Agnieszka Leszczynski
Biographic Data
| ID | 297928 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Agnieszka Leszczynski |
| GIVEN NAMES | Agnieszka |
| FAMILY NAME | Leszczynski |
| SIGNATURE | LESZCZYNSKI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5167-0499 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1348 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Visual Negotiations of Gentrification in Toronto: Contestation, Politicization and Resistance through Urban Signage
This article engages signage as a medium through which urban stakeholders negotiate the politics of housing redevelopment and gentrification in cities. Focusing on Toronto, we examine housing‐related signage in three neighbourhoods where social mix approaches to redevelopment have ushered in gentrification: Parkdale, Regent Park, and Moss Park. We identify three types of signs through which these politics are expressed: notice of proposed develop…
Degree Photography: A Step-by-step Method for Collecting and Analyzing Spherical Visual Data in the Social Sciences
360-degree photography is an emerging form of visual media that is increasingly used in research. However, little methodological evidence exists on the use of this technology for field-based data collection and analysis. Drawing on an “urban objects” research project, we describe procedures to capture, process, store, code, and analyze 360-degree digital photos, highlighting considerations particular to this imaging format. 360-degree photography…
The smart home: A visual analysis
In this article, the authors engage with visual representations of smart homes, examining whether and how these media constitute emergent narratives of Western meanings of home. They do so by reporting on the findings of visual content and semiotic analysis of smart home images published in architectural media. They identify two modalities of smart home images published in these media – images in which smart home technologies are visible and thos…
The last meter problem in cities: Digital platforms, urban signage, and the enduring analog
Docklessness, aesthetic governance, and the urban ‘micromobility mess’
Dockless micromobility sharing systems have wrought significant visual changes to urban streetscapes worldwide. These changes are often described in terms of the ‘mess’ of micromobility, characterised by dockless vehicles abandoned in roadways, sidewalks, and recreational paths, tossed into waterways, and graffitied, burned, and otherwise vandalised. In this paper, we argue that efforts to govern this dockless micromobility mess – which most freq…
On method, and the present and future of “doing” urban geography
Digital rurality: A three-fold model and research agenda
Rural spaces are increasingly shaped by the pervasive influence of digital technologies, which are integral to their constitution, experience, and practices. This article distills how the forces of digitality inflect contemporary conceptualizations of rurality by iterating Halfacree's (2006, 2007) model of rural space to account for the emergence of what we term digital rurality . We advance a threefold heuristic of digital rurality as comprised …
Degree Video for Whole Scene Capture: From Immersive Realism to Immersive Holism in Place-Based Research
360-degree video is an affordable and easy-to-use technology for social science research. It holds significant potential for capturing spatio-temporal aspects of the social world from a fully omni-directional spatial perspective; however, gaps remain as to how it can be used to support field-based data collection and analysis. In this short piece we offer two contributions to the literature on 360-degree video for qualitative social science resea…
"Platform Urbanism and "Splintering Amenitization: An Analysis of Canadian Cities
This article engages with the spatialities of platform urbanism by foregrounding where digital platforms are located in cities. Drawing on a geocoded data set of visible, material traces of platformization collected across neighborhoods in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, we consider the influences that characteristics of urban built environments-including existing amenities, urban morphology, and area-level socioeconomic factors-have on platfor…
Tourism Platforms and the Digital Biopolitics of Nature: An Interface Analysis of TripAdvisor in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile
This article investigates how digital platforms are implicated in the neoliberalization of conservation by turning nature and protected areas into tourism commodities. We mobilize Ash et al.’s (Citation2018) heuristic of unit, vibration, and tone to analyze TripAdvisor’s interfaces for contributing, exploring, and reviewing nature-based points of interest in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile. We contend that digital tourism platforms express what we term di…
Platforms and/as urban communication: Mediums, content, context
This paper brings an urban communication lens to bear on the geographies of platformisation in cities. It does so by drawing on three select instances of platformised materialities in Toronto and Vancouver that represent familiar contours of urban platformisation: mobility (bike and car sharing), last‐mile logistics (on‐demand delivery), and labour (gig work). These examples are worked through Aiello and Tosoni's heuristic of cities as constituti…
The multiple environmentalities of conservation mapping in Patagonia-Aysén
In this paper, we mobilise a multiple environmentalities framework that captures overlapping rationalities of governing nature to engage and identify the role of maps and mapping practices in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile, a peripheral region where government and institutional actors have embraced (eco)tourism as a conservation strategy in protected areas. Through interviews with key stakeholders situated in conservation and tourism institutions in both…
