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Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of ‘cruel optimism’. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an ‘object’ holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of ambivalence to Berlant's thought, as well as their orientation to overdetermination and incoherence. Geographers and others have found in the concept a way of understanding the intersection between affective and political economies in the crisis-present following the 2008 financial crisis. Together with Berlant's linked concepts such as ‘crisis ordinariness’ and ‘impasse’, cruel optimism has offered a way of understanding why detachment can be so difficult and how damaging conditions endure. Contributors begin from these starting points, amplifying the concept's promise: a new way of researching and writing about the reproduction of ordinary damage and harm. By writing from diverse encounters with Berlant's work, they move the concept in multiple directions, juxtaposing it with other optimisms across a variety of empirical scenes and locations. The result is a repository of what cruel optimism, and Berlant's mode of thinking-feeling more broadly, offer geographers and others. publishedVersion Non

We offer an engagement with the generous responses to our article, ‘Feeling Otherwise’. We think with the authors who responded to our paper to sketch out an affirmative way to understand the concept of ambivalence. We clarify key points, reflect on the responses, and make suggestions for ways to explore this topic further. publishedVersion Non

Racism, sexism, and homophobia have long been characteristic of liberal democracy in North America. Public discussion around harassment - with a particular focus on sexual violence against women - ...

Scholars have recently begun to account for the absence of feminist analyses in the popular and academic discourse surrounding ‘the future of work’. In this article we offer a critical synthesis of emerging research from feminist economic geography to propose a series of questions about the future of work, conceptualized as both an object of intellectual inquiry and an emerging empirical reality. Feminist economic geography emphasizes difference, embodiment, and conceives of workplaces as dynamic, uneven, and untidy spaces, an emphasis which can help recenter discussions about the future of work on workers and their experience of work. Our discussion features a series of analytically rigorous, theoretically informed, and empirically rich conference papers, organized around three critical questions: Who are the subjects of the future of work? What counts as work? And where should we look? We highlight a broad concept of work developed through debates among feminist scholars across disciplinary fields as a key frame for understanding the global economy, including difference, social reproduction, and the spatial division of labor. Feminist economic geographers are pluralizing the subjects, forms, and geographies of work, which may help enhance our understanding of the future of work in economic geography.

Sexuality, Subjectivity, and LGBTQ Militancy in the United States by Guillaume Marche, recently translated by Katherine Throssell, charts developments in US lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, que...

Long working hours have become a normal and expected characteristic of employment in many sectors in the Global North. In this paper I examine subjective and affective experiences of overwork that ...

In this commentary, we explore the idea of detachment that we see as central to Anderson's notion of attachment but that nevertheless does not take centre stage in the paper. We situate detachment not as attachment's antithesis, opposite, or negative, but as its structural condition and as irretrievably interwoven with attachment. Through Berlant's recent writing, we foreground the notion of ambivalence as a way to think about the complexity of attachment–detachment and to foreground politics and differences in these processes. Then, we draw on abolitionist writers like Gilmore and Lewis to highlight the complicated intersection of structural and affective attachment and to consider the possible intellectual and political stakes of pursuing a geography of attachment. publishedVersion

This paper is an inquiry into the process of defining the parameters of economic geography research from both a methodological and epistemological point of view. I ask what it means that research parameters are often difficult to define, while also acknowledging that strictly defining research may be disadvantageous in efforts to retain complexity and nuance. I draw on research with startup firms in San Francisco, California and Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario and insights from feminist economic geography and post-structuralist theory. ‘Startup,’ as denoting at once a discourse and an actual type of firm or working practice, is privileged by economic policy in both the US and Canada as promising regional economic development driven by technological- and knowledge-based forms of entrepreneurship. Startup purports a new, modern, and innovative form of work. Yet separating out the startup discourse from startups themselves, e.g., for purposes pertaining to the practicalities of research design, can be difficult. I argue that it may be useful to hold open the definition of one’s research objects, in order to allow multiple understandings of terms to proliferate, so as not to circumscribe in advance the set of interpretations that might otherwise be possible. I make this argument through two interrelated claims: first a methodological claim around what it means to define research around the term startup; and second an epistemological claim about how uncertain terms like startup can be conceptualized as economic performatives. I situate these two claims as a prism for thinking through the complexity and problematic of defining research in general.

I present a cultural geographical analysis of the recent choral composition Considering Matthew Shepard. I explore the cultural, musical, and emotional geographies of this piece of music, in terms of its content and my experience of rehearsing and then performing the piece as a member of the choir. Drawing on cultural geography, musical geography, and queer theory, I argue that the memorializing of Matthew Shepard’s killing through this musical setting both repeats and challenges the normative popular and academic framings of Shepard’s murder and, more generally, queer critiques of the memorialization and historicization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer pasts. I explore this by examining three spatial themes in Considering Matthew Shepard: its representations of (1) Wyoming, (2) the fence (where Shepard was left by his assailants), and (3) universality. I also point to what musical geographies might gain in looking more closely at choral music performance.

