smart interventions and their political critiques demonstrate the increased convergences of home, the urban, and geopolitics.
Feminist research has long established that homes are intimately intertwined with geopolitics (Brickell 2012). Drawing on perspectives from feminist geopolitics, as well as critical geographies of home and critical urban geopolitics, the proposed session seeks to expand feminist understanding of geopolitics and home by focusing on smart home interventions as “geopolitical” and homes as socio-spatialities where smart geopolitics take shape. I am interested in critical analyses of how homes – within the context of smart interventions – as ideological, material and socio-technical practices connect to, shape and reorient geopolitics and power in the urban and beyond.
Papers can focus on the following themes (but not limited to):
1. Post/colonial State-making and smart capitalism
2. Violence, (in)security, surveillance, and warfare
3. Social reproduction, care and smart home technologies
4. Smart tech-mediated domestic violence
5. Smart/digitalised intimacies
6. Digitalised domesticities
7. Climate change and transition politics
8. Digitalised and smart dispossessions through housing interventions.
I especially encourage contributions from under-represented groups and people working in/on urban Global South contexts.
Please send paper abstracts (max 250 words), including the title, name of author(s), affiliations, and contact information to Syeda Jenifa Zahan (sezal.dse@gmail.com)
Deadline for abstract submission: 20 February 2024