Author: Juliette Davret

From 21 to 23 May, the annual French conference SAGEO (Spatial Analysis and Geomatics) took place in the historic city of Avignon, France. Juliette Davret, the French touch of our team, attended to present our research.

Day 1 – Supporting Early-Career Researchers 

The conference began with a workshop aimed at early-career researchers, focusing on the transition from academia to the public or private sector. It was a valuable and honest discussion, offering practical advice and personal experiences to help guide young researchers in shaping their future paths.

To wrap up the day, attendees enjoyed a guided tour of Avignon’s historic center, exploring the medieval architecture, narrow streets, and cultural landmarks like the Papal Palace. It was a great way to discover the city.

Day 2 – Parallel sessions and a taste of local life

The second day of SAGEO featured two sets of parallel sessions. In the morning, participants chose between Image Processing and Spatial Metrics, Graphs, Relation and Scales. Both offering in-depth presentations and new insights.

In the afternoon, attention shifted to sessions on Artificial Intelligence in Geomatics and Mapping, Spatialisation, and Geovisualisation, showcasing creative approaches to geographic data and emerging technologies.

That evening everyone gathered for a dinner at a “Guinguette” – a traditional, laid-back riverside restaurant typical of the region. It was the perfect setting to relax and connect with fellow researchers over good food and conversation.

Day 3 – Presenting on Digital Data

On the final day, Juliette presented our team’s recent work in the Digital Data session. This panel featured seven presentations exploring a wide range of topics: from digital globes and emotional cartography to coastal risk analysis and educational mapping tools. The room was full, and the discussions were lively and thoughtful.

Juliette presented the following paper:

Kitchin R., Davret J., Kayanan C. M. & Mutter S. (2025). Data mobilities: rethinking the movement and circulation of digital data. Mobilities, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2025.2481309

At the same time, another session focused on Mobilities was held. In the afternoon the conference concluded with two final parallel sessions on Climate and Biodiversity, bringing ecological themes to the forefront.

The full program of the conference is available here: SAGEO 2025 Program

A successful event

SAGEO 2025 stood out for its high-quality presentations, interdisciplinary themes, and engaged audience. Juliette was grateful for the opportunity to take part and to share our team’s research in such a dynamic environment.

Her participation was supported by Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI) through their Small Grants Scheme, which helped make the trip to Avignon possible.

This edition of SAGEO was not just about research, it was also about the community, collaboration, and celebrating the role of data and spatial analysis in tackling complex challenges.

 

Earlier this month Samuel Mutter and Danielle Hynes attended the Conference of Irish Geographers 2025, held at Queens University over three exceptionally sunny days. Danielle and Sam presented in two sessions: ‘Creative Methodologies’ and ‘Critical Geographies of Housing’.

In Creative Methodologies, Danielle and Sam discussed two aspects of their current work, focusing on their ongoing collaboration with artist Mel Galley on the theme of ‘data narratives’ and nascent work around photographing planning site notices around Ireland. In a presentation titled ‘Telling Data Otherwise: Creating Housing Data Stories through Researcher-Artist Collaboration in Dublin, Ireland’, they reflected on the collaborative process with Mel, tracing the work of artist and researchers to find ways of unsettling, countering or responding to mainstream data narratives of housing and planning through practices such as grid-based story writing. Meanwhile, reflections on site notice photography raised the potential for such approaches to foreground the emplaced and material qualities of data in the built environment.

Two other excellent presentations were delivered in this session. The first was from Gerry Kearns, Isabella Oberlander, Fearghus Ó Conchúir and Karen Till who discussed dance as a form of knowledge and the possibilities of tearmann aiteach / queer sanctuary. The second came from Ruodi Yang, who is exploring public space under neoliberalism through the lens of street performance.  

In the Critical Geographies of Housing session Sam presented findings from CATU’s Eviction Nation report, in place of Fiadh Tubridy who was unable to attend. Danielle presented on work undertaken during her PhD, examining the shift from government managed public housing to NGO-owned and managed community housing. This presentation was in conversation with Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn’s work, who also presented in this session, examining the similar shift from social housing delivered by Local Authorities in Ireland to the increasing growth of the AHB sector.