This commentary explores some of the threads developed by the editors of Dialogues in Human Geography in light of the recent publication and online conversation surrounding our article, ‘Citation Matters’. We examine the precariousness of academic speech, question when it’s necessary to conscientiously disengage from dialogue, and posit whiteness as a limit of and condition for dialogue. We frame this around the claim, building further on Mouffe’s concept of agonism, that different speech acts, in particular within spheres like the academy, and especially in the absence of a clear foundation for dialogue, can be viewed from a point of view of nonequivalence.

Drawing on recent research in feminist and cultural economic geography, as well as queer and affect theory, in this paper I examine the construction of ideas of workplace culture in the context of digital media work in San Francisco. I argue that in this context, workplace culture is produced as an idea that functions to describe certain individuals and behaviors as in or out of alignment with the firm’s established and gendered norms. I frame these observations around a discussion of affect and emotion in the workplace through a critical examination of interviews with workers in this setting. Drawing on Ngai’s framing of confidence as the tone of capitalism, and Berlant’s notion of underperformativity, I emphasize the gendered and affective dimensions of accumulation in the digital media sector, and how ideas of culture are discursively and materially constructed rather than natural or existing prior to their circumstances of production. In a practical sense, reproductions of a culture–economy dualism implicate gendered and other forms of discrimination in the workplace in terms of hiring practices, uneven distributions of (often emotional and unremunerated) work, and how difference in the workplace is valued or undermined.

This introduction to the themed section ‘Queering Code/Space’ poses the question: what is the spatial relationship between technology and sexuality? We outline two overarching issues concerning technology and sexuality that lie outside of yet intersect with discussions in geographical scholarship. We then detail the characteristics of two largely distinct schools of thought – software studies and queer theory – to examine the tensions of and correspondence between these separate intellectual systems. We assess what might be productively found at the intersections of software studies and queer theory in terms of their respective epistemological approaches toward the topics of technology and sexuality. We briefly outline the effects the combination of software studies and queer theory have had on geography and what more they might have to offer. We conclude by providing an overview of the articles in the themed section.

An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation thought conscientiously can also be a feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance that demonstrates engagement with those authors and voices we want to carry forward. We argue for a conscientious engagement with the politics of citation as a geographical practice that is mindful of how citational practices can be a tool for either t...

The mutual production of space by sexuality and technology has been differently addressed in the often-disparate disciplinary pursuits of queer geographies and critical studies of technology in geography. Building on Dodge and Kitchin’s ‘code/space,’ we highlight how studies of technology in geography are already concerned with questions of sexuality through the examination of biopolitics and the regulation of bodies, together with the (re-)establishment of new and old lines between the public and the private. The immanence of sexuality in code/space foregrounds the importance of spatial processes characterised by their difference and normativity in the geographies of technology. Queer geographies critically examine such different experiences and processes of differentiation through space in their nuanced conceptualisations of spatial regulation and transgression. We illustrate how these two bodies of geographical scholarship might be synthesised by outlining three approaches for studies of ‘queer code/space.’ To show how there are a variety of relationships between sexuality, code, and space, we play on the double entendre of ‘code’ as a set of social rules and norms, and ‘code’ as the set of algorithmic instructions underlying software systems. In both senses, codes constrain forms of intimate life, but can also transgress, disrupt, and distribute the norm. To queer code/space is to emphasise the complexities of difference and normativity in living with technologies, where technologies might both proliferate and regulate socio-spatial experience.

Contemporary practices of sex and intimacy are increasingly digitally mediated. In this paper, we identify two distinctly spatial effects of these mediations. First, the digital extends the spaces of sex/uality beyond the immediately proximate, simultaneously expanding the potential for non-human object choice in intimate encounters. Second, the digital intensifies the experiential fidelity of intimate encounters by folding the remote into the spatially immediate, such that non-proximate intimate relations with human subjects as well as non-human objects may feel more proximate. We articulate these effects by building on and contributing to developments in the geographies of encounter, which allows us to bring together theories and conceptual framings of intimacy, digitality and sexuality in a uniquely spatial register. These effects of extension and intensification resonate in a selection of empirical examples of digitally mediated sex/uality that we place along continuums of more-and-less human and more-and-less proximate. These continuums comprise the conceptual axes of a heuristic framework that we advance to both (i) capture particular points at which configurations of spaces, practices and subject/object choices of sex crystallize given conditions of pervasive digital mediation, and (ii) provoke further interrogations of the multiple ways in which sex, sexuality and intimacy are recast by the digital.

