16 OCT 2025 (THU) 14:00-15:00

Departmental Research Seminars Series

Digital geographies of power

Date: 16 OCT 2025 (Thursday)

Time: 14:00-15:00 (HKT)

Venue: CLL, Department of Geography, 10/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Registration link: TBC

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Abstract:

Modern statecraft was enabled by information technology, such as writing. With the ability to store, transport, and retrieve information, administrators could leverage "their" human and material resources to sustain organizational life. I identify contemporary digital spaces that are empowered in analogous ways and directly and indirectly complicate state rule, by supporting harmful and/or illegal activities that are outside the reach of state regulation.

Professor Isak Ladegaard

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

Isak Ladegaard is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at HKU. His work has appeared in journals such as Social Problems, Social Forces, British Journal of Criminology, and Socio-Economic Review. His first book, Open Secrecy: How Technology Empowers the Digital Underground, is published by the University of California Press. Before returning to HKU, his undergraduate alma mater, he spent four years on the tenure track at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a year and a half as a lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, and six years at Boston College, where he obtained his Ph.D. He was born in Oslo.

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