Sensing the City, Surveilling the Body: Algorithmic Urbanism and Affective Governance

Contemporary urban environments have become digital sensor-based citadels, pervasively integrating digital technologies into the fabric of everyday life. From the algorithmically-managed flows of 'smart city' infrastructures, emotional recognition cameras, and down to the granular biometric monitoring of bodies in workplaces, homes, and leisure spaces, this session questions the relationship between sensory experience and digital systems. Yet the experiential and sensory dimensions of these urban transformations remain undertheorized. As top-down high-tech systems increasingly intervene within civic spaces and help constitute a new urban-environmental milieu of surveillance - e.g. Andrejevic and Burdon’s (2015) "sensor society", Byler (2021, 2022) updating Agamben’s notion of ‘camps’ into the “digital camp”, Zuboff’s (2018) formulation of “surveillance capitalism”, Easterling’s (2016) “extrastatecraft” - city dwellers negotiate these apparatuses through the cultivation of embodied alertness, tacit knowledge, and affective attunements - including disappointment, stress, or even playful resistance. With increasingly cemented partnerships between state authority and private tech corporations, such apparatuses impose new forms of technological re-burdening that fall unevenly across lines of class, race, gender, and ability.

For this session, we invite theoretically-engaged, inter-disciplinary papers that engage with areas such as:

• The surveillance of physiological and affective states in workplaces and public space
• The governance of urban populations through data, and modes and techniques of resistance
• Tacit knowledge, embodied navigation, and urban coping
• Platform capitalism, digital labor, and new regimes of accumulation
• Resistance, refusal, and counter-practices in datafied urban space
• Experiences of the gendered and raced body in urban/digital infrastructures