Paper short abstract:

By tracing the old and new imaginaries of human-dog relationships, shifting terrains of public housing policy, and the sciences of animal control, training, and care, this paper considers ideas of companionship and canine citizenship from the Singaporean context.

Paper long abstract:

Stray dogs in Singapore are called “Singapore Specials,” and their existence is predicated by a web of relationships that link institutions that oversee animal governance, public housing policy, and the shifting sciences and technologies of animal care. This paper shows how Singapore Specials, which are regarded as a distinct breed, are as much the outcome of genealogies of animal control and care as of biological reproduction. By tracing the old and new imaginaries of human-dog relationships, the paper considers ideas of companionship and canine citizenship from the Singaporean context.

When the first housing units were built in the 1960s, animals were not allowed, which resulted in mass abandonment. In the 1980s, the public housing board published a list of small-breed dogs that it allowed as pets, and the state followed a culling program as a way of controlling the stray dog population. It was only in recent times, with active campaigning by animal welfare groups, that the government allowed stray dogs in public housing–where over 80% of the city’s human population resides. The growing acceptance of strays hinges on the idea that they share a common identity as Singapore Specials, a breed with roots in the city. It is also the result of changing technologies of animal control, sciences of stray dog management, and the development of dog training as a scientific practice. The histories of housing and animal governance in the city show how ideas of human-dog companionship are shot through with ideas of wildness, citizenship, and species politics.

Paper short abstract:

As bushfires have become more intense and frequent, how do those labouring to make their potentialities “real” relate to their computational companions? Examining such questions offers insight into how models and platforms are sedimented into the impossible work of controlling a world of risks.

Paper long abstract:

As bushfires have become more intense and frequent under the influence of climate change, and political and social pressure to intervene in their increasing risks builds, fire management in countries such as Australia, Canada and the United State have called upon a growing number of computer models and platforms to imagine, anticipate, and intervene in flammable landscapes. But just as proliferating virtual fires have made real forests and fires legible and governable in novel ways, or at least that is how it seems, they have also made fire managers and their tools newly available to contest and audit. In this paper, I examine the social and political life of Australia’s most widely used fire simulator - known as Phoenix - through the work of a large state land and emergency management bureaucracy in southeast Australia. With the bureaucracy’s policies and practice falling under the scrutiny of a series of formal audits, alongside continual public criticism, how do those labouring to make fires’ potentialities “real” relate to and animate their computational companion? Examining such questions, I suggest, offers renewed insight into how computer models and platforms are sedimented into the impossible work of controlling a world of risks.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how the long history of scholarship on forestry commodities in