We invite paper submissions for the session “Geodatafication: Socio-technical Infrastructures, Economies and (Geo-)Politics of Datafied Space” at the RGS/IBG, London 1-4 September 2026. We welcome theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contributions.
The digital transformation is fundamentally spatial. Contemporary forms of digital capitalism, platform economies, and data-driven governance depend on the continuous translation of space, spatial relations, and territorial knowledge into machine-readable geospatial data. At the same time, geospatial data are a strategic resource in geopolitical competition, territorial surveillance, and contemporary warfare. From real-time logistics and location-based services to satellite infrastructures, drone operations, border surveillance, and military targeting, geodatafication lies at the heart of how spatial power is exercised, contested, and operationalized in the digital age. While recent debates in geography and the social sciences have addressed datafication, platformization, digital infrastructures, and geopolitics, the specific role of geospatial data and its infrastructures remains under-explored and under-theorized.
Therefore this session foregrounds geodatafication as a foundational process of the digital transformation. We conceptualize geodatafication as the socio-technical translation of space and spatial relations into geospatial data, enabling the calculability, governability, and operationalization of territory, circulation, and mobility. Geodatafication not only allows digital information to be anchored in physical space; it also provides the infrastructural, economic, and political basis for the spatial logistics of digital capitalism and for emerging forms of geopolitical control, surveillance, and warfare. The session invites papers that critically examine the political, economic, infrastructural, and everyday dimensions of geodatafication, with particular attention to its dual role in locating digital capitalism and operationalizing geopolitics and conflict.
Topics include (but are not limited to):
• geodatafication and digital capitalism
• geopolitics, security, and surveillance
• satellite and positioning infrastructures
• GeoAI, military and dual-use technologies
• open geospatial data, commons, and conflict
Full CfP: see pdf
Abstract deadline: 16 February 2026
Submit a 250-word abstract to:
georg.glasze@fau.de | boris.michel@geo.uni-halle.de
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