Department of Geography

she/her

ettlinger.1@osu.edu | office tel: 614-292-2573 | office: 1144 Derby

interests

critical human geography; algorithmic governance; science, technology, and society; neoliberalism; racial capitalism; inequalities and polarization;  far right; cultural politics; subjectivities; social and data justice; critical data studies and digital geographies; poststructural theory and critical epistemologies

current research

As a critical human geographer I ask: how can critiques of our social, political, economic, cultural environment offer insights into how to produce change? How are people governed and enrolled in a wide range of societal projects (e.g. neoliberalism, racial capitalism,  digitalization, totalitarianism…), and what are the prospects for resistance? What is the relation between subjectivity and change? Underscoring these questions is a concern for the relation between individuals and larger-scale phenomena (firms, institutions, societal projects) and an interconnected view of social, political, economic, and cultural processes.
In recent years I have directed the general approach above to identifying, contextualizing, and explaining the digitalization of life and its consequences for the deepening of inequalities and the production of fragile subjectivities. Along with climate change, I regard societal polarization as an existential threat. See the description below of my recent book (January 2023) that engages these issues.
Currently I am researching the socio-technical underpinnings of the ascendancy of the far right and the dissolution of democracy  with reference to the role of ordinary citizens transformed into digital soldiers, the decline of national-scale legislation, techno-imperialism, and the diminished role of constitutional rights in the context of societal projects of data colonialism and mining.
PODCAST on current research, Politics Considered, interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/helping-or-hurting-how-is-technology-affecting-u-s/id1680953386?i=1000617889411

book

2023 Algorithms and the Assault on Critical Thought: Digitalized Dilemmas of Automated Governance and Communitarian Practice. Routledge, Series on Digital Spaces.
PODCASTS on book,  Politics Considered                                                                                                                                         interview, through 1st half of chapter 3: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-7kam3-141f94b
interview, 2nd half of chapter 3 to end: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-tk7nh-14240b5
Algorithms and the Assault on Critical Thought examines the digitalization of longstanding problems of technological advance that produce inequalities and automated governance, which relieves subjects of agency and critical thought, and prompts a need to weaponize thoughtfulness against technocratic designs.
The book situates digital-era problems relative to those of previous sociotechnical milieux and argues that technical advance perennially embeds corrosive effects on social relations and relations of production, recognizing variation across contexts and relative to entrenched societal hierarchies of race and other axes of difference and their intersections. Societal tolerance, despite abundant evidence for harmful effects of digital technologies, requires attention. The book explains blindness to social injustice by technocratic thinking delivered through education as well as truths embraced in the data sciences coupled with governance in universities and the private sector that protect these truths from critique. Institutional inertia suggests benefits of communitarianism, which strives for change emanating from civil society. Scaling postcapitalist communitarian values through community-based peer production presents opportunities. However, enduring problems require critical reflection, continual revision of strategies, and active participation among diverse community citizens.
This book is written with critical geographic sensibilities for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences, humanities, and data sciences.

selected publications – journals & book chapters

2024 Cautious hope: prospects and perils of communitarian governance  in a Web3 environment. Digital Geography and Society, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2024.100080.
2024 The datafication of knowledge production & consequences for the pursuit of social justice. In Knowledge and Space, vol. 19, Knowledge and digital technology, eds. J. Glückler and R. Panitz. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
2021 Precarity at the nexus of governmentality and sovereignty: entangled fields of power and political subjectivity. In Precarity and international relations, eds. R. Vij, T. Kazi and E. Wynne-Hughes. Palgrave.
2020, with D. Bose. The ordinariness of struggle and exclusion: a view from across the north-south urban ‘divide’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society.
2020 Unbounding ‘states of exception’, reconceptualizing precarity. Space and Polity, 24: 401-407.
2020 Dispossessed prosumption, crowdsourcing, and the digital regime of work. New Formations, 99: 52-75.
2018  Algorithmic affordances for productive resistance. Big Data and Society 5: 1-13.
2017  Paradoxes, problems and potentialities of online work platforms. Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation 11: 21-38.
2017 A relational approach to an analytics of resistance: towards a humanity of care for the infirm elderly – a Foucauldian examination of possibilities. Foucault Studies 23: 109-140.
2017 Open innovation and its discontents. Geoforum 80: 61-71.
2016 The governance of crowdsourcing: rationalities of the new exploitation: Environment and Planning A 48: 2182-2180.
2015, with C. Hartmann. Post/neo/liberalism in relational perspective. Political Geography 48: 37-48.
2014 “The openness paradigm.” New Left Review 89: 89-100.
2014. Delivering on poststructural ontologies: epistemological challenges and strategies. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13: 589-598.
2011 Governmentality as epistemology. Annals, Association of American Geogrpahers, 101: 537-560.
2011 Interpreting racial formation and multiculturalism in a high school: towards a constructive deployment of two approaches to critical race theory. Antipode 43: 1250-1280 (with C. Riley).
 2010 Bringing the everyday in the culture/creativity discourse. Human Geography 3: 49-59.
 2009 Whose capitalism? mean discourse and/or actions of the heart. Emotion, Space and Society 2: 92-07.
2009 Problematizing the presentation of post-structural case-study research, or working out the crisis of representation in the presentation of empirics,” Environment and Planning A 41: 1017-1019.
2009 Surmounting city silences: knowledge creation and the design of urban democracy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33: 217-230.
2008 The predicament of firms in the new and old economies: a critical inquiry into traditional binaries in the study of the space-economy. Progress in Human Geography 32: 45-69.
2007 Precarity unbound. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32: 319-240.
 2007 Bringing democracy home: post-Katrina New Orleans. Antipode 39: 8-16.
 2004 Towards a critical theory of untidy geographies: the spatiality of emotions in consumption and production. Feminist Economics 10: 21-54.
2004 Thinking through the spatiality of networks: a critique of the us ‘public’ war on terrorism and its geographic discourse. Antipode 36: 249-271 (with F. Bosco).
2003 Cultural economic geography and a relational and microspace approach to trusts, rationalities, networks, and change in collaborative workplaces. Journal of Economic Geography 3: 145-171.

recent courses

Geography 8100 – Geographic Thought
Geography 5502 – Data Justice and the Right to the Smart City
Geography 2400H – Economic and Social Geography (honors)

course under development

Digital Life (3000 level)

Nancy Ettlinger, Department of Geography, Ohio State University: https://geography.osu.edu/people/ettlinger.1