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Welcome to the website of the Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG).

We are an academic research group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG).

Digital technologies are changing the life worlds we research as well as the very way we ourselves undertake research and teaching. Therefore this group seeks to be a welcoming forum to discuss these changes for geographers from different epistemic and methodological traditions, and for those conducting theoretical as well as applied research work. The DGRG is a platform for exchanges within and between sub-disciplines, engaging with the diversity of geographies of and through the digital, and thereby nurtures and deepens discussion of geographical digital scholarship and practice.

Our AGM is the point of the year when the committee reports to the membership and we all reflect on what has been achieved in the last year, plan the next year, and hear new suggestions for how the group is run and what it can do. We also elect committee members for open positions, and farewell previous committee members who are leaving. All ideas and suggestions are very welcome. 

RGS-IBG International Annual Conference 2025: DGRG Pre-Conference Event

Exploring Place-based Creativity in a Digitally-Mediated World

Tuesday 26th August 2025 – 12pm – 5pm

Complementing the RGS-IBG’s conference theme of ‘Creativity/Creative Geographies’, the Digital Geographies Research Group organised this preconference event that invited participants to explore the placed-based creative practices of researchers, content creators and game designers alike. Speaking across a range of digitally-mediated contexts, the parallel sessions introduced explorative, playful and audio-visual forms of creativity. The workshops began to address a series of questions prompted by this year’s theme: What new concepts, methods or practices can digitally-mediated creativity offer researchers? Where are new spatialities of digital creativity emerging? The event was organised around a number of interactive sessions followed by a keynote by Professor Oli Mould titled: Psychedelics, multiverses and readical creativity: towards an aesthetics of the commons. The sessions were: AI in the Street, Pin the Tale and The Sounds of Birmingham.

DGRG Dissertation Prize Winner 2025 Announced!

We are delighted to announce that the winner of our 2025 Dissertation Prize is Levina Purewal from Durham University.
 
Her dissertation, “‘I can’t think without ChatGPT’: A Cognitive Sociotechnical Assemblage Analysis of Student-AI Entanglement at Durham University”, examines how students at Durham University engage with ChatGPT across their academic lives, and what these interactions reveal about the distributed nature of thinking, authorship, and subjectivity.
 
Through a novel intra-viewing AI method, alongside questionnaires, diaries, and interviews with students, Levina unpacks how ChatGPT reshapes academic cognition and subjectivity by participating in a cognitive sociotechnical assemblage, where thinking and selfhood emerge through affective, infrastructural, and technological entanglements.
 
Levina’s dissertation scored very highly in all our assessment criteria. However, reviewers particularly praised the quality of Levina’s critical analysis and discussion, the clear contribution the research makes within the field, the multi-method research design and the overall ambition of the project.
 
Levina will have an opportunity to share more about her work via our channels over the coming months. Stayed tuned for this and for news of our 2026 Dissertation Prize offering.
 
Meanwhile, you can watch a recorded conversation with our 2023 Dissertation Prize winner Lucas Evans here, which discusses his research on the Forest app, a popular productivity app that enables users to support forest restoration.
 

Our latest Work in Progress video series is up now – Eurovision fandom, working from home privacy, place and location, and more! View on our YouTube channel