Beyond Data Flows: Towards a Geographical Understanding of Data Mobility

ABSTRACT

Digital data now circulate through digital platforms, material infrastructures, administrative systems, and everyday environments, shaping contemporary transformations in governance, urban development, and spatial organisation. Recent scholarship has moved beyond the language of data flows towards more processual accounts of data journeys, migration, and mobility, showing that data movement depends on infrastructures, institutions, and uneven relations of power. Yet the spatiality of data movement remain under‐theorised. This article argues that data mobility should be understood not simply as movement across space, but as a process of spatialisation. Drawing on mobilities research and theories of sociospatial relations, it shows how data mobility is organised through interrelated configurations of territory, place, scale, and networks, and how governance actively shapes these configurations through legal, infrastructural, and operational arrangements. In turn, these processes contribute to structured spatial orderings and uneven geographies. The article concludes by outlining a geographical research agenda for analysing how digital transformation reworks spatial relations across local, regional, and transboundary contexts.