Reconstituting Geography for the 21st century
Maps, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and the spatio-discursive construction of nature
This paper interrogates the role that spatial media such as maps and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) play in the construction and mobilisation of representations of nature. Drawing on poststructural political ecology, critical cartography, and GIScience, this article engages maps and VGI as discursive mechanisms that solidify and convey meanings and representations of nature tied to broader strategies of commodification. Particularly, we…
Glitch cities
The generous responses to our intervention, Glitch epistemologies for computational cities , open onto knowing cities via glitches through an expanded attention to temporalities, subject/ivities, and power and politics in addition to our initial concern with urban spatialities. We respond to our interlocutors by engaging their responses as engendering more robust theorizations of what we here term glitch cities : pervasively digitally mediated an…
Glitch epistemologies for computational cities
This intervention advances glitches as epistemological vectors for apprehending and engaging the significance of digitally-mediated spatialities that appear nonperformative against normative scripts of urban computational paradigms. Drawing on two strands of contemporary thinking about glitches as systemic design features of digital systems and as generative fissures within them, we mobilize a queer orientation that stays with the generative tens…
Walking (with) the platform: Bikesharing and the aesthetics of gentrification in Vancouver
This paper engages the increasing significance of urban platforms through the lens of the aesthetics of gentrification. We report on “walks-with” platformized bikesharing infrastructure across three neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Canada: gentrified Mount Pleasant/South Main, gentrifying Strathcona/Chinatown, and the gentrifiable East Village. Drawing on photographs, reflections, and observations of the visualities of select bikeshare stations’ micr…
Gentrification and the an/aesthetics of digital spatial capital in Canadian “platform cities”
This paper reports on the findings of an empirical study of the street‐level visual spatialities of urban platforms in three Canadian cities: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Enumerating, typologizing, and spatially analyzing incidences of platforms in these three cities, we find platforms to be concentrated in neighbourhoods classified as “gentrified,” “gentrifying,” and “gentrifiable,” while being largely absent from established affluent encla…
Being genealogical in digital geographies
In this intervention, I trace the genealogies of the recent heralding of digital geographies as a boundary object for scholarship and scholars foregrounding the digital in geography. Building off of previous efforts to be technopositional in digital geographies, I make an entreaty for further being genealogical by attuning to the insider/outsider positionalities that have informed this particular endeavour of intellectual community‐making in Angl…
Viral Data
We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a …
Glitchy vignettes of platform urbanism
Platform urbanism' has recently gained traction as a designator for emergent dynamics and material configurations associated with the increasing presence of digital platform enterprises in cities. Initial scholarly engagements with platform urbanism have tended to coalesce around critiques of digital platforms as progenitors of inevitably dystopian urban futures. In this paper, I advance a counter-topographical minor theory of platform urbanism. …
Digital Geographies
Spatialities
Phase Media: Space, Time, and the Politics of Smart Objects
James Ash. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2018. x and 212 pp., bibliography, index. $120.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-5013-3560-0).The novelist Philip Pullman once offered an instructive interpretation of phase
Digital methods III: The digital mundane
This report considers a burgeoning strand of scholarship that foregrounds the mundane in engagements with the digital. Research concerned with the digital mundane attends to the ordinary and often taken-for-granted digital objects, practices, productions, and sites that significantly both mediate and are mediated by everyday lives and spatialities. Methodological innovations are advancing new techniques for researching mundane digital objects tha…
Digital turn, digital geographies
Geography is in the midst of a digital turn. This turn is reflected in both geographic scholarship and praxis across sub-disciplines. We advance a threefold categorization of the intensifying relationship between geography and the digital, documenting geographies produced through, produced by, and of the digital. Instead of promoting a single theoretical framework for making sense of the digital or proclaiming the advent of a separate field of ‘d…
Glitchy vignettes of platform urbanism
Platform urbanism' has recently gained traction as a designator for emergent dynamics and material configurations associated with the increasing presence of digital platform enterprises in cities. Initial scholarly engagements with platform urbanism have tended to coalesce around critiques of digital platforms as progenitors of inevitably dystopian urban futures. In this paper, I advance a counter-topographical minor theory of platform urbanism. …
Feminist digital geographies
At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of scholarly engagement that have emerged from feminist theory and praxis. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the…
New spatial media, new knowledge politics