On the final day, attendees were invited on one of two field trips. Danielle attended a bus tour of Belfast, led by geologist and geophysicist Alastair Ruffell. Attendees visited various sites around Belfast and heard a little about the history of the city. Visiting the peace wall, two graveyards, and the new Grand Central Station (to drop off everyone heading home), Alastair told us some of the history of the city and his part in it as a forensic geologist.

We’d like to thank the organisers for such a wonderful and well run conference, and to all those who attended sessions where we presented and asked such engaged questions.

On Monday the 5th of May, postdoctoral researcher on the Data Stories project Sam Mutter participated in a day of events on Community Action Archiving at the Usher Street Community Centre, Dublin. 

The event was hosted by Tom O’Dea (NCAD) in collaboration with the Liberties Community Development Project and the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), of which Sam is a member. The day was attended by a mixture of artists, community activists (including those from CATU) and NCAD students on the Masters in Art and Social Action.

Led by fellow members of the CATU archiving group Tommy Gavin and Jazz Burns, Sam helped facilitate a workshop practicing cataloguing for the CATU digital archive, using sample materials produced by CATU and other related Irish housing activist groups. Activities involved using a draft intake form developed by the archiving group to catalogue different types of record, from campaign leaflets and social media content, to documents from CATU’s Ard Fheis (Annual General Meetings).    

In a pragmatic sense, the activity provided feedback to the archiving group on how the intake form and associated processes could be clarified or improved with a view to opening up this process to other members via their local branches. However, it simultaneously prompted discussions around the politics of sensitivity and redaction (especially in the current global political climate), and the importance of cataloguing in this context being a collective endeavour which wherever possible involves the creators, users and/or subjects of the data in question.

The CATU workshop joined a selection of other interesting events throughout the day. This included a talk from Josh MacPhee of Interference Archive, based in New York, a brainstorming session around the potential for a physical housing action archive to be established in Dublin, and artistic works from NCAD students made using and in response to materials from the South Inner City Community Development Association (SICCDA) archive. 

Common themes across these sessions included the challenge of creating archives as an accessible space of lively engagement through which communities would feel an attachment to memories and histories, and be inspired to collective action – as opposed to more traditional conceptions of archives as dusty rooms full of carefully indexed boxes. This in turn sparked conversations around the balance to be struck between engagement and preservation, and the question of how archives might be meaningful and useful at a time when community and cultural spaces are frequently fighting against threats of removal in favour of more financially valuable land-uses.   

These discussions will help to shape the CATU archiving group going forward, as well as feeding into the broader findings of the Data Stories project. 

Since January, our project has entered a new phase, launching a fresh series of case studies. While most of these are based in Ireland, we’ve broadened our scope to examine data practices at the European level. Given that Ireland must comply with EU data collection standards, we wanted to explore how European harmonisation shapes data production in Ireland, how data flows across borders, and the political and critical issues surrounding data practices. 

To investigate these questions, Juliette Davret travelled to Luxembourg in late April to meet with representatives from Eurostat and ESPON. At Eurostat, she met with the team responsible for short-term business statistics, and at ESPON, she connected with the team working on the Housing4All project. 

Before these meetings, she also spoke with representatives from Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO). These initial conversations helped her understand how Irish statisticians prepare and submit data to Eurostat and highlighted potential areas of friction or challenge in meeting EU requirements. These insights proved valuable in framing the discussions in Luxembourg.

Meeting with Eurostat representatives shed light on the complexities of data processing and standardisation across EU member states. They discussed the challenges of aligning timelines, addressing national data specificities, and creating entirely new datasets. These obstacles reflect broader tensions between Eurostat’s centralised data strategy and the diverse realities of data production in different countries, in line with what we have observed within Ireland’s own data ecosystem. 

At ESPON, the focus shifted to the topic of housing affordability and the difficulties of developing coherent data narratives at the European scale. Juliette met with both a project manager and a data manager, which offered complementary perspectives. A key challenge discussed was the lack of harmonised datasets, particularly concerning issues like housing vacancies and income. These data gaps make comparisons more difficult and challenge the development of evidence-based policies. The urgency of improving housing data was a recurring theme, especially given the strong role that data-driven narratives play in planning and housing policy across Europe.

This field visit deepened our understanding of the broader European data landscape and how national and EU-level priorities overlap. It also emphasised the importance – and the difficulty – of building comprehensive, harmonised datasets to support effective and equitable policymaking.