Digital Ecologies

The proliferation of digital tools in public health has spurred the emergence of ‘digital health’, a term encompassing the varied technologies that utilise digital media to manage illness and support wellbeing (Lupton, 2022). Meanwhile, the rise of One Health as an influential public health paradigm – and with it the idea that animals, humans, and the environment form an interdependent system that should be governed in a coordinated, interdisciplinary manner to secure positive health for all – has contributed to new technologies that seek to monitor and manage disease emergence across species lines (Braverman, 2022). Despite this ambition, much geographical analysis has argued that digital health interventions are anthropocentric, attending to non-humans through modes of surveillance and datafication in so much as they represent a risk to human health, furthering an unequal public health paradigm that leaves little space for local contingency and the wants and needs of non-human actors (Hinchliffe, 2015; Lupton, 2022). Nevertheless, recent geographical work channeling more affirmative ‘digital ecologies’ approaches to the digitisation of more-than-human relations has considered how digital technologies also cultivate understanding of and responsiveness to how pathogens, disease vectors, reservoirs, and environments in specific contexts are implicated in and impacted by disease emergence, throwing light on how digitisation may reconfigure disease ecologies to enable life in less-pathological configurations (Turnbull, 2022; Kirkham, 2026).

Expanding on understandings of digitisation as a process that materially configures disease ecologies to produce programmes of biopolitical intervention, intersubjective experiences of illness and wellbeing, and uneven health outcomes across species lines, this panel interrogates how digital technologies are shaping whose, and what, health is made to matter across diverse contexts. How can we merge digital geographies and health geography scholarship to apprehend the digital mediation of illness and wellbeing? What happens when digital health technologies are inserted into unequal health geographies? How do these technologies reconfigure the topologies of more-than-human relations that drive disease emergence? And how may digital health technology sediment or open taken-for-granted understandings of public health? We are interested in papers answering: • The role of digital technology in practices of biosecurity and disease surveillance at the human-animal-environment nexus, including the ways in which processes of digital datafication, visualisation, and mapping alter how disease situations are apprehended and acted within; • how digital health technologies mediate the experiential dimensions of human-non-human encounter in the context of disease governance; • the political economies of digital disease governance and the role of digital technologies in challenging or supporting pathological industries; • the role of digital technologies as they operate within agro-industrial and veterinary sectors, and the consequences this has for labour, care practices, and more-than-human health; • how material infrastructures of the digital, such as data centres, chip production, and e-waste, are implicated in disease emergence and environmental health; • how digital technologies may or may not transform conventional public health approaches to facilitate the assembly of ‘healthy publics’ or a ‘more-than-One Health’ agenda (Hinchliffe, 2015; Hinchliffe et al., 2018).

Ray Chan and I are convening a panel at the upcoming RGS-IBG 2026 conference titled "Digital Disease Ecologies of More-than-Human Health". Please see the abstract below, and if you are interested in attending send george.kirkham@sjc.ox.ac.uk a 250 word abstract with a short bio by the 23rd Feb

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | RGS Journal | Wiley Online Library Through the case of Snake Awareness Rescue Protection App (SARPA), a digital snake translocation and snakebite prevention mobile phone application in Kerala, India, this paper extends recent geograph...

New article for @tibg.bsky.social. Through the case of digital snake rescue, I merge @digicologies.bsky.social and disease ecology work to develop the lens of 'digital disease ecologies' - a way to analyse how digital encounter and datafication configure disease emergence and multispecies health.

Tickets have now sold out.

We're looking forward to welcoming everyone to Oxford in just over a week!

The schedule can be viewed at our website: digicologies.com/schedule

Very excited to be chairing a panel at the upcoming conference on The Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies! Amazing line up below:

Check out the schedule for 'The Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies' at our website 👇

digicologies.com/schedule

A few tickets are left!

Check out the schedule for 'The Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies' at our website 👇

digicologies.com/schedule

A few tickets are left!

learn more about the visual politics of lots of ecologies by registering for the Digital Ecologies conference, 2-3 Feb in Oxford - tickets going fast! 🧐
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-visual...

@digicologies.bsky.social

There's a few tickets left for our 2026 conference!

🌐 Registration NOW OPEN for 'The Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies' 🌐

Join us to explore how emerging visual regimes are shaping environmental governance and knowledge politics

With wonderful keynotes: @joannazylinska.bsky.social & Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-visual...