New spatial media – the informational artefacts and mediating technologies of the geoweb – represent new opportunities for activist, civic, grassroots, indigenous and other groups to leverage web‐based geographic information technologies in their efforts to effect social change. Drawing upon evidence from an inductive analysis of five online initiatives that engage new spatial media in activism and civic engagement, we explore new dimensions of t…
Spatial media/tion
This paper builds on the designation of networked spatial information technologies (both hardware/software objects and information artifacts) as ‘spatial media’ to advance media as an epistemology for engaging these presences as both channels for content and as cultural apparatuses. Doing so directly asserts their materiality as coincident with (new) media techno-cultural productions. This allows for a theory of mediation that belies narratives o…
Speculative futures: Cities, data, and governance beyond smart urbanism
In this paper, I examine the convergence of big data and urban governance beyond the discursive and material contexts of the smart city. I argue that in addition to understanding the intensifying relationship between data, cities, and governance in terms of regimes of automated management and coordination in 'actually existing' smart cities, we should further engage with urban algorithmic governance and governmentality as material-discursive proj…
Situating the geoweb in political economy
The geoweb represents a profound shift within regimes of the production, dissemination, and institutionalization of geographic information. Going beyond early geographic accounts of the geoweb that engage it as an extension of Web 2.0, this paper situates the emergence of the geoweb within the neoliberal political economic restructuring of the state. Drawing upon evidence of state, market, and citizen practices around Web-based spatial media and …
Privacy, reconsidered: New representations, data practices, and the geoweb
Glitch epistemologies for computational cities
This intervention advances glitches as epistemological vectors for apprehending and engaging the significance of digitally-mediated spatialities that appear nonperformative against normative scripts of urban computational paradigms. Drawing on two strands of contemporary thinking about glitches as systemic design features of digital systems and as generative fissures within them, we mobilize a queer orientation that stays with the generative tens…
Spatial big data and anxieties of control
Kate Crawford has recently suggested that the everyday lived experience of big data is one of "surveillant anxiety": the fear that the personal information that individuals disclose about themselves and that others generate about them is intercepted and analyzed by the intelligence services within emergent praxes of pervasive dataveillance. I empirically assess this notion of "surveillant anxiety" in the context of spatial big data. Drawing on th…
Platform affects of geolocation
HotForBots: Sex, the non-human and digitally mediated spaces of intimate encounter
Contemporary practices of sex and intimacy are increasingly digitally mediated. In this paper, we identify two distinctly spatial effects of these mediations. First, the digital extends the spaces of sex/uality beyond the immediately proximate, simultaneously expanding the potential for non-human object choice in intimate encounters. Second, the digital intensifies the experiential fidelity of intimate encounters by folding the remote into the sp…
Digital methods III: The digital mundane
This report considers a burgeoning strand of scholarship that foregrounds the mundane in engagements with the digital. Research concerned with the digital mundane attends to the ordinary and often taken-for-granted digital objects, practices, productions, and sites that significantly both mediate and are mediated by everyday lives and spatialities. Methodological innovations are advancing new techniques for researching mundane digital objects tha…
Feminist geographies of new spatial media
Critical GIS emphasized the ways in which social, political, and economic inequalities are (re)produced through spatial information technologies and attendant practices. In the mid‐1990s through the early 2000s, feminist interventions challenged the presumed gender neutrality and universality of GIS and brought gender to the fore of Critical GIS concerns. However, the rise of nascent web‐based spatial information technologies—or new spatial media…
Digital methods I: Wicked tensions
In this first of three reports, I engage with ‘digital methods’ as methodologies or approaches to knowing and making sense of the world. Triangulation and representativeness are two sites of tension at which new opportunities for research opened up by digital mediums, mediations and data sources come up against epistemological limitations of methodologies for accessing and making sense of digital presences, practices, and spatialities. Triangulat…
Poststructuralism and GIS: Is There a 'Disconnect
Human geography critiques of GIS are operationalized under a unique interpretation of ontology and epistemology. Internal to poststructuralism, this metaphysics collapses the traditional separation between ontology and epistemology, reducing ontological questions to epistemological constructs. Although critiques have moved beyond an initial fixation upon positivism, critical/cultural assessments of GIS tendered within the last ten years continue …
Gentrification and the an/aesthetics of digital spatial capital in Canadian “platform cities”
This paper reports on the findings of an empirical study of the street‐level visual spatialities of urban platforms in three Canadian cities: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Enumerating, typologizing, and spatially analyzing incidences of platforms in these three cities, we find platforms to be concentrated in neighbourhoods classified as “gentrified,” “gentrifying,” and “gentrifiable,” while being largely absent from established affluent encla…
Walking (with) the platform: Bikesharing and the aesthetics of gentrification in Vancouver
