Call for Papers for the 2013 Annual American Geographers conference in Los Angeles
Please find the Call for Papers for the 2013 Annual
American Geographers conference in Los Angeles below. The deadline can be
relaxed a little for interested parties, but please email with interest.
Thanks!
*Disruptive geographies: communication technologies and
economic reconfigurations at the periphery*
*“In the new millennium, the world’s poor are still at
the bottom of the pyramid, but this time they are the fortune that can be
mined, not the workers whose labor feeds all.”*(Roy 2012)
Much has been written about the death of distance and the
end of geography.
The spread of the Internet and other communications
technologies combined with booming practices of offshoring left many to talk
about a techno-mediated new international division of labour and a global shift
in economic flows. However, geography continues to matter as much as ever while
global body shopping seems to be largely confined to low-end work.
Yet, the geography of internet and communications
infrastructure has again radically changed in the last few years: potentially
upsetting relationships of global production and consumption. There are now
over two billion Internet users and five billion mobile phone users. Barriers
to access still exist, but are less pronounced than ever before. As such,
geographic barriers are potentially less relevant for many of the movements of
codified information and services that happen around the world. This opens up
possibilities for significant economic and social transformation and
disruption: especially in the world’s peripheries.
For instance, ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ capitalism has
gained prominence among scholars of economic development and ‘social
enterprise.’
Multinational companies are increasingly viewing the
world’s poorest as willing consumers and part of profitable developing world
markets. New technologies combined with old social networks are said to bypass
old and cumbersome distribution networks, making new populations accessible to
transnational capital and global consumption in unprecedented ways. In
addition, many firms and entrepreneuers across the South are themselves
building new transnational businesses that leverage the ease at which
information can move across borders. Northern firms are also attempting to take
advantage of the variable frictions between labour, capital, and information in
order to engage in ‘bodyshopping,’ offshoring, and outsourcing.
In this session, we wish to interrogate these moments and
strategies of disruption. We wish to focus, in particular, on those actors and
institutions that have demonstrated an awareness of socio-technical networks
and have leveraged themselves and their organizations successfully and
profitably. Are these global reconfigurations changing economic relationships
and livelihoods on national or society-wide scales or are such moments of
disruption confined to highly visible and sophisticated strategies used by a
few? If so, can such strategies ultimately be leveraged for broader change?
Perhaps most importantly, are reconfigurations of connectivities linked to
further empowerment or exploitation for the world’s poorest?
Please email abstracts of 250 words to Mark.Graham@oii.ox.ac.uk and Laura.Mann@oii.ox.ac.uk before
October 15th, 2012.
--
Dr. Laura Mann
Postdoctoral Researcher
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
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