CFP: The Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies 

CALL FOR PAPERS

THE VISUAL POLITICS OF DIGITAL ECOLOGIES
A Digital Ecologies Conference: February 2nd – 3rd 2026, University of Oxford


As environmental degradation accelerates apace globally, Nature is becoming increasingly mediated through screens, sensors, and simulations: datafied, downloaded, and deciphered; saved, stored, and shared. Emerging technologies create novel visual regimes through which humans encounter, imagine, and interpret the other-than-human world. These visual regimes are not only technical; they also refashion ecological aesthetics, shaping how environments are perceived, valued, and cared for. Wildlife webcams promise unmediated intimacy with living beings, while Artificial Intelligence (AI) fabricates hallucinatory ecologies untethered from the web of life. “Digital twins” offer ecosystems from an impossible nowhere-everywhere vantage (a rearticulated ‘god trick’), while Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies layer and curate space and attention at the whim of their designers. From TikTok feeds to satellite imagery, these proliferating techniques of visualisaiton not only mediate ecological knowledge but also stage new aesthetic and political relations between humans and their environments.

Visualisation practices—often employed uncritically or devoid of social, cultural, and historical context—form a key part of emergent forms of modelling, prediction, and analysis in science, engineering, and architecture. Emergent visualisation practices are not neutral; they carry material, affective, and political implications for increasingly precarious ecologies. The implications of these practices, therefore, fundamentally alter the politics of environmental governance and knowledge. From the advertising boards of property developers to contemporary documentary film, this emerging visual regime is characterised by, among other things, curation, artificiality, and abundance. What is at stake, then, in this evolving visual politics of ecologies? How might we characterise this emerging visual regime? How is nature visually presented?

This in-person conference invites contributions from academics, artists, and practitioners interested in the visual politics of digital ecologies. We aim to collectively explore visual metaphors prevalent in the mediation of more-than-human worlds to interrogate how digital technologies are refashioning ecological aesthetics. We invite 20-minute papers with one-word titles that speak to a particular action of visualisation, for example: reflecting, hallucinating, refracting, zooming, obscuring, glitching, layering, pixelating, blurring, filtering, operating, mirroring, generating. Following the conference, our intention is to publish a collection detailing this lexicon with one-word chapter titles.

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words along with a short author biography and contact details to adam.searle@nottingham.ac.uk by November 14th.

The two-day conference will take place at the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub, Jesus College, University of Oxford on 2nd and 3rd February, 2026.

We are delighted to welcome Joanna Zylinska (Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice, Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London) and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (Recent recipient of the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize and internationally renowned multimedia artist) as our keynotes.

The event is part of the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub Programme with support from the School of Geography and the Environment and Jesus College Oxford and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The conference fee will be £59, inclusive of refreshments, lunches, and a networking reception. A number of subsidised tickets may be available.  Further details will be published on the conference website soon: digicologies.com

The organising team includes Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle, Janina Schupp, Ben Platt, Gillian Rose and the Digital Ecologies Research Group. If you have any questions, please get in touch with one of the organisers.


                                                                 

About


Digital Ecologies is an interdisciplinary and international research group fostering critical conversations at the interface of more-than-human and digital geographies, political ecology, digital humanities, and media studies to understand the mediation of more-than-human worlds. 

Our current team members include: 

Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle, Oscar Hartman Davies, Jenny Dodsworth, Pauline Chasseray-Peraldi, Henry Anderson-Elliott, Karolina Uskakovych, Noemi Duroux, Caitlin Hafferty, 

At the core of our research is a commitment to empirically exploring what we term ‘digital entanglement’, a condition in which digital technologies have become constitutive to modes of living in more-than-human worlds. It is commonly assumed that digital technologies disengage humans from nature, yet myriad examples point to the opposite: that digital technologies, in certain contexts, can foster convivial human-nonhuman relations. To date, however, there has been only minimal empirical research into the effects emerging digital technologies have in terms of human-nature disengagement and connection. As such, we highlight how digital human-nonhuman relations are always situated, fraught, and complex; inaugurating a range of social and environmental harms, but also positive relations.

Our past research and events have been kindly supported by the Vital Geographies research group at the Department of Geography at Cambridge, King’s College (University of Cambridge), the University of Bonn, the German Research Foundation (project number 446600467), the European Research Council (grant number 949577), the Olso School of Environmental Humanities, and the Technological Life research cluster at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. 

To keep informed on our research and future events, follow us on Bluesky or Instagram (@digicologies) 

Any questions, drop us an email at team@digicologies.com.