Earlier this month, Danielle and Sam travelled to Lisbon to attend the Digital Geographies conference. This was the fourth edition of Digital Geographies, and the theme for 2025 was ‘Artificial Geographies: opening the black box for a new wave of critical thinking’. The conference examined the ways digital technologies are reshaping territories, and the implications and challenges of this for governance, inequality and more.
Image: the conference opening panel of Yanliu Lin, Chun Yang, Dylan Brady, Mario Vale (chair) and Paulo Morgado
Danielle and Sam organised a session titled ‘Data Voids: Understanding Digital Geographies of the Built Environment through Negativity and Refusal’. You can read the full call for papers here. The session was generative and sparked discussions across a range of fields, with presentations from Shahriar Khonsari and Lin Zhang. Khonsari examined silences and absences in the system, conceiving of them not as gaps or errors, but as voids that are actively produced for different reasons. Looking at the context of Iran, Khonsari argued that, on the one hand, the state uses invisibility as a weapon to delegitimise marginal communities, and that, on the other hand, citizens actively erase themselves to survive. Khonsari looked at the example of informal settlements in Iran, and spoke of the act of building an illegal home as committing an act of data refusal through creating a data void.
Lin Zhang discussed initial findings from the UKRI/ERC-funded GENERATE project, led by Prof. Saska Petrova. The project aims to offer original insights into the social, spatial, and political inequalities that drive energy related injustices, and struggles linked to the growth of new low-carbon energy production in disadvantaged regions and communities. Zhang applied the ideas of data feminism (a way of thinking about data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a commitment to action, and by intersectional feminist thought) to both survey and critique existing quantitative research into energy poverty.
In their own presentation, Danielle and Sam examined the potentialities and possible contradictions of bringing together ideas of critical refusal and negative geographies, articulating these concepts through examples drawn from the Data Stories project. Firstly, they discussed the relationships between data and the politics of land and property, considering how attempting to grasp the world through data always also means contending with absences of various kinds. Secondly, they proposed critical refusal as a tool and practice which holds promise in responding to data harms, with capacity to shape the production of existing and possible alternative trajectories.
Image: Danielle Hynes and Samuel Mutter present “Half the houses built don’t exist”: Questions of absence and refusal in the case of Irish housing, planning and property data at Digital Geographies
Danielle and Sam concluded that, while the two concepts have divergent foci, there is value in considering negative geographies together with refusal. Where negative geographies invites researchers to stay with absences, gaps, voids and shadows, resisting the impulse to quickly resolve them, one key aspect of critical refusal is its generative potential. As such, it was proposed that, in the spaces of negative geography, areas for refusal may emerge.
They closed with a series of questions which remain open-ended: Could the framing of negative geographies attune us to imagining systems that could build on or even expand existing absences in ways that lead to more just alternatives? Could this assist us in avoiding what, in the context of prison and police abolitionism, is widely referred to as ‘reformist reforms’ (those that add money, power or resources to the prison-industrial-complex)? But, at the same time, does bringing critical refusal into conversation with negative geography contradict or undercut its core tenets?
We thank the conference organisers for their work and our session presenters and participants for their thoughtful engagement.