Embodiment and Infrastructures: Power and violence through digital technologies
We are pleased to invite submissions for the next annual meeting of the AK Digitale Geographien! This year taking place from the 8-9th of October at the Mathematikon in Heidelberg. While we keep this forum open for any engagements with the whole breadth of digital geographies, we encourage submissions that address questions of embodiment and infrastructure.
This theme seeks to explore how (digital/digitized) bodies, environments, and infrastructures are entangled in the production, experience, and mediation of power and violence.
We invite discussions that critically examine how shifting analytical perspectives between embodied experiences on the one hand and infrastructures on the other hand broaden ways of understanding power relations.
We propose this theme, as an ever-diversifying array of technologies and infrastructures – including intimate, assistive, human optimisation and enhancement, communication, transport, energy, and surveillance – interacts with both established and emerging forms of power and violence. Both, embodied technologies and digital infrastructures, are tightly interwoven and entrench power asymmetries across global and local scales. In addition, current technological developments challenge what these categories describe in qualitative terms, as their boundaries become increasingly blurred.
We therefore invite contributions that engage with questions of embodiment, materiality, and infrastructure, and that critically interrogate how digital technologies reshape and are intertwined with relations of power, vulnerability, agency, and violence across social, cultural, political and digital contexts. Contributions may be conceptual, methodological and/or empirical.
We welcome contributions focused on – but not limited to – the following topics:
- Political and military conflicts, war, and violence: autonomous weapons technologies and warfare, information and cyberwarfare, embodied digital warfare, human optimisation and enhancement in warfare, discourses on (digital) security, conflict, war, sovereignty, and peace strategies, and imaginaries of futures of digital warfare.
- Structural violence through/with digital systems: algorithmic violence, entrenchments of power relationships through digital systems, energy consumption through datacenters
- Socio-cultural conflicts and (cyber-)violence: dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in entangled spaces, technological affordances in violence and (cyber-)bullying, gendered, racialised, classed, and other forms of violence.
- Human- and more-than-human conflicts: environmental crises, environmental justice, and the entanglement of human with more-than-human actors in environmental conflicts.
- Socio-economic conflicts: inequalities, digital divides, and privilege in urban platform economies, smart cities, and other digitally mediated infrastructures.
- Reflections on representations of violence and power difference through (geo-)data: humanitarian GIS, Rapid Response GIS,…
- Addressing power and violence in teaching and learning
Presentation formats:
- Classic paper presentation (20 mins, plus 5 minute Q&A slots)
- Flash talks (5 min presentation with direct peer-feedback within the session)
- Creative inputs (application demos, art projects, …)
Submission guideline:
Please submit your abstracts of max. 300 words until the 15.07.2026 via e-mail (AKDigitaleGeo26@uni-heidelberg.de). Please indicate how you would like to contribute based on the presentation formats above.
For any questions, please reach out to us at the same address as used for submissions.
Greetings!
AK meeting 2026 organizing team
Julia Poerting, Linda Ruppert, Julia Meluso, Lennart Matzkeit, Johannes Melchert, and Tabea Bork-Hüffer