Towards accountable digital geographies

Digital geographies on Indigenous lands

I pose the above questions by Liboiron (2021a) and Fujikane (2021) at a moment of growing fascism, climate breakdown, ongoing pandemics, relentless attacks on Black and Indigenous people and communities of color, and the criminalization of women, the LGBTQ  +  community, the unsheltered, and more. Geographers have contributed tremendously to understanding the material and political significance of state-sanctioned violence directed toward freedom movements and Land (Gilmore, 2017; Liboiron, 2021b). This includes scholarship on the rise of geo-computation and its relationship to racial governance (Jefferson, 2020) as well as investigating the co-optation of Black visual aesthetics and the regulation of place (Summers, 2019). Geographers have long investigated the structural underpinnings of colonial knowledge within institutions of education, organizing pathways to decolonize the discipline (de Leeuw and Hunt, 2018; Rose-Redwood et al., 2020). Despite the entanglement of geographical knowledge in settler colonialism and racial capitalism, decolonial movements continue to deploy their own spatial grammars and practices that make visible an otherwise world in the here-and-now (Maynard and Simpson, 2022). Against this backdrop, I suggest that digital geographers follow Curley and Smith's (2020) invitation to contend with the question of Land Back and centering Indigenous land in geography. I direct this question of Land Back to digital geographers in part because of the instrumental role of the digital in shaping sociospatial relations and geographical imaginaries of place, but also to underscore the history of ‘extraordinary knowledge politics’ (Elwood, 2022) by anticolonial and decolonial movements already doing that work.

The proliferation and everywhereness of the digital has resulted in mass interest and a need to apprehend the impact of technology on sociospatial relations, resulting in new research frontiers that expands the archive of disciplinary inquiry to the digital as an object and subject of study (Ash et al., 2018). As a scholar of digital geographies and anticolonialism, I enter the question of accountability in geography through scholarship in Indigenous geographies and decolonial thought. The situatedness of digital technologies in racial capitalism and settler colonialism continues to animate imaginaries of Black and Indigenous dehumanization, including digitally mediated spectacles of police violence, trauma, climate and ecological apocalypse, and more. Following McKittrick's (2006) insistence on centering Black and Indigenous livingness, King (2019) argues that white cartography did not anticipate Black and Indigenous life, necessitating the technoproduction of imaginaries of violence and ‘exterior’ threats to institute the project of ‘settling’. For instance, the celebration of science and technology through imaginaries of the Columbus Exhibition was instrumental in shaping the ongoing geographic rationale for conquest, producing colonial territory through the performance of civilization (Harley, 1992). The failure to see relational expressions of Black and Indigenous livingness is a feature of the whiteness of Western colonial knowledge structures (King, 2019).

Writing to researchers eager to study and do scholarship alongside Black and Indigenous communities, Tuck (2009) calls on researchers to reconsider ‘damage centered’ research used to document legacies of dispossession. Rather than chronicle damage, Tuck (2009) insists on centering the desires of Indigenous communities. This is not to say that tracing the operations and impacts of racial capitalism and settler colonialism are not important, particularly given ongoing genocide through the accumulation of Indigenous lands and the mass expansion of new surveillance regimes and technologies of dispossession, such as the ‘automated landlord’ and the ‘logistical borderland’ (Fields, 2019; González, 2019). Rather, it is to invite collective inquiry on digital geography's pedagogical practices in a moment of mass death and the expansion of state securitization, asking the question: How does reading for Black and Indigenous livingness reshape genealogies of the digital?

Re-imagining digital geography requires attention to pedagogical practices, demanding inquiry into the ways in which the ‘ontics, aesthetics, logics, and discourses’ of the digital are theorized, applied, and inscribed with meaning (Ash et al., 2018). Within the classroom, pedagogical practices are shaped by colonial economic forces, informing institutional programing and geographical imaginaries. For instance, inquiry into the pedagogical practice of digital technologies such as GIS have long considered the limits and potentials of ethical engagement with geospatial technologies, imploring the epistemological and ontological tensions of data production and application (Elwood and Wilson, 2017; Lucchesi, 2022). GIS programs in the United States, however, continue to emphasize content in the service of commodity reproduction, driven and funded by real estate, policing, military, and fossil fuel interests (Henderson and Montange, 2022). The knowledge assumptions of digitizing for digitizing's sake expose the white possessive logics of digital pedagogies and their long histories in racial-colonial governance (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), demanding genealogies of the digital outside of racial capitalist and settler colonial orders. Pedagogies emergent from Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Trans, and queer of color communities open up doorways toward accountable digital geographies beyond simplistic binary critiques of research (e.g. abundance vs. deficit), emphasizing decolonial desires instead (Russell, 2020).

