Agnieszka Leszczynski

Research Areas

Digital geographies, platforms and cities, digital location/ geolocation, GIScience & Society

Research Interests

I am a human geographer interested in the intensifying relationships between digital technologies and cities, and situate my scholarship within the intradisciplinary field of ‘digital geographies’. I currently have three active research projects that examine different dimensions of these technology-city relationships, all funded by SSHRC:

1) I lead a four-year project (2022-26) investigating the visual aesthetics of urban platformization. This research examines how these aesthetics inform and are informed by projects of world-class city making, via which cities aspire to position themselves at the ‘top’ of global status hierarchies. This project is comparative in its approach, focussing on cities in Canada, Poland, and South Africa.

2) A second project, on which I am co-investigator, examines how small Canadian cities function as sites of digital experimentation for a number of technology-based initiatives that may, or may not, scale to larger Canadian metro regions.

3) Currently in its concluding phases, my third project examines where material traces of urban platforms are visually encountered in cities, and investigates the relationship of the locations of platforms and gentrification in the Canadian urban context.

I welcome expressions of interest from prospective graduate students with interests in smart cities, platform urbanism, urban technology, and spatial aesthetics, as well as urban GIS and GIScience & Society.

Teaching

Supervised Graduate Students and Theses Titles

PhD Students

• L. Jahiu (Current) t.b.d.
• H. He (2025) The Digital Rural in China: Rurality, Urban-Rural Relations, and Aesthetics

Masters Students

• A. Ojolowo (Current) t.b.d.
• M. Paiz-Domingo (2024) Conceptualizing the Urban Circular Economy: Understanding the formal-Informal continuum in London, Ontario, Canada
• S. Sadati Far (2022) A visual analysis of the smart home
• V. Kong (2021) The Spatial Equity of Dockless Micromobility Sharing Systems in Calgary, Canada
  
  

Recent Publications

Refereed Journals
Leszczynski, A. & Elwood, S. (2022). 'Glitch epistemologies for computational cities.' Dialogues in Human Geography

Leszczynski, A. & Kong, V. (2022). 'Gentrification and the an/aesthetics of digital spatial capital in Canadian 'platform cities.' The Canadian Geographer 66(1): 8-22

Astaburuaga, J., Martin, M. E., Leszczynski, A. & Gaillard, J. C. (2022). 'Maps, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and the patio-discursive construction of nature.' Digital Geography and Society 3 (100029): 1-13

Leszczynski, A. (2021). 'Being genealogical in digital geographies.' The Canadian Geographer 65(1): 110-115

Castree, N., Leszczynski, A., Stallins, J. A., Schwanen, T. & Patel, Z. (2022). 'Reconstituting Geography for the 21st century.' Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice

Leszczynski, A. & Zook, M. (2020). 'Viral Data.' Big Data & Society 7(2): 1-5

Leszczynski, A. (2020). 'Digital methods III: The digital mundane.' Progress in Human Geography 44(6): 1194-1201

Leszczynski, A. (2020). 'Glitchy vignettes of platform urbanism.' Environment & Planning D: Society and Space 38(2): 189-208

Leszczynski, A. (2019). “Platform affects of geolocation”. Geoforum 107: 207-215

Leszczynski, A. (2019). 'Digital methods II: Digital-visual methods.' Progress in Human Geography 43(6): 1143-1152

Books
Ash J, Kitchin R and Leszczynski A (eds.; 2019) Digital Geographies. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE

Chapters in Books
Leszczynski A (2020) Geolocation. In Kobayashi A (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd ed. Elsevier, 101-106

Leszczynski A (2019) Spatialities. In Ash J, Kitchin R and Leszczynski A (eds.) Digital Geographies. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE, 12-23

Ash J, Kitchin R and Leszczynski A (2019) Introduction. In Ash J, Kitchin R and Leszczynski A (eds.) Digital Geographies. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE, 1-10

Leszczynski A (2018) Geoweb. In Warf B (ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE, 390-394

Leszczynski A (2017) Geoprivacy. In Kitchin R, Lauriault T and Wilson MW (eds.), Understanding Spatial Media. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE, 235-244

Leszczynski A (2017) Epistemological critiques. In Wilson JP (ed.) The Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge, 4th Quarter 2017 Edition. The University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. doi: 10.22224/gistbok/2017.4.1

Conference Proceedings
Mitchell P. Leszczynski A, Zook M, Blankenship J, McGrane C, Hjorth L, Thomas J and Willen R (2019). Geolocation: Locating trust in digital platforms and economies. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. Panel presented at AoIR 2019: The 20th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. 03-05 October, Brisbane, Australia.