🌐 Registration NOW OPEN for 'The Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies' 🌐

Join us to explore how emerging visual regimes are shaping environmental governance and knowledge politics

With wonderful keynotes: @joannazylinska.bsky.social & Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-visual...

register now for the Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies conference, 2-3 Feb 2026 in Oxford! with keynotes @joannazylinska.bsky.social and Daisy Ginsberg www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-visual... 🌳 📹 🦫 🛰️

Manchester University Press - Digital ecologies Digital ecologies - Browse and buy the Paperback edition of Digital ecologies by Jonathon Turnbull

DIGITAL ECOLOGIES is available for just £15 in paperback until the end of January; discount applied automatically unless you're in North America, where you need to type "JAN40" at payment

this also applies to ALL @manchesterup.bsky.social books!!!

manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526188601/

Thanks so much to everyone who has submitted to our CFP.

We've had an overwhelming number of wonderful submissions. It's going to take us a while to process them all, so we'll aim to get back to you within the next few weeks)!

Today is the deadline to send your abstracts for the Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies conference!

🌐🚨 CALL FOR PAPERS 🚨🌐

'The Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies'

🗓️ 2-3 February 2026
📍 @oxfordgeography.bsky.social

We invite one-word titles (e.g. hallucinating, zooming, obscuring, glitching, generating)

Deadline: 14th November

Full info: digicologies.com/cfp

Two days 😱

Last four days to send in your abstracts 👇

Last four days to send in your abstracts 👇

unboxing Public Data Cultures book

Copies of the book on a train in Totoro bag.

Front and back cover of Public Data Cultures with quotes and book blurb.

Public Data Cultures is out today on @politybooks.bsky.social! 📗🎊 jonathangray.org/2025/10/23/p...
It aims to nurture critical and creative engagements with public data as cultural material, medium of participation and as site of transnational politics. Happy to see it out in the world! 🦔🌌💜

There's still over a week left to submit to our next conference, 'The Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies'.

Deadline: 14th November.

Any questions, get in touch with the organisers!

two weeks left!!
received some INCREDIBLE abstracts so far!!

🌅 How are digital technologies refashioning ecological aesthetics? 🌅

Join us for the next Digital Ecologies conference in February 2026 - CFP now open!

We're delighted to welcome Joanna Zylinska and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg as our keynotes!

Any questions, get in touch.

🌐🚨 CALL FOR PAPERS 🚨🌐

'The Visual Politics of Digital Ecologies'

🗓️ 2-3 February 2026
📍 @oxfordgeography.bsky.social

We invite one-word titles (e.g. hallucinating, zooming, obscuring, glitching, generating)

Deadline: 14th November

Full info: digicologies.com/cfp

The expansion of computational capital reproduces the core-periphery dynamics of earlier empires—extracting from the Global South to enrich the North—while excavating billions of years in geological time to increase the speed of algorithmic convenience by milliseconds. After feeding at this planetary scale, the industrial beast now releases a tide of slop.

Crawford's new essay in e-flux offers the best summary of the monstrous absurdity of contemporary AI that I've read in a long time.

(via @jonnyjjt.bsky.social)

www.e-flux.com/architecture...

Glitch environmentalism - Naomi Parker, Adam Searle, Jonathon Turnbull, 2025 Birding is a form of wildlife recreation that often involves exclusive communities and spaces, where both access and practice are policed along hegemonic lines....

GLITCH ENVIRONMENTALISM is freely accessible for two weeks... make sure to download it soon!!

we think with Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism (2020) to examine digitally-mediated activism challenging birding's hegemonic, exclusionary histories and cultures

w/ Naomi Parker and @jonnyjjt.bsky.social

New #DigitalEcologies paper from Naomi Parker, @admsrl.bsky.social & @jonnyjjt.bsky.social on 'glitch environmentalism'!

Open Access for the next two weeks.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

🦉 Glitch Environmentalism 🦉

In our new paper, Naomi Parker, @admsrl.bsky.social & I explore glitches in the birding community that arose in the Self-Isolating Bird Club

We theorise glitch environmentalism to understand how transitory glitches can gain duration

journals.sagepub.com/eprint/CESTC...

Plenty of brilliant books on display on the MUP stand at #BSA2025!

Featuring titles from some of our key series:
Theory for a Global Age 🧠
Racism, Resistance and Social Change ✊
Rethinking Borders 🌏
Music and Society 🎶

Can you spot yours?🔍

Photograph of the Manchester University Press conference stand at the ASA 2025, displaying a selection of sociology, anthropology and geography books as well as posters and marketing materials for their key book series.

Calling all Sociologists!

We're excited to be in Birmingham this week for the Association of Social Anthropologists 2025 conference #ASA2025

Pop by the MUP stand to chat with @lauramswift.bsky.social and browse a selection of our latest academic and trade titles🗨️