My colleague Ziad Al Achkar and I are organizing a panel for the International Studies Association meeting in 2023 in Montreal! We’ve mentioned this panel a few times on Twitter, and would love to have 1-2 more papers on the panel. Here’s the panel abstract:

“This panel explores the roles that digital mapping, remote sensing, and social media data play in helping researchers and policy makers understand the impact of humanitarian crises in geographic and demographic ways. Humanitarian crises, including natural disasters and violence conflict, cause social and physical upheaval. From the perspective of political geography and demography, these events reshape local politics, create new diasporas, and shake up national economies. Since the mid-2000s the use of digital mapping tools, social media crowdsourcing, and satellite and ground-based sensing technologies has grown dramatically as a means for understanding the complex social, political, and geographic dynamics at work in humanitarian crises. The papers on this panel will highlight new technologies and methods being used in humanitarian research, discuss the recent history of technology in humanitarian response, and provide sociological and anthropological insights into what these tools mean for disaster- and conflict-affected communities themselves. The goal of the panel is to shed light on how new technologies can be used in political and demographic research, and what these technologies mean in a practical sense to policy makers and the humanitarian response community in practice.”

If you have something ready or in the pipeline that could be a fit, and plan to attend the 2023 ISA meeting, we’d love to have you join us! Feel free to ping us on Twitter or just email me (Charles.Martin-Shields[at]die-gdi.de) with a title (50 words max) and abstract (200 words max) by May 31.