Geographies of digital skill

Abstract

In an era of rapid technological change, especially considering the rise of robotics and AI, there is widespread anxiety about the impacts of digital technologies across a vast range of industries. Policy responses to this changing employment landscape champion the necessity for growing ‘digital skills’. However, we argue that these dominant macropolitical interpretations draw on a restricted understanding of spatiality where digital skills are discretely located in particular bodies and in particular geographical locations. The paper develops a novel geographical response through an exploration of the micropolitics of digital skills. This focuses on the material and practical dimensions of work with digital technologies that produces a more dynamic spatiality and thus a more complex politics of labour. We argue that the dynamic spatiality of digital skills can be evaluated according to: (1) site-specific dimensions, as digital skills are co-minglings of humans and technologies; (2) extensive dimensions, as digital skills are networked across geographically dispersed sites; and (3) intensive dimensions, as digital skills emerge across bodies and environments through repetitive practices. This analysis suggests that policy declarations of digital skills ‘shortages’ are problematic, since they overlook the contested and shifting forms of enablement and constraint that labour practices involving digital technologies give rise to. Unpacking this labour politics therefore requires geographical approaches that are adept at grasping these complex spatialities of labour.