Call for Papers on the theme of Digital Geographies in Fragile Times: Precarity, Instability, and Uncertainty
Geographies Research Group 2026 Annual Symposium // Online // 8/9th July 2026
Symposium Theme:
It feels like the world is more fragile than ever. Precarity, instability, and uncertainty are defining the current political landscape and are, to varying degrees, impacting the lived realities of both academic scholarship, employment conditions, and everyday life. We seem to be living in a time of profound transition and ontological vulnerability that demands critical reflection on the kinds of futures and social orders that are emerging in relation to key changes in digital technologies and geographies.
Fragility is abundant, spatial, and entangled with the digital. People are being vanished by authoritarian police agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and there are now significant questions emerging over the ways states are policing borders through isolationist policies. Many progressive endeavours such as diversity, equity and inclusion are being dismantled, and efforts to tackle the existential threats of climate change now feel seemingly impossible to achieve. Universities are enacting deep cuts, closures, and restructures to academic departments and funding schemes. Countless organizations and sectors are exploring ways to embed artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and dismantle the need for human labour and criticality. Contemporary social media platforms have become increasingly consolidated into ‘Big Tech’ oligopolies while also moving further towards right wing political agendas.
These, and countless other examples, all mutually gesture to an increasing feeling of fragility that is lived and felt in ways that are social, embodied, and spatial. Digital geographers can help understand and develop critical reflections about the ways fragility is spatial and manifest in and through digital technologies. This symposium therefore seeks to build conversations around emerging issues of precarity, instability, and uncertainty that are shaping contemporary social life, and asks how digital geographies in particular can help frame and address such complex questions and issues.
Questions might include, but are not limited to:
- How do we understand notions of precarity, instability, and uncertainty today?
- What kinds of authoritarian or post-democratic politics are shaping spaces, mobilities, and environmentalities?
- How is the digital shaping and shaped by ways in which authoritarian politics are unfolding at various scales around the world?
- How are affective and embodied experiences of fragility mediated through digital platforms, systems and infrastructures?
- Reclaiming and using the digital as an alternative to authoritarian politics and control
- Using digital visualising technologies as a method of critical witnessing
- What is at stake, or happens, when you think of digital geographies through the lens of fragility?
- What theoretical or practical interventions might support alternative responses to precarity, instability or uncertainty?
- How can we reflect on and re-imagine the futures of geographical scholarship and the precarities of academic labour?
Submission information:
The Digital Geographies Research Group invites contributions that broadly relate to the theme of digital geographies in fragile times. We welcome abstracts for paper submissions at any stage of research, including (but not limited to) theoretical or empirical studies, critical reflections, impact case studies, or recent policy interventions.
We also welcome and encourage creative, artistic and innovative contributions. These may be interactive, skills-based, practical or workshop-type contributions. Innovative approaches do not need to conform to the conventions of paper contributions.
Digital Shorts:
In addition, we welcome abstract submissions in the form of digital shorts. Digital shorts are short videos (between 2 and 5 minutes in length) that provide an introduction to, or summary of, an aspect of your research. Your video could discuss:
- Recent research findings
- An emerging research idea or interest
- A new or upcoming research output, publication, creative work etc.
- Research methodology
- Approaches to teaching
- Uses of digital technologies within academia
This format has been deliberately designed to require limited preparation, so is ideal for postgraduates, early career researchers, those with caring responsibilities, or other commitments. You can view examples of digital shorts on the DGRG YouTube channel.
For accessibility purposes, please provide a transcript when submitting a digital short so that your video can be accurately subtitled.
Abstracts and panel proposals should aim to be approximately 250 words and submitted before 15th May 2026. Please submit your abstract via Qualtrics: https://qualtricsxmn4sh2rv6f.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b2yngZQzpL2tpcO
Timeline:
| 13th April 2026 | Call for Papers and panel proposals opens |
| 15th May 2026 | CfP and panel proposal deadline |
| End of May | Notification of acceptances and registration info |
| June 2026 | Symposium programme published |
| 8/9th July 2026 | Symposium Date |