The re-emergent turn to unsettle the spatial practices of a white supremacist-heternormative geography is not new, but an ongoing response to centuries of resistance by anticolonial movements (Simpson, 2017). I argue that the turn to (re)imagine the futures of geographical thought and praxis ought to begin with assembling a geography accountable to communities, places, Indigenous nations, and the Earth itself from which geographical knowledge arises. Accountable digital geographies must refuse the metaphorization of decolonial demands for liberatory praxis (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Accountable digital geographies must refuse the spectacle of reconciliation, demanding humility in how ‘we’ ask and do geography (Daigle, 2019). Geography's entanglements in settler colonialism and racial capitalism shape the view of geography, ensuring the continuation of knowledge practices ordered to reify the reproduction of conquest and white comfortability (Curley and Smith, 2020). As geographers endeavor to (re)imagine the discipline, I ask: What might an accountable digital geographical pedagogy look like?

Toward accountable digital geographies

Leszczynski (2018) argues that digital methodologies enact ‘wicked tensions’ toward ways of knowing in geography, offering methodological accounts that engage directly with the epistemological, ontological, and genealogical tensions that arise in digital geographical knowledge production. These challenges echo larger epistemological tensions surrounding the whiteness of digital thought. For instance, Elwood and Leszczynski (2018) argue that how and from where ‘we’ theorize must recognize more than our positionalities. Emphasizing good relations with the communities and spaces/places where knowledge arises is foundational to feminist and anticolonial politics (Tuck and Yang, 2014). The ‘we’, of course, is not universal, as geography continues to reproduce whiteness through pedagogical frameworks that privilege white comfortability, where demands for Land Back and reparations are rendered unthinkable.

There have been repeated calls to decolonize the field of geography, prompting a session at AAG 2023 titled, ‘All this decolonizing but nothing decolonized’. Geographers have raised the necessity of ‘an other geography’ that addresses calls to imagine anew for decades (Oswin, 2020). From building a discipline centered on care and responsibility (Daigle, 2019; Lawson, 2007), to calling for a geography that honors its decolonial mandate given its legacy as a discipline of empire and unbearable whiteness (Bruno and Faiver-Serna, 2022; Daigle and Ramírez, 2019), to investigating the making of liberatory geographies by social movements (Gilmore, 2017), geographers have assembled a path that (re)imagines geographical praxis. These efforts, I argue, can be directed to digital practices as well. For instance, Shannon Mattern's (2018) call for maintenance and repair demonstrates a multiscalar approach to apprehending geographies of accountability.

Demands for #LandBack are also demands for DataBack. Scholars of Indigenous Data Sovereignty have traced the ways in which colonial data practices threaten the self-determination of Indigenous nations and how the latter are endeavoring to advance their own legal political orders amidst ongoing regimes of data accumulation (Duarte, 2017). From advancing Indigenous-assembled data infrastructures, data governance, and more, scholarship on Indigenous data sovereignty offers conceptual, ethical, and political avenues for advancing accountable digital geographies on Indigenous lands (Duarte et al., 2019). Beginning with #Databack offers an immediate point in which to re-imagine data practices, digital ethics, and digital geographies itself. Geographies of accountability must be shaped on the terms of Indigenous people. Efforts to advance #Landback echo a multitude of ongoing geographical imaginaries of what is possible and already here.

From uncomfortable tensions to relational anticolonial praxis

Conducting research is about being in good relations with those whom you work alongside with and love (Wilson, 2020). I believe that Indigenous protocols of knowledge generation offer lessons for geographers, including apprehending the materiality of data and maps as more than abstracted forms of observable or ‘neutral’ information that connect to political, social, and ecological processes. Genealogies of the digital through anticolonial methods engender worlds that teach ‘us’ about ways of being in good relations with the Earth and with each other. Genealogies of the digital from the standpoint of Black and Indigenous livingness produce the conditions for dignity, good land relations, and reciprocity (Grossmann and Trubina, 2022; Lucchesi, 2022; Safransky, 2022). For instance, Liboiron's anticolonial CLEAR LAB emphasizes humility, good land relations, and accountability to all things geographical science. ¹ I believe that GIS, cartography, and data practices can be redirected to do the same.

Maynard and Simpson's Rehearsals for Living (2022) reminds us that the ‘end of this world’ is a chance to build a new world together. Land Back is a material necessity for Indigenous nations, and calls for accountability are moments to (re)imagine our roles as a scholarly community, uneven as they are across difference and power (Peña, 2022), while acknowledging, as Stuart Hall argues, that ‘learning is a personal, political, and collective task’. ² This task will be uncomfortable but necessary for confronting the logic of settler colonialism. Let's (re)imagine digital geography and praxis together.