Data Power: Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance (Radical Geography) - Hardcover

Thatcher, Jim E.; Dalton, Craig M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745340083 ISBN 13: 9780745340081

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2021

Synopsis

In recent years, popular media have inundated audiences with sensationalised headlines recounting data breaches, new forms of surveillance and other dangers of our digital age. Despite their regularity, such accounts treat each case as unprecedented and unique. This book proposes a radical rethinking of the history, present and future of our relations with the digital, spatial technologies that increasingly mediate our everyday lives.

From smartphones to surveillance cameras, to navigational satellites, these new technologies offer visions of integrated, smooth and efficient societies, even as they directly conflict with the ways users experience them. Recognising the potential for both control and liberation, the authors argue against both acquiescence to and rejection of these technologies.

Through intentional use of the very systems that monitor them, activists from Charlottesville to Hong Kong are subverting, resisting and repurposing geographic technologies. Using examples as varied as writings on the first telephones to the experiences of a feminist collective for migrant women in Spain, the authors present a revolution of everyday technologies. In the face of the seemingly inevitable dominance of corporate interests, these technologies allow us to create new spaces of affinity, and a new politics of change.

About this title

About the Authors

Jim E. Thatcher is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Washington Tacoma.

Craig M. Dalton is Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Geography at Hofstra University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2021
• ISBN 10: 0745340083
• ISBN 13: 9780745340081
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176