Blockchains, like many “disruptive” digital media, continue to garner significant academic and popular attention about what they are. Recent critical provocations in geography and cognate disciplines shift lines of enquiry to interrogate the material realities of digital technologies, emphasizing instead how they are lived. Inspired by critical and feminist thinking, the primary task of this dissertation is to follow the latter mode of analysis and present a critical cartography of blockchains, loosely defined. The critical cartography presented in this study sketches a conceptual and methodological map of context-specific and intimate blockchains practices I participated in and experienced from 2013-2020, in a mostly Canadian context. I construct this cartography by using a variety of autobiographical and auto-ethnographic methods that are sometimes buttressed by more conventional qualitative methods. Research reveals that blockchains have the capacity to become economic in a diversity of ways, enacting multiple rowdy characteristics of capitalism, a phenomenon I term rambunctious capitalism. Rambunctious economic flows actualizing through blockchains rely on different situations of power to enact nomadic subject/ivities in a variety of spatial, temporal, and material contexts. Specifically, the blockchain practices addressed in this dissertation highlight the embodiment of joyful moments for a pregnant body working in Toronto’s crypto-economy, the algorhythmic impacts of blockchain hard fork events, where code participates in the instantiation of diverse temporalities that produce uneven geographies, and the materialization of Canadian policy discourses about blockchains that position and, in some cases, implement these media as smart solutions to civic service delivery. Findings presented throughout this study contribute to feminist and digital geographies by offering autobiographical, auto-ethnographic, and intimate accounts of blockchains, and how they are practiced as lived and multiple realities. In addition, this dissertation also adds ethnographic research to the now expansive multi-disciplinary scholarship on blockchains and cryptocurrencies to understand how these media operate in specific contexts. / Graduate

Virtual reality (VR) and videogames present, enable, and constrain human engagement with what may broadly be called digital worlds. Videogames have already become a global force in popular culture. Although VR technologies have existed for half a century, it is only during the past decade that VR has become more widely accessible to the public beyond the confines of research institutions and industry use. Very little scholarship has examined the interconnections of videogames and VR as co-extensive cultural forces that shape ideas and feelings about inhabiting digital worlds. This thesis specifically examines the often-employed lexicon of immersion, presence, or feelings being inside of computer-generated contexts as they exist across videogames and VR. By analyzing 15 participants’ interactions with a contemporary VR videogame and interviewing them about this experience, I discuss how immersion, presence, or the feeling of being inside computer-generated worlds is performative and exceeds what the technology affords. Instead, engagement with digital worlds intersects with other performances, actions, and previous engagement with objects or other digital worlds to make sense of creating meaning in VR. / Graduate

Die aktuellen Debatten im Feld der Digitalen Geographie und der Arbeitsgeographie zeigen, dass digitale Plattformen nicht neutrale Vermittelnde von digitalen Interaktionsmöglichkeiten sind, die in einem entfernten digitalen Cyberspace operieren. Stattdessen beruht die Funktionalität digitaler Plattformen auf zeitintensiven Arbeitspraktiken, die von den Nutzenden der Plattform zwischen digitalen und sozial-materiellen Räumen durchgeführt und von den Plattformunternehmen gesteuert werden. Vor diesem Hintergrund besteht das übergeordnete Forschungsziel der Dissertation darin, die Räume und die Zeitlichkeit zu erforschen, die von dem Plattformunternehmen und den Nutzenden gemeinsam, aber dennoch konfliktreich konstruiert werden. Es wird eine Perspektive auf die Produktion von plattformvermittelten Zeiträumen und deren Friktionen herausgearbeitet. Die alltägliche Aushandlung von digitalen Zeit-Räumen wird als Zeit-Raum-Reibung entwickelt. Um die plattformgestützte Vermittlung von Zeit und Raum und ihre Reibungen empirisch aufzuarbeiten, kommt das Instrumentarium einer digitalen Ethnographie zum Einsatz. Dieser Ansatz ermöglicht die detailreiche Untersuchung der Wechselbeziehung von Plattformoberflächen, Nutzungspraktiken und Erfahrungen in einem spezifischen Fall. Es wird die Arbeit selbständiger Berliner Modeunternehmer:innen analysiert, die zwischen Offline-Räumen und der digitalen Plattform Instagram erfolgt. Die Dissertation unterstreicht die Verbindung von Perspektiven der Digitalen Geographie und der Arbeitsgeographie. So können kritische Einblicke in die tägliche Arbeit, die Aushandlungen und die Machtverhältnisse gewonnen werden, die der Ausgestaltung von Zeit und Raum im digitalen Kapitalismus zugrunde liegen. Schließlich zeigt die Dissertation, wie qualitative Online- und Offline-Methoden miteinander verschränkt werden können, um eine detaillierte, fallspezifische Analyse der Produktion digital vermittelter Zeiträume und ihrer Aushandlungsprozesse offenzulegen. / Current digital and labor geography debates reveal that daily spaces represent a web of interconnected online and offline spaces. This implies that not only has the web become platformized, but work practices and daily tempo-spatial relations have also been structured by the spaces of digital platforms and their models of value capture. Therefore, digital platforms are not merely asset-light matchmakers operating in distant digital cyberspace. They are deeply embedded in the fabric of daily life. The dissertation aims to uncover the platform mediation of time and space and its frictions. The concept of platform-mediated timespace suggests that platform interfaces, human practices, and socio-material relations intricately and seamlessly shape the configuration of space and the perception of time. Platform-mediated time and space are negotiated and contested between platform capitalism and platform labor. This contested production of digitally mediated timespace is defined as timespace friction. Methodologically, a digital ethnography is employed to investigate the interplay between platform interfaces, user practices, and experiences in a specific case of platform mediation. The study analyzes independent fashion entrepreneurs in Berlin who work between offline spaces and the digital platform Instagram. Against this backdrop, the dissertation urges the field of digital geography to move beyond notions of augmented digital space. Instead, in combination with a labor geography perspective, it suggests gaining more critical insights into the daily work, negotiations, and power relations underlying the creation of platform-mediated timespace in digital capitalism. Finally, the dissertation advocates for the application of mediated methods in researching mediated timespaces. It demonstrates how a detailed, case-specific digital ethnography can provide insights into the production of digitally mediated spacetime and its struggles.