Digital Geographies & the City: Methodologies of Hope

Department of Geography’s Harold and Florence Mayer Lecture
Digital Geographies & the City: Methodologies of Hope

Professor Sarah Elwood (Department of Geography, University of Washington)

April 11, 2025
2:30-3:30pm
AGSL

Digital Geographies & The City: Methodologies of Hope
In many places, digitally-mediated urbanism is ubiquitous, violent and unequal, as technocapitalist development processes and the platformization of everyday life produce racialized removal, surveillance, impoverishment, illegalization, even premature death – structural harms for which critical social science research has a well-developed conceptual-epistemological apparatus. Here, I make the case for an intentional turn toward methodologies of hope, a re-orientation toward apprehending creative politics that advance sociospatial relations of emplacement, collectivity, accountability, mutuality and thriving. I explore digital and emplaced tactics of mutual aid, direct action, and insurgent visual politics created by Stop the Sweeps, a horizontal network of local collectivities fighting public eviction of tent encampments of unsheltered people in cities and towns across the US.

Hope is an animating force underlying these digital, material and ideological pathways toward staying put and living well in the city, yet ironically, hope is largely absent from the theoretical-epistemological fabric of ‘critical’ social science research on digital cities. I argue for abundance-oriented analyses of the urban politics being forged by precarious communities and their allies, showing how this shift opens a vital window onto complex networks of solidarity and mutual support that are generating profound challenges to the circuits of harm that define life in the digital city.