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This book examines the changing digital geographies of the Anthropocene. It analyses how technologies are providing new opportunities for communication and connection, while simultaneously deepening existing problems associated with isolation, global inequity and environmental harm. By offering a reading of digital technologies as 'more-than-real', the author argues that the productive and destructive possibilities of digital geographies are changing important aspects of human and non-human worlds. Like the more-than-human notion and how it emphasises interconnections of humans and non-humans in the world, the more-than-real inverts the diminishing that accompanies use of the terms 'virtual' and 'immaterial' as applied to digital spaces.
Digital geographies are fluid, amorphous spaces made of contradictory possibilities in this Anthropocene moment. By sharing experiences of people involved in trying to improve digital geographies, this book offers stories of hope and possibility alongside stories of grief and despair. The more-than-real concept can help us understand such work - by feminists, digital rights activists, disability rights activists, environmentalists and more. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this book will appeal to academics, university students, and activists who are keen to learn from other people's efforts to change digital geographies, and who also seek to remake digital geographies.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Framing the more-than-real in the Anthropocene.- Chapter 3: Digital action, human rights and technology.- Chapter 4: Digital rights and digital justice: defining and negotiating shifting human-technology relations.- Chapter 5: Decolonising digital technologies? Digital geographies and Indigenous peoples.- Chapter 6: Changing climates digitally: More-than-real environments.- Chapter 7: Delivering green digital geographies? More-than-real corporate sustainability and digital technologies.- Chapter 8: Feeling the digital Anthropocene.- Chapter 9: Feminist digital spaces.- Chapter 10: Australian feminist digital activism.- Chapter 11: 'It's just coding': Disability activism in, and about, digital spaces.- Chapter 12: Conclusion: Thinking with the more-than-real.
About the author
Jessica McLean is a lecturer in the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research focuses on two areas: digital geographies and water cultures. Both research areas call for critical, engaged and situated research praxis, building on partnership approaches with community groups and individuals who are working in Indigenous, feminist and digital rights contexts. Jessica has published in a range of academic and accessible publications on topics relating to environmental justice, digital lives and the Anthropocene.
