Daniel Cockayne

Associate Professor

EV1-312, ext. 45783
daniel.cockayne@uwaterloo.ca

Daniel is a feminist economic geographer who is interested in workplace culture, with a particular focus on startup economies and entrepreneurship. He also examines digital media, equity finance, entrepreneurship, gender and sexuality, and emotions and affect in the workplace.


Courses Offered
Fall terms:

GEOG100 - On Becoming a Geography
GEOG302 - Geography of Work and Employment (Co-taught with Dr. Nancy Worth, GEM)

Spring terms:

GEOG202 - Geography of the Global Economy (Also offered in Winter terms)
GEOG411 - The Digital Economy

Key Areas of Graduate Supervision
Cultural geography, critical human geography, economic geography, entrepreneurialism and startup economies, feminist geography, queer geography and sexuality.

Daniel is currently seeking graduate students for supervision at the MA and PhD level. Please contact him by email with a CV and writing sample if you are interested.

Research Interests
Daniel focusses his empirical research on working culture, anti-work politics, and neoliberalism, taking up feminist and cultural lenses in economic geography to approach these themes. His current research, building on doctoral work in San Francisco and Silicon Valley with entrepreneurs and others working for startup firms, examines entrepreneurship and education in the Waterloo-Kitchener context.

He is currently developing a research agenda around the relationship between sexuality and work, that could include investigations into the relationship between labor movements and LGBTQ activism, the political economy of pride protests, and the often popular and liberal uptake of diversity and inclusion programmes in businesses across North America.

Theoretically, Daniel’s research is influenced by social theory, including feminist theory, Marx’s writing, political theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and queer and affect theory. In particular his theoretical research has focused on the early writing of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, prior to (though without ignoring) his later collaborations with Félix Guattari. Additionally, Daniel also investigates the relationship between queer theory and software studies, and is engaged in feminist critiques of knowledge production in geography particularly through the practice of academic citation conceptualized as a method for reproducing academic authority in the discipline.

Recent Publications

Feminist Economic Geographies of Startup Culture and Entrepreneurship

  • Underpeformative economies: discrimination and gendered ideas of culture in San Francisco’s digital media sector. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (2018) 50.4: 756-772.
  • ‘Sharing’ as neoliberal strategy: the economic function and discursive practice of sharing in the digital ‘on demand’ economy. Geoforum (2016) 77: 73-82.
  • Locating affect, exploitation, and value in critical examinations of digital prosumption and big data. Big Data & Society (2016) 3.2: 1-11.
  • Entrepreneurial affect: attachment to work practice in San Francisco’s digital media sector. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2016) 34.3: 456-473.

Digital Geographies and Social Difference

  • The queer times of internet infrastructures and digital systems. In: Catherine Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray (eds) The Geographies of Digital Sexuality (2019). London: Palgrave Macmillan, with Lizzie Richardson
  • What is queer about internet studies now? First Monday (2018) 23.7, with Jack Gieseking and Jessa Lingel.
  • #HotsForBots: intimacy, sex, and the non-human in digital spaces of encounter. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2017) 35.6: 1115-1133, with Agnieszka Leszczynski and Matthew Zook.
  • Queering code/space: the co-production of socio-sexual codes and digital technologies. Gender, Place & Culture (2017) 24.11: 1642-1658, with Lizzie Richardson.

Deleuze, Difference, and Space

  • Thinking space differently: Deleuze’s Möbius topology for a theorization of the encounter. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2019) doi: 10.1111/tran.12311, with Derek Ruez and Anna Secor.
  • Between ontology and representation: locating Gilles Deleuze’s ‘difference-in-itself’ in and for geographical thought. Progress in Human Geography (2017) 41.5: 580-599, with Derek Ruez and Anna Secor.

Feminist Geographic Critiques of Knowledge Production and Academic Authority

  • On “movers” to business and management schools: A response from outside “the project.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (2018) 50.7: 1510-1518, with Amy Horton, Kelly Kay, Jessa Loomis, and Emily Rosenman.
  • Conscientious disengagement and the limits of dialogue. Dialogues in Human Geography (2018) 8.2: 143-147, with Carrie Mott.
  • Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’. Gender, Place & Culture (2017) 24.7: 954-973, with Carrie Mott.