Digital Geographies and The City: Queer Methodologies of Hope

Critical digital geographies scholarship has a well-developed repertoire for theorizing adverse relations between technology, media, society, and space, setting up an enduring ambivalence in the analysis of minor, small-scale, improvisational efforts to rewrite these relations. At this impasse, I argue for an intentional turn to analytic frames rooted in queer of color critique, such as methodologies of hope. This approach emerges from Jose Esteban Muñoz’s writings on queer futurities, which he crafted as an epistemological-political frame for apprehending hope, justice, and life-affirming futures from positions of deep material and ideological exclusion. Muñoz’s approach offers vital off-ramps from the theoretical cycles of negation found in much critical digital geography thought. My article demonstrates how orienting to minoritarian digital activisms through a queer methodology of hope illuminates dynamic cycles of critique and creation that transgress accepted limits to urban inhabitations and demonstrate normatively unthinkable, yet already existing, possibilities for being and being in relation in the city. I demonstrate this approach through a close reading of the digital mediations and mediatizations advanced in the social media tactics of Stop the Sweeps Seattle, a local collective fighting the systematic eviction of tent encampments of unsheltered people by municipal authorities. A queer relational analysis of these emplaced politics illuminates the digital, material, and ideological pathways they forge toward staying put and living well in the city against seemingly impossible odds.