Abstract This chapter asks how the politics of land is affected by the emergence of digital technologies, which infuse and penetrate all sectors of life and yield an intense, fast-paced, connected, and problematic digital life for billions of people. It focuses first on the context of the technological transformations that are shaping all aspects of society. Second, it examines the developments affecting the food system and agrarian sectors, especially the new frontiers of “precision agriculture” in global North and global South contexts. It examines the form digitalization is taking, while taking into consideration the technologies and practices in development, and the logics and rationalities underpinning them. Finally, it asks why and how digitalization matters for those engaged in resistance and struggles against dominant trends shaping the politics of land. Digital technologies shape—and have a role to play in exploring—new horizons of resistance regarding food sovereignty construction and in the development of a politics of land capable of responding to the effects of climate change in the twenty-first century.

I argue that confronting climate change requires conceptualizing and crafting a post-carbon planetary politics focused on removing carbon from the atmosphere. A focal point for beginning to build this politics should be carbon removal networks. I conceptualize these networks as vehicles that tap diverse knowledge domains (from sciences such as ecology or chemistry to activism and the law) to establish a planetary-wide political alliance which removes carbon while delivering nutrition, shelter, and care to populations in all manner of geographical settings. Such networks would mobilize the cooperative and collaborative power of civil society to establish an extensive, significant, and as yet under-recognized, 'civil society carbon sink.' I then suggest astute political organizing might take advantage of contemporary (and emerging) technologies to build such alliances and amplify the potential impact of organizing to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

This paper presents a critical examination of smart farming. I follow other critical analyses in recognizing the centrality of innovation processes in generating smart farming products, services, arrangements, and problematic outcomes. I subsequently use insights from critical human geography scholarship on the significance of understanding topological transformations to move beyond interpretations that identify only a narrow range of smart farming problems, such as a lack of coordination or limited uptake by farmers. Instead, I examine a broader set of challenges produced by smart farming developments. The overriding concern, I argue, is that smart farming unfolds via the production of numerous ‘misconfigured innovations.’ Using insights from literature on responsible research and innovation I then probe the stakes of looking beyond the misconfigured innovations of smart farming and discuss how new technologies might come to play a role in producing emancipatory smart farming. I pay attention to research on the ‘internet of people,’ which paints a stark new picture of social life generally, and in particular how rural life might be computed and calculated according to new conceptualizations of sociality and spatiality.

This paper considers some of what it means to work with, and within the limits to, Marxism. I make reference to two sets of inquiries where Marxism matters but remains at the margins of things. My focus will be on human cognition and digital life. To balance things, I then highlight some issues where Marxism is much more to the fore, specifically what I loosely refer to as "foodscapes." Finally, I conclude the essay with some further personal comments on my engagement with Marxism. Throughout, I want to give some expression to the sensation of walking a fine line between remaining committed to the conclusion that capitalist social relations are an enormous problem for human society but finding also that Marxism does not provide enough of the analytical equipment to answer how we should move beyond it. At the same time, I try to offer reflections on critical intellectual thought and action as a tentative and iterative experience, rather than an engagement framed by the security that one can find enough of what’s needed in Marxism.

This chapter calls attention to new connections between digital technologies and food that can be found all across the world. It scrutinizes these developments against the light of an environment-development nexus engineered by mainstream development theorists, which assumes that an embrace of digital technologies in and across food systems will boost “development” and reduce the environmental impact of “modern” agricultural practices. The chapter uses materials on emerging configurations in the digital-infused food system to probe the possibilities for critical subjects to blend technical proficiencies to create alternative, conceivably more just, digital futures than those called forth by the well-established and many new firms using digital devices and services to generate and capture value across the food system.

Concerns regarding the prevalence of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) have led some critical public health scholars to propose analyses of the “double burden of neoliberalism.” In turn, analysts shine a light on corporate power and how it is mobilized to create a food system that works, in the first place, for capital. This paper builds on these contributions to argue that getting to grips with corporate power in the food and drinks industry requires looking beyond its instrumentality or short-range functionality and developing an understanding of its mode of operation and longer-range objectives. I specifically propose focusing on the way corporations push for and territorialize “selective openness.” The ongoing iterative task facing firms is constructing geographical arrangements that suit their respective but sometimes collective requirements to establish as much control as possible over the conduits connecting capitalists in any particular place to the wider, chaotic, throwntogether, and contingency-laden world. My empirical reference point is the practice of corporate power in Ireland as it was expressed in corporate lobbying activities and during parliamentary hearings on childhood “obesity and political debates about the country’s sugar tax.

Technological change has given rise to the so-called 'digital revolution' (DR). How the DR affects food sovereignty (FS) construction remains unclear. This paper explores a balanced point of view, which highlights some key reasons why the DR is bad news for FS but also identifies features of the DR that could bolster FS construction. At the centre of the argument is the concept 'data curation,' which connects data-laden, algorithm-infused capitalist enterprises to users of diverse technology services and devices. I examine how data curation is practized by capitalist enterprises in the food sector, focusing in particular on developments pursued by the British food retailer Ocado. I then examine three forms of data curation of relevance to FS construction. Emphasizing the urgency of attending to these new dynamics of FS construction, I conclude the paper with a call for further research on data curation practices of relevance to FS scholars and activists.

