Politics of Algorithmic Life
- Special Issue: -The Social Life of Robots: The Politics of Algorithmic Life, Governance, and Sovereignty. Ed. by Del Casino Jr., V., House-Peters, L., Crampton, J., and Gerhardt, H. ANTIPODE SPECIAL ISSUE.
Description
From the Introduction:
"This special issue emerges out of an ongoing set of conversations amongst geographers who have been increasingly thinking about how human and more-than-human relations with robots and robotic technologies are reworking the socio-spatial dimensions of our lives. This special issue takes one cut at this concern. The four papers included explore how the rapidly changing, and increasingly networked, world of robots and robotic technology development is shifting and disrupting geographic imaginaries and everyday social, cultural, and ecological practices. Here, the terrain of robots and robotics is interpreted broadly to consist of the hardware and software that can be found in the materialities of robot bodies, and the algorithmic logics and machine learning capacities of new emerging digital technologies. Geographers have produced ground-breaking work interrogating what robots and robotic technologies mean for discipline, surveillance, and security in the 21st century (e.g., Amoore and Raley 2016), and how these technologies may “travel” from hubs to sites of application (e.g., McDuie-Ra and Gulson 2019).This special issue takes as its point of departure the role of these technologies and their associated materialities in making and remaking the structures, conditions, and relations of everyday life. It is important to note that this body of work on robots and robotic technologies is partially related to but also parallels the recent wave of attention to and growth of geographic research produced through, by, and of the digital, what Ash, Kitchin, and Leszczynski (2018) have termed a critical ‘digital turn’ in geography. This turn has focused on questions of smart cities (Datta2015), digital media and communication (Adams 2017), the security state (Shaw 2013, 2016,2017), and the automation of environmental conservation (Arts et al. 2015; Adams 2017), writ large. It does less, though, to think through the reimagination of human-nonhuman relations, subjectivities, and potentialities that come to be possible in a world already populated by robotic possibilities. It also shies away from fully interrogating the ways in which these relations are altering meanings of the concept of human intelligence or cognition."