Annual Symposium of the Digital Geography Research Group, RGS-IBG
19-20 June 2025, online
Global Digital Geographies: Digitalising the Territorial / Territorialising the Digital
We are thrilled to announce the programme for the Royal Geographical Society’s Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG) Annual Symposium on the theme of Global Digital Geographies. This year’s symposium features 44 papers, 3 keynote speakers, and 3 discussion panels across a broad range of topics. The full draft programme is available below.
Registration is now OPEN via the RGS-IBG website. Registration closes on 18th June 2025.
Anyone is welcome to attend this event – whether you are presenting or not. You do not need to be an RGS member or geographer to attend this conference either. After you have registered for the conference via the RGS, you will receive the Zoom link that will enable you to attend the symposium. The password for the Zoom link will be shared with you in advance of the conference.
Practical Information:
We are running this year’s online symposium over multiple time zones across 2 days starting with Hong Kong (GMT+8) into UK (GMT+1) on Day 1 then starting with East Africa and Middle Eastern (GMT+3) into UK (GMT+1) on Day 2. This ambitious online format is designed to accommodate the global community of digital geographers we are bringing together at this symposium. All sessions will be recorded and uploaded to the DGRG YouTube channel, for wider dissemination.
A time zone summary is below:
Making digital geographies global:
By global digital geographies, we aim to foreground two interconnected dimensions of the global. First, we engage with geography’s long-standing critique of the binary conception of territory and network in the context of globalization—a debate that has gained renewed urgency and complexity with the advent of digitalisation and information technology. Second, we envision this as a global platform for scholarly exchange, bringing together diverse perspectives and insights on these topics from different regions around the world.
Theme and Focus
In 1998, Stephen Graham (1998) posed a provocative question—“The End of Geography or the Explosion of Place?”—to explore how flow-oriented information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenge our conventional understanding of territory. Nearly two decades later, Milton Mueller (2017) raised the opposite question—“Will the Internet Fragment?”—reflecting growing concerns about digital sovereignty and state practices of enclosure, fragmentation, and governance.
These contrasting perspectives reveal the non-linear evolution of digital geographies—oscillating between flow and fixity, circulation and enclosure (Barabasi, 2002; Glasze et al., 2022; Zhang & Morris, 2023). While early imaginaries of an open and networked world emphasized fluidity and deterritorialization, the recent buzzword “digital sovereignty” exemplifies the assertion of nationalist logic of territory, wherein geopolitical rivalries, regulatory enclosures, and cyber securitization strategies reinforce spatial boundaries even as open data movement proliferates (Glasze et al., 2022; Lambach, 2020; Schindler et al., 2021).
Studies on digitalising the territorial demonstrate how digital technologies transform sociospatial relations (Luque-Ayala & Neves Maia, 2018; Wang & Tomassetti, 2024) and material landscapes, redefine Geospatial technologies (Latour et al., 2010; Leszczynski, 2012; Luque-Ayala & Neves Maia, 2018), drones (Gregory, 2011; Jackman & Brickell, 2021; Yao & Wang, 2024), and computational mapping practices (Atkins, 2021; Woods et al., 2024) not only represent but actively produce territories. These processes operate as sociotechnical assemblages that reshape ethnical, urban, regional, and volumetric spatialities (Adey, 2010; Datta, 2024; Yebra López, 2021).
Conversely, territorializing the digital entails examining how states, corporations, and communities inscribe territorial logic into digital infrastructures, data and prosumer-citizens (Lambach, 2020; Lehdonvirta, 2022; Möllers, 2021). The digital infrastructures — from cable and data hubs to platforms and prosumer-citizens — which were initially envisioned to support and channel the open flow of data, may concurrently serve as the very foundation for embodying the ideas of enclosure and demarcation (Lehdonvirta, 2022; Möllers, 2021; Munn, 2023).
Digital geographies are thus not immaterial or abstract but grounded in terrestrial politics, the operation of which depends on terrestrial resources—metals, energy, and labour—implicated in global extractive economies (Latour, 2011). Such an understanding is crucial for unveiling the patterns of digital neo-colonialism in the Global South (Fraser, 2019; Mouton & Burns, 2021; Tait et al., 2022). A better understanding of digital-territorial dynamics cannot be achieved through an isolated focus on any single region. Instead, it must be situated within a global arena, where practices of “digitalising the territorial” and “territorializing the digital” across different areas and regions can be introduced, discussed, and used to inform conceptual efforts.
This symposium aims to serve as a global platform for such exchanges, emphasizing the importance of scholarly dialogue across diverse parts of the world.
Symposium Organising Committee of DGRG
June Wang, Tess Osborne, Sammia C Poveda Villalba, Adam Packer, Harrison Smith, Sam Kinsley, Olivia Fletcher
Please send questions to June.wang@cityu.edu.hk