This paper engages the increasing significance of urban platforms through the lens of the aesthetics of gentrification. We report on “walks-with” platformized bikesharing infrastructure across three neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Canada: gentrified Mount Pleasant/South Main, gentrifying Strathcona/Chinatown, and the gentrifiable East Village. Drawing on photographs, reflections, and observations of the visualities of select bikeshare stations’ micr…
Digital methods II: Digital-visual methods
Digital-visual methods enrol digital-visual artefacts as evidence or objects of study in research, and/or they rely on digital media and computational techniques to collect, explore, and analyse visual data. The use of digital-visual methods has increasingly figured in human geographic research over the last decade, coalescing around: i) work that interrogates digital-visual scopic regimes and politics; ii) scholarship that engages digital-visual…
On the Neo in Neogeography
The term neogeography, which designates the proliferation of Web-based geographic information technologies and the parallel opening up of the mapping enterprise to nonexpert cartographers, gained traction in 2006. Implicit in the declaration of neogeography, however, is a trivialization of the geographic discipline. Academic geographers, who have never expressed affinity for the label neogeography, have worked to problematize the instrumentalist …
Introduction: Spatial Big Data and everyday life
Spatial Big Data-be this natively geocoded content, geographical metadata, or data that itself refers to spaces and places-has become a pervasive presence in the spaces and practices of everyday life. Beyond preoccupations with "the geotag" and with mapping geocoded social media content, this special theme explores what it means to encounter and experience spatial Big Data as a quotidian phenomenon that is both spatial, characterized by and enact…
Rematerializing GIScience
Viral Data
We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a …
Maps, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and the spatio-discursive construction of nature
This paper interrogates the role that spatial media such as maps and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) play in the construction and mobilisation of representations of nature. Drawing on poststructural political ecology, critical cartography, and GIScience, this article engages maps and VGI as discursive mechanisms that solidify and convey meanings and representations of nature tied to broader strategies of commodification. Particularly, we…
Glitch cities
The generous responses to our intervention, Glitch epistemologies for computational cities , open onto knowing cities via glitches through an expanded attention to temporalities, subject/ivities, and power and politics in addition to our initial concern with urban spatialities. We respond to our interlocutors by engaging their responses as engendering more robust theorizations of what we here term glitch cities : pervasively digitally mediated an…
Rematerializing GIScience
Poststructuralism and GIS: Is There a 'Disconnect
Human geography critiques of GIS are operationalized under a unique interpretation of ontology and epistemology. Internal to poststructuralism, this metaphysics collapses the traditional separation between ontology and epistemology, reducing ontological questions to epistemological constructs. Although critiques have moved beyond an initial fixation upon positivism, critical/cultural assessments of GIS tendered within the last ten years continue …
Privacy, reconsidered: New representations, data practices, and the geoweb
Situating the geoweb in political economy
The geoweb represents a profound shift within regimes of the production, dissemination, and institutionalization of geographic information. Going beyond early geographic accounts of the geoweb that engage it as an extension of Web 2.0, this paper situates the emergence of the geoweb within the neoliberal political economic restructuring of the state. Drawing upon evidence of state, market, and citizen practices around Web-based spatial media and …
New spatial media, new knowledge politics
New spatial media – the informational artefacts and mediating technologies of the geoweb – represent new opportunities for activist, civic, grassroots, indigenous and other groups to leverage web‐based geographic information technologies in their efforts to effect social change. Drawing upon evidence from an inductive analysis of five online initiatives that engage new spatial media in activism and civic engagement, we explore new dimensions of t…
Spatial media/tion
This paper builds on the designation of networked spatial information technologies (both hardware/software objects and information artifacts) as ‘spatial media’ to advance media as an epistemology for engaging these presences as both channels for content and as cultural apparatuses. Doing so directly asserts their materiality as coincident with (new) media techno-cultural productions. This allows for a theory of mediation that belies narratives o…
On the Neo in Neogeography
The term neogeography, which designates the proliferation of Web-based geographic information technologies and the parallel opening up of the mapping enterprise to nonexpert cartographers, gained traction in 2006. Implicit in the declaration of neogeography, however, is a trivialization of the geographic discipline. Academic geographers, who have never expressed affinity for the label neogeography, have worked to problematize the instrumentalist …
Feminist geographies of new spatial media
Critical GIS emphasized the ways in which social, political, and economic inequalities are (re)produced through spatial information technologies and attendant practices. In the mid‐1990s through the early 2000s, feminist interventions challenged the presumed gender neutrality and universality of GIS and brought gender to the fore of Critical GIS concerns. However, the rise of nascent web‐based spatial information technologies—or new spatial media…
