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In my previous progress reports I suggested that geographers might attend more to the leaky boundaries of 'science' and 'technology' and to their imbrications in the mundane spaces of the everyday, and that stances of analytical critique might be joined by practices of engaged imagination of alternative lifeworlds in the shadow of the Anthropocene. In this final report, I zoom in on care as a 'concept, emotion, practice, politics, moral exhortation'. This has recently provided a focus for much innovative and impactful research in critical geography. I explore the analytical and political potential of centring care within geographical engagements with science and technology, and suggest that nuanced engagements with the concept contain valuable insights into the everyday geographies of technoscience, and into how practices of care are central to – but not exhaustive of – political strategies for building alternative lifeworlds in uncertain times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world of accelerating environmental crises, global pandemics and seemingly unstoppable datafication of anything that moves, thinks or feels, the politics of science and technology are pervasive. In this first of three progress reports on the geographies of science and technology, I home in on some definitional questions which an account of anything like a new or emerging subfield must necessarily concern itself. I examine how geographers have addressed the spatial effects of the making and unmaking of boundaries between science, technology and their various outsides. While work on historical and contemporary geographies of technoscience has often pulled in slightly different directions, I identify some promising convergences around questions of political economy and on the topic of scale as an emergent property of technoscientific practices. New attention is also falling on the spatial practices through which technoscience gets plugged into wider worlds, such as politics and policymaking, while geographers have also been busy disrupting, in a more experimental mode, conventional boundaries and hierarchies of technoscientific practice. Finally, the report examines recent and welcome efforts to convene new conversations around the geography of technology but cautions against the potential seduction of the new, the innovative and the 'disruptive'. Important recent work in cultural geography has purposively unsettled assumed hierarchies of 'high' and 'low' tech, new and old, and suggests that any nascent subfield of 'geography of technology' needs to reflexively attend to how boundaries get drawn around 'technology', and with what effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conferences are an ubiquitous and important part of political and academic life, acting as key sites of knowledge creation, public performance, legitimation and protest. Reviewing the current literature and drawing on our own work, this paper suggests that geographers are well-placed to provide insight into conferences through the concepts of visibility, performance and space. We explore the politics of academic, climate and geopolitical conferences, focusing on their production of epistemic communities and their role as sites for the performance of ideological positions and identities. We then explore international summits as protest spaces. We draw attention to a number of scales in our analysis, suggesting the need to attend to the global, national, local and micro-scale of conferences to ask what space and location contribute to conference outcomes and how conferences in turn act back on the landscapes in which they are embedded. We conclude with four reasons why we believe that conferences provide a fruitful - and important - focus for research in geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]