Worlding digital geographies: reflections on the situated and uneven geographies of digital-geographical knowledge production

This commentary reflects on the situated and uneven geographies of knowledge production in epistemic communities within digital geographies. It uses the Arbeitskreis Digitale Geographien – a network connecting digital geographers in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland – as an example. Reflections on the development of this community and an exploratory review of publications by its scholars highlight specificities of this regional community and serve as a basis for reflecting on and raising provocations concerning the role of regional communities in knowledge production. The analysis reveals how such communities importantly enrich the diversity of themes and place-based research within digital geographies. At the same time, I argue, they also play a central role in the unequal production of digital-geographical knowledge. First, inequalities among scholarly positions shape which digital geographies become constitutive of the field. Second, the consolidation of thematic and epistemic orientations within digital-geographical communities may reproduce certain epistemic selectivities. Third, while the example of the Arbeitskreis demonstrates that the “geographies of digital geographies” are broader and more regionally diverse than they may initially appear within a largely Anglo-American-dominated field, the fact that three major digital geographies communities that have emerged in recent years are based in the Global North reinforces uneven knowledge production and representation in international digital geographies, ultimately perpetuating a biased history of the field. Hence, this piece advocates for greater efforts to world digital geographies while acknowledging that this perspective, too, arises from a position of privilege within global academia, and thereby emphasises the urgent need to decolonise digital geographies.