7–8 November 2025 in Frankfurt am Main
Digital geographies of valuation: platforms, technologies, narratives
Research interests in the heterogeneous field of digital geographies range from critical inquiries into geodata and their material infrastructures to socio-technical transformations through information and communication technologies. In this year’s annual meeting, the AK Digitale Geographien brings together digital geographies scholars with researchers in adjacent disciplines working on questions of valuation and value. Everyday valuations through digital technologies are now as ubiquitous as they are incidental, attaching intensities of economic, aesthetic or ethical value to all sorts of materials in real time and with fine-grained geographic precision. Simultaneously, externalised costs of these operations are increasingly apparent, as “zombie” blockchain schemes continue to consume vast resources and the AI industry aims to disrupt fundamental relations of society.
Reading literature from valuation studies against digital geographies texts, three fields of tension emerge. First, if value has always occupied the murky ground between objective fact and subjective perception, the digital era may have exaggerated this confusion. Digital valuations tend towards seemingly objective and normative precision in space and time, but these valuations are accompanied by a heightened possibility for partiality and personalisation of place. Second, although tech start-ups have little or no revenue or tangible assets, they often receive extraordinary valuations through venture capital. Here, economic value is entangled with techno-utopian narratives and cults of personality, and decoupled from mechanisms of market exchange and material activities of labour. Third, the promise of open digital infrastructures and equal access has been revoked, as assets and control accumulate in a few corporations. Platformisation entails the capture of digital infrastructures and internet commons by private actors: protocols and standards are increasingly contended for economic interest and market share.
In this year’s annual meeting, we seek to unpack digital geographies through questions of value and explore what digital technologies signify for valuation processes. In addition to contributions from other fields of digital geographies, we invite papers that tackle research on the following topics:
- data and the measurement of value
- values as norms of digital life and work
- valuation, temporality and future-making
- valuation of space, property and assets
- start-ups, FinTech and venture capital
- private and public value
- a “digital labour theory of value” and beyond
- ethical evaluation and affective value
- digital commons and internet activism
- governance and regulation (of digital infrastructures)
The conference languages will be German and English, and contributions in both languages are welcome. In your submission, please indicate the language(s) in which you would feel comfortable giving your presentation.
Please submit your abstract (max. 300 words) by 27 June 2025 to ffm-2025@digitale-geographien.de.
Registrations will open in mid-March.
The organising team:
Alexandra Wirobek
Alina Gombert
Anna Verwey
Lizzie Richardson
Malenka Nicol
Marc Boeckler
Robert Lämmchen
Till Straube