Digital Geographies of Hope: Situated Futures in a Data-Driven World

Cornelia Brantner, Kaarina Nikunen and Georgia Aitaki
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Cornelia Brantner: Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden
Kaarina Nikunen: Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Finland
Georgia Aitaki: Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden

Media and Communication, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: This thematic issue advances digital geographies of hope as a lens for examining how possibilities for action, connection, and alternative futures take shape in a deeply datafied and platformized world. While critical scholarship has documented extraction, surveillance, bordering, and algorithmic injustice, the contributions foreground hope as situated, relational, and contested, emerging within crisis rather than outside of it. Drawing on utopian and feminist thought, queer and decolonial critique, and research on affect, care, and solidarity, the thematic issue conceptualizes hope as both affective and infrastructural: enacted through everyday practices, collective struggles, and sociotechnical imaginaries that expand “room to act.” Cases range from feminist and anti-war organizing to rural and regional media ecologies, post-digital work cultures, and AI governance debates. Read across these contexts, hope appears as ambivalent yet generative, enabling refusal, repair, solidarity, and world-making across scales.

Keywords: critical geomedia studies; digital activism; digital geographies; futures; hope; platformization; spatial justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:meanco:v14:y:2026:a:11973

DOI: 10.17645/mac.11973

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