Spatial big data and anxieties of control
Kate Crawford has recently suggested that the everyday lived experience of big data is one of "surveillant anxiety": the fear that the personal information that individuals disclose about themselves and that others generate about them is intercepted and analyzed by the intelligence services within emergent praxes of pervasive dataveillance. I empirically assess this notion of "surveillant anxiety" in the context of spatial big data. Drawing on th…
Digital turn, digital geographies
Geography is in the midst of a digital turn. This turn is reflected in both geographic scholarship and praxis across sub-disciplines. We advance a threefold categorization of the intensifying relationship between geography and the digital, documenting geographies produced through, produced by, and of the digital. Instead of promoting a single theoretical framework for making sense of the digital or proclaiming the advent of a separate field of ‘d…
Introduction: Spatial Big Data and everyday life
Spatial Big Data-be this natively geocoded content, geographical metadata, or data that itself refers to spaces and places-has become a pervasive presence in the spaces and practices of everyday life. Beyond preoccupations with "the geotag" and with mapping geocoded social media content, this special theme explores what it means to encounter and experience spatial Big Data as a quotidian phenomenon that is both spatial, characterized by and enact…
Speculative futures: Cities, data, and governance beyond smart urbanism
In this paper, I examine the convergence of big data and urban governance beyond the discursive and material contexts of the smart city. I argue that in addition to understanding the intensifying relationship between data, cities, and governance in terms of regimes of automated management and coordination in 'actually existing' smart cities, we should further engage with urban algorithmic governance and governmentality as material-discursive proj…
Digital methods I: Wicked tensions
In this first of three reports, I engage with ‘digital methods’ as methodologies or approaches to knowing and making sense of the world. Triangulation and representativeness are two sites of tension at which new opportunities for research opened up by digital mediums, mediations and data sources come up against epistemological limitations of methodologies for accessing and making sense of digital presences, practices, and spatialities. Triangulat…
HotForBots: Sex, the non-human and digitally mediated spaces of intimate encounter
Contemporary practices of sex and intimacy are increasingly digitally mediated. In this paper, we identify two distinctly spatial effects of these mediations. First, the digital extends the spaces of sex/uality beyond the immediately proximate, simultaneously expanding the potential for non-human object choice in intimate encounters. Second, the digital intensifies the experiential fidelity of intimate encounters by folding the remote into the sp…
Feminist digital geographies
At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of scholarly engagement that have emerged from feminist theory and praxis. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the…
Digital methods II: Digital-visual methods
Digital-visual methods enrol digital-visual artefacts as evidence or objects of study in research, and/or they rely on digital media and computational techniques to collect, explore, and analyse visual data. The use of digital-visual methods has increasingly figured in human geographic research over the last decade, coalescing around: i) work that interrogates digital-visual scopic regimes and politics; ii) scholarship that engages digital-visual…
Digital Geographies
Spatialities
Phase Media: Space, Time, and the Politics of Smart Objects
James Ash. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2018. x and 212 pp., bibliography, index. $120.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-5013-3560-0).The novelist Philip Pullman once offered an instructive interpretation of phase
Digital methods III: The digital mundane
This report considers a burgeoning strand of scholarship that foregrounds the mundane in engagements with the digital. Research concerned with the digital mundane attends to the ordinary and often taken-for-granted digital objects, practices, productions, and sites that significantly both mediate and are mediated by everyday lives and spatialities. Methodological innovations are advancing new techniques for researching mundane digital objects tha…
Platform affects of geolocation
Viral Data
We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a …
Glitchy vignettes of platform urbanism
Platform urbanism' has recently gained traction as a designator for emergent dynamics and material configurations associated with the increasing presence of digital platform enterprises in cities. Initial scholarly engagements with platform urbanism have tended to coalesce around critiques of digital platforms as progenitors of inevitably dystopian urban futures. In this paper, I advance a counter-topographical minor theory of platform urbanism. …
Being genealogical in digital geographies
In this intervention, I trace the genealogies of the recent heralding of digital geographies as a boundary object for scholarship and scholars foregrounding the digital in geography. Building off of previous efforts to be technopositional in digital geographies, I make an entreaty for further being genealogical by attuning to the insider/outsider positionalities that have informed this particular endeavour of intellectual community‐making in Angl…
Reconstituting Geography for the 21st century
Sociology (27 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Political science (21 works) · Geography (19 works) · Geographic Information Systems Studies (16 works) · Politics (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (11 works) · Social science (11 works)