Commentary | Open Access
Thinking Geomedia Futures: Indigenous Futurisms, Afrofuturisms, and Counter-Mediations of Temporality, Spatiality, and Digitality
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Abstract: For critical scholars, abiding concerns about geomedia futures have included utopian–dystopian formulations of geomedia in popular culture and governance, the deep harms and inequalities that inevitably flow from technocapitalist geomedia regimes, and the urgent need for a plurality of counter-normative ways of theorizing and engaging geomedia. Toward these concerns, I argue here that Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism hold vital conceptual and analytic insights for thinking and realizing geomedia futures that assemble time, space, and digitality in just and life-sustaining ways. Here, I briefly explore work by geographers, historians, and digital studies scholars that has engaged Indigenous and Black feminist speculative traditions to critique the structural, embodied, and emplaced violence of racial capitalist and settler colonial histories, chronopolitics, and futures. The minoritarian futures expressed and circulated through speculative fiction, visual arts, everyday digital practices, and technocultures by structurally-oppressed groups for whom the future has never been taken for granted hold vital conceptual and analytical insights for thinking geomedia futures beyond the limits of its technocapitalist roots and present structures.
Keywords: Afrofuturism; digital geographies; geomedia; Indigenous futurism; speculative imagination
Published:
Issue:
Vol 12 (2024): Geomedia Futures: Imagining Tomorrow’s Mediatized Places and Place-Based Technologies
© Sarah Elwood. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.