On July 8th 2019, Ronan Paddison, founding editor of Space and Polity (from 1997–) and for over two decades Editor-in-Chief of the journal, sadly died. Under Ronan’s stewardship, Space and Polity h...

The spaces of/for (human and non -human) life are inescapably infused and bound up with the digital. The concept of 'data colonialism' has emerged against this general backdrop, connecting fruitfully with research on 'digital geographies' and a broader 'critical data studies' literature. 'Curation' is frequently invoked in these contributions, although the experiences taking shape when digital subjects curate digital geographies in an era of data colonialism have not been given sufficient attention. In response, this paper uses an autoethnography of everyday digital practices to probe the possibilities and constraints in play when digital subjects curate digital geographies. The analysis reviews how 'iterative interplays' and 'constellations of contingencies' are given vitality when digital geographies of 'flow' and 'territory' are pursued. The paper concludes with observations and provocations for future research on what we might refer to as 'data curation.'

Drum 'n' bass music has received some attention from academics but the contributions of MCs who perform onstage alongside DJs in live events and broadcasts needs further consideration. In response, and using MC lyrics, secondary interviews and Tweets, this article is a critical of what MCs bring to British drum 'n' bass. The critique concerns the content of what MCs say, some of which I argue undermines the cultural and economic potential of the music. The celebration explores what MCs bring to drum 'n' bass, particularly practices that I suggest should be viewed as community services. I therefore argue that MCs are community workers, providing, leading, building and networking in ways that help generate solidarity, reciprocity, and alliances within and across an overlapping and diverse world of drum 'n' bass.

Sugar consumption recently has become an object of political deliberation in the context of public health concerns about “obesity” and high prevalence rates of type 2 diabetes. Mexico has attracted significant attention in this regard, especially since its government introduced a “sugar tax” in 2013. The sugar tax was widely acclaimed by public health campaigners as a victory amidst an otherwise corporate-run foodscape. In this article, I interrogate the political debate over the tax as it played out in the Mexican Congress in 2013 and 2015. Analysis of political debates has value when it takes seriously the sociospatial constitution of the economy and its unending iterability. Debates illuminate interrelations among space, markets, and resistance; that is, core issues engaged by scholars in geography (and beyond) in the light of the expanding scope and depth of market relations. I argue that the debate sheds light on the concept of “foodscapes of hope,” to which geographers have turned to summarize new spatial formations regarding the production and consumption of food. Specifically, I argue that foodscapes of hope emerge via processes of “marketization”—and using the political debate regarding Mexico's sugar tax I demonstrate how geography is drawn on and reproduced when marketization occurs. Space, markets, and resistance are bound up with one another in complex interassociations. Against this backdrop, the frontiers of intellectual deliberation on “alternative” social formations must engage the full significance of market relations, a challenge that geographers are well placed to meet.

This article uses archival documents concerning Herbert Gladstone, first Governor-General of the Union of South Africa from 1910 to 1914, to explore the enactment of iterative power. Iterative power focuses on the inevitable fallibility of individual decision-makers who respond to, and seek to alter, the spatial arrangement of diverse materials and flows. Focusing on Gladstone's interaction with a critical incident in 1914, the article reveals how he imagined altering the country's unique geography but yet how the iterative power he expressed was ultimately incapable of negotiating the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, race, and the imperial project in South Africa.

Con base en documentos de archivo relacionados con Herbert Gladstone, primer gobernador general de la Unión Sudafricana de 1910 a 1914, se explora la adopción del poder iterativo, centrado en la inevitable falibilidad de las personas encargadas de la toma de decisiones, que responden a la disposición espacial de diversos materiales y flujos, y tratan de alterarlos. Centrándose en la interacción de Gladstone en un incidente crítico en 1914, se revela cómo imaginó alterar la geografía única del país; sin embargo, también se evidencia la manera en que el poder iterativo que él manifestó, finalmente, fue incapaz de gestionar la dinámica de la acumulación capitalista, de la cuestión racial y del proyecto imperial en Sudáfrica.

Developments in the area of 'precision agriculture' are creating new data points (about flows, soils, pests, climate) that agricultural technology providers 'grab', aggregate, compute and/or sell. Food producers now churn out food and, increasingly, data. 'Land grabs' on the horizon in the global south are bound up with the dynamics of data grabbing, although hitherto researchers have not revealed enough about the people and projects at issue. Against this backdrop, this paper examines some key issues taking shape, while highlighting new frontiers for research and introducing the concept 'data sovereignty', which food sovereignty practitioners (and others) need to begin considering.

In this short position paper we examine some of the dimensions and dynamics of the algorithmic age by considering three broad questions. First, what are the problematic consequences of life mediated by ‘algorithm machines’? Second, how are individuals or groups and associations resisting the problems they encounter? Third, how might the algorithmic age be re-envisioned and re-made in more normative terms? We focus on two key aspects of living with ubiquitous computing, ‘acceleration’ and ‘data grabbing,’ which we contend are two of the most prominent and problematic features of the algorithmic age. We then begin to shed light on the sorts of practices that constitute slow computing responses to these issues. In the conclusion, we make the case for a widescale embrace of slow computing, which we propose is a necessary step for society to make the most of the undeniable opportunities for radical social change emerging from contemporary technological