In this paper I offer a critical analysis of ‘sharing’ as a discursive formation in the emerging on-demand economy or, as its more commonly known, ‘sharing’ economy. The set of firms and digital platforms that constitute the on-demand economy evade precise definition, though in popular commentary include Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Couchsurfing, and Yelp, among others. I argue that sharing is a discursive formation that is produced through neoliberal economic practices and contributes to their constitution and performance, connoting the embeddedness and inter-determination of the economic with the social. I analyze interview material with software developers and others working for on-demand economy firms in San Francisco to underscore how the sharing discourse is produced, and to examine the possible relationship between the sharing discourse and working practices in the on-demand economy. I explore how sharing, though a fragile and contested discourse, has been used by some proponents of the on-demand economy in an attempt to justify and normalize flexible and precarious work through an ambiguous association between capitalist exchange and altruistic social values. This ambiguity is productive insofar as sharing has become associated variously with transactional platforms, digital peer review via surveillant and punitive ratings systems, and algorithmically mediated, precarious, and ‘entrepreneurial’ contract work, while retaining affective associations with community, inclusion, and participation.

The concept of difference has long been integral to geographical thought. However, it is rare for geographers to consider precisely what difference is, or how it functions, and there are several contrasting traditions through which difference is understood. We argue that geographers could helpfully extend their theorizations of difference through Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘difference-in-itself’. We examine the value of a ‘difference-in-itself’ that views difference as generative, originary, and primary, in productive tension with conceptions of difference that tend to, purposefully or otherwise, subordinate difference to presupposed identity-based, representational categories, or dialectical forms of contradiction and opposition.

This chapter examines the queer temporalities of the internet. Our starting point is that space cannot be adequately theorised without reference to time. Geographers have theorised the spatial structure of internet infrastructures, but they have paid less attention to the temporal structure of these systems. Contemporary queer theory provides analyses of temporality as a critique of the heteronormative-reproductive times of state-capitalism, which also characterise imaginaries of digital systems. Instead of the internet as a necessarily futuristic invention, we demonstrate the necessity of thinking through the concrete histories and embodied presents of the internet. We first conceptualise internet infrastructures as historical anachronism—evidence of the continuing inequalities of colonialism. Then we examine how queer presence online can lend itself to a troubling of modern temporalities.

The list below is a selection of queer Internet studies (QIS) literature that, far from a comprehensive list, as a jumping off point for those looking to undertake research on the Internet from a queer perspective, or who are looking to do research with queer communities online. We offer this list as a complement and extension to the proceedings and articles in order to show the breadth and depth of QIS at work.

In this paper I examine entrepreneurial work in San Francisco's digital media sector to consider how affect and desire are invested in sites of neoliberal production. Drawing on recent writing on affect, I treat affect as ambivalent and coextensive with the mode of production, suggesting an approach that looks beyond the investment of value in commodities, to how desire is produced and directly located in economic infrastructures. Entrepreneurial affect functions through the embodiment of work as a site of personal “satisfaction,” the development of passionate attachments to that work, and the production of working subjectivities characterized by their “compulsory sociality.” I argue that affect functions through entrepreneurial forms of digital media work to produce and reproduce attachments to precarious working conditions. Drawing on recent debates on precariousness and precarity, I reflect on the possible consequences of affective attachments to entrepreneurial work as a primary site for the justification of precarious work practices and neoliberal modes of governance in general.

In this response, the members of a professional development graduate seminar at the University of Kentucky reflect on key implications and questions which arose from our reading of the Kitchin et al. (2013) paper. We found the paper very relevant to our situation as potential entrants to the academic labor market, and to practices of knowledge production and dissemination that we already face. We highlight the following three inter-related points: (1) The IrelandAfterNAMA (IAN) blog can be placed into a wider context of new (spatial) media developments; (2) the conception of “public geography” implied here is too narrow, focusing not on public participation, but on public reception of content, viewpoints and data. Thus we ask “which publics are being invoked?”; (3) the production and consumption of knowledge. We ask “whose geography?” We do not offer final answers to these questions, but rather pose them as an invitation to further dialogue.

In this paper I explore the relationship between the production and the value of Big Data. In particular I examine the concept of social media ‘prosumption’—which has predominantly been theorized from a Marxist, political economic perspective—to consider what other forms of value Big Data have, imbricated with their often speculative economic value. I take the example of social media firms in their early stages of operation to suggest that, since these firms do not necessarily generate revenue, data collected through user contributions do not always realize economic value, at least in a Marxist sense, and that, in addition to their speculative value, these data have value beyond an economic valence. Instead I argue that in addition to their function as systems for accumulation, social media and their associated data have an affective value, related closely to their economic value, and demonstrate the efficacy of social media as systems designed for the appropriation and circulation of user attention.