Keynotes

Rob Kitchin

Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen

Rob Kitchin is a professor in Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. His research examines the production of digital geographies and his present ERC-funded project (2022-27) is ‘Data Stories: Telling Stories About and With Planning and Property Data’. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of 34 academic books and (co)author of over 200 articles and book chapters. He has been an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography, and Social and Cultural Geography, and was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (1e). He is a recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.

Keynote Title: The politics and praxes of spatial data in understanding and managing crises

This paper will consider the role of data and data-driven approaches for understanding and managing crises. On the one hand, it will examine critically how data are generated, published and utilised to make sense of the geographies of crises, focusing in particular on spatially referenced data. On the other, it will explore the role of geographers in constructing and using evidence for understanding crises from two perspectives: first, as scientists operating in a post-truth world seeking to provide key information and analysis to inform policy and political/media debate; second, as critical scholars that are mindful of the partiality, politics and situatedness of official statistics and scientific data and how data can be ‘weaponised’ rhetorically in debates. The paper will draw on twenty year’s worth of applied data work to build data tools (open dashboards and interactive mapping modules) for understanding social and economic crises and critical data scholarship that critical interrogates the politics, veracity and utility of official state data. In particular, it will focus on the data used to make sense of a long crisis of housing in Ireland and the state response to Covid-19.

Commentator: Eric Delmelle, University of Eastern Finland

Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen is a Professor in Russian Environmental Studies at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. He leads a research group focusing on energy and environmental policies, energy security, political power, and culture in Russia. He unfolds Europe’s relations with Russia through the prisms of energy geography and power analytics in his upcoming book by Edward Elgar (forthcoming in 2024). Professor Tynkkynen has a wide track-record in teaching at European and Russian universities. He has delivered tens of public talks, is frequently giving expert statements for authorities as well as is an oft-asked commentator at media.

Keynote title: What can geography tell us about the relationship between energy and violence?

Scholars within energy humanities argue that energy is a worldview-forming factor. Slaves, an energy commodity central for the Roman Empire, were naturally dreaming of becoming free. As individuals they strived for freedom, but as members of the community they supported slavery, because everyone understood that the society and the Empire could not be maintained without slavery and the energy it provided. Today, in a similar vein we take for granted the worldview shaped by energy. Modern world is still by far hooked on to fossil energies. Even though knowledge on the detrimental local and global environmental effects of fossil-fuel based system is mounting, there are still blind spots in our understanding on the versatile negative effects of our petro-addiction. Fossil energy is violent in at least two ways: it leads to global destruction by accelerating climate change, but it also drives conflict over the control of these resources and pushes Petrostates down a path of violence. A spatial glance and the discipline of Geography can help to better understand the relationship between energy and violence and think of ways to curtail the problem. The keynote looks at these blind spots through the discussions within energy Geography (new geographies of energy), as well as within energy humanities and analytics of political power.

Commentator: Paul Fryer, University of Eastern Finland