Welcome Digital Geographers
The Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers supports scholarship and pedagogy that advance our understanding of how digital objects and practices produce space, place, and social relations. We bring together a diverse community of scholars whose work centers the digital as object, subject and medium of geographical knowledge and practice.
The Digital Geographies Specialty Group operates within the American Association of Geographers, advocating for and supporting pluralistic scholarship on the relationship between emerging forms of digital life, critical perspectives on (and practices in) spatial data science, and the production of new spatialities.
We invite you to get involved. Please feel free to reach out to our membership, listed below.
Leadership
Ryan Burns, PhD
Chair Affiliate Professor, University of Washington Bothell Ryan works at the intersections of GIScience, digital human geographies, urban studies, political economy, and Science & Technology Studies. Much of his research questions how people, places, and knowledge come to be encoded as data, and then analyzed and acted upon through other digital objects, practices, and spatialities. burnsr77@gmail.com
Will Payne, PhD
Vice Chair Assistant Professor, Rutgers University Will uses quantitative and qualitative methods to study the relationship between geospatial technologies and urban inequality, examining how changing technical capabilities, labor relations, and competitive pressures in the location-based services (LBS) industry interact with processes of racialized and class-based segregation in American cities. will.b.payne@rutgers.edu
Emma Fraser, PhD
Secretary/Treasurer Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley Emma’s research considers digital culture, space and place, modern ruins, and visual media in relation to urban experience and the writings of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. Emma also researches and writes about games and play across sociology, geography, game studies and media and cultural theory. emma.fraser@berkeley.edu
Shiloh Deitz, PhD
Board Member At-Large Assistant Professor, Saint Louis University Shiloh Deitz is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University. She studies infrastructural inequality and its uneven effects, applying disability justice theory to reimagine data science, AI, and GIS. shiloh.deitz@slu.edu
Genevieve Reid, PhD
Board Member At-Large Assistant Professor, Florida International University Genevieve's research looks at issues of spatial data science in Indigenous contexts and adopts a critical GIScience perspective to interrogate ways in which mapping and geospatial technologies reinforce power dynamics in society.
Nasha Virata
Student Representative PhD Candidate, Rutgers University Nasha is a PhD Candidate in Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Her research combines spatial, computational and qualitative analyses to trace how digital platforms reorganize urban space while channeling value into transnational circuits of capital. nasha.virata@rutgers.edu