CFP Museum of Contemporary Commodities: creative propositions and provocations on the heritages of data-trade-place-value

RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Royal Geographical Society, London

Wednesday 30 August – Friday 1 September 2017

Call for Papers (Deadline Monday 07 February 2017)

Museum  of Contemporary Commodities: creative propositions and provocations on the heritages of data-trade-place-value

How do we open out the messy digital geographies of trade, place and value to the world? How can we work with the digital beyond beyond archives, spectacle and techno-dystopian imaginations? How do we do so in a ways that are performative, collaborative and provocative of the digital?

This session builds on the planned hosting of the Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) in the RGS(IBG)’s Pavilion in the days leading up to the annual conference (and its partial installation in the RGS(IBG) building during the conference) where it will join the V&A, Science and Natural History Museums on London’s Exhibition Road. Developed as acts of valuing the things we buy today as the heritage of tomorrow, MoCC’s artworks take the form of dynamic, collaborative hacks and prototypes; socio-material processes, objects and events that aim to enrol publics in trade justice debates in light footed, life-affirming, surprising and contagious ways as part of their daily routines.

We invite prospective participants to offer propositions and provocations that stitch into or unpick the complex and sometime knotty patchwork quilt of data-trade-place-value. This is an invitation to contribute to and convene conversations that enliven geographical understandings of the governance, performance, placings and values/valuing of contemporary (digitally) mediated material culture. The resulting session is not conceived as a ‘conventional’ paper session. We invite submissions of ten-minute contributions that might take various forms, which might include essay, performance, video and many other creative responses to the theme.

This invitation should be understood in its broadest sense. We are interested in the commingling and mash-up of the theme(s) data-trade-place-value. We very much encourage submissions that push back against the normative authorities or discourses surrounding ‘the digital’ (however that might be conceived). So, we hope that all involved in the session will thereby be challenged and inspired by creative propositions and provocations that begin to get to the heart of how we open out the messy digital geographies of trade, place and value to the world.

Themes could include:

  • lively methods that work with and through participatory media
  • intimacy, humour, trust and the internet of things
  • mashups, subversions and hacks of big data from the bottom up
  • discourses and practises of future orientation and the spatial imaginations of ‘the digital’
  • an intersectional internet and the rise of ‘platforms’
  • alternative trade models, value systems and networked culture
  • DIWO (Do It With Others), scholar-activism & public pedagogy
  • the economic geographies of the battle for ‘open’

Submit 250 word abstracts to us by email by 7 February and we will get back to you by 13 February.

Please get in touch beforehand if you have any questions.
Ian Cook (i.j.cook@exeter.ac.uk)
Paula Crutchlow (pc343@exeter.ac.uk)
Sam Kinsley (s.kinsley@exeter.ac.uk).