CFP written with Evangeline McGlynn
Across formats as varied as newspapers, TikTok, and humanitarian aid missions, media producers assume their audiences both understand and trust complex satellite diagrams and visualizations. Satellite images have become familiar backdrops on satnavs and news broadcasts, thematic and reference maps. From climate change to war to urbanization, comparative overhead images are often presented as demonstrable proof of changing material conditions on the ground. Today it is not uncommon for people to challenge or buttress truth-claims by comparing satellite imagery against myriad images made by commercial drones, smartphone cameras, street-level photos, and their own lived experiences. Indeed, the power of researchers like Forensic Architecture (Fuller and Weizman, 2021) to foment change came from a methodological reliance on inferring ground truth from massified images of landscapes from open-sourced publics.
Of course, the way audiences engage with and interpret these pixels is always shifting. Geographers have long warned against the seductive dimensions of maps and data visualizations (Monmonier 1991), and work exploring the politics of images is rich and valuable (Berger, 1971; Campt 2017, 2021; Dyer, 2021; Mirzoeff, 2011, 2015; Sontag 2002). Yet the contested political work of precision geographic imagery is unfolding in a moment of both intense data skepticism and data circulation. That, alongside the rise of AI-generated images, deepfakes, and synthetic media throw the veracity of ANY image into question. What are we to make of forensic methods when our collective access to imagery of far-away landscapes is changing faster than public capacity to verify (or interpret) what we’re looking at?
Is it possible that the stakes of the image have shifted, and with this shift, a changing definition of ground truth? Almost two decades ago, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007) identified three periodizations that organized the history of scientific objectivity up to their then-present day: truth-to-nature, mechanical objectivity, and trained judgment. Further, the notion of accuracy itself has a rich and complicated socio-technical history (MacKenzie, 1993). Our current moment prompts us to further reflect on the historical drivers underpinning how we got here, and to take seriously the question of what is happening, and what happens when precision diagrams and generative visuals alike blur the boundaries between fact, fabrication, and affect?
In this paper session, we seek work that is situated in these complex interstices. We want to highlight investigations exploring not only ground truth-as-veracity—whether a landscape image corresponds to material reality—but also engaging with something akin to ground-truthiness, an affective sense of plausibility that images produce even when their factual basis is uncertain or unverifiable. Spangler et al. (2025) recently argued that we are living through an era of authoritarian counting, where falsified, stretched or cherry-picked data are still actionable, even weaponized, because it assembles political realities, or resembles existing assumptions. Similarly, precision imagery often feints toward the authority of mechanical objectivity, borrowing the aura of machine vision, while simultaneously operating in registers closer to persuasion, performance, and affect. Both generative and ostensibly forensic imagery, that is, are not just representational, but infrastructural—they create evidence that does things in the world.
Still, the promise of landscape imagery is that it has the ability to verify information on the ground, regardless of intent or physical ability to do so. This is not just a question of technical savvy and increased pixel resolution—it is also about politics, an aesthetic, and a mode of evidentiary capture. The issue at hand then, is the centrality of an affective ground-truthiness—a feeling of accuracy that shapes how publics and policymakers act that circulates independently from either the precision of its tools or the material reality it represents. Given the mass production of countless images claiming forensic certitude, of landscapes of evidence, ‘reality’ seems even farther from our grasp (Gregory, 2011; Parks and Caplan, 2017). What does this do for current hyper-visible interventions? How do these changes impact the use of high-resolution satellite imagery in countermapping projects (Perkins and Dodge, 2009)? How does this changing relationship to the image and its “truthiness” mediate how we understand Gaza? How do we study evidence not as what it is but what it does?
This session invites contributions situated in the unsettled space between digital landscape imagery’s “ground truth” and its “groundtruthiness.” We welcome papers that examine this terrain through computational AI pipelines, satellite-based analyses, or critical cartographic and investigative practices. Submissions may investigate, provoke, or historicize the landscape–imagery relationship, attending to moments where truth gives way to precision truthiness.
A partial list of topics might include:
- Unexpected cases of continuity between military and environmental modelling
- Strategic falsification of landscape, generative imagery acting like data, other reflections on slippage between operational and (merely) representational imagery
- Technical access differentials vs risk / truth differentials
- “Groundtruthiness” in competition: stories of counter-analyses
- Instrumental/technical approaches to spatial information il/literacy
- Ethnographies of how publics, analysts, and activists learn to read satellite diagrams and model outputs
REFERENCES
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Classic, 2008.
Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Duke University Press, 2017.
Campt, Tina M. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. MIT Press, 2023.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Zone Books, 2007.
Dyer, Geoff. See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Graywolf Press, 2021.
Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth. Verso, 2021.
Gregory, Derek. “From a View to a Kill Drones and Late Modern War.” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 188–215.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press Books, 2011.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World. Pelican, 2015.
Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Parks, Lisa and Caren Kaplan. Life in the Age of Drone Warfare. Duke University Press, 2017.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Spangler, Ian, Emory Shaw, Scott Markley, and Dillon Mahmoudi. “We Can’t Count Our Way out: Rethinking Quantification amidst Digital Authoritarianism.” Dialogues on Digital Society, September 18, 2025.
Perkins, Chris, and Martin Dodge. “Satellite Imagery and the Spectacle of Secret Spaces.” Geoforum 40, no. 4 (2009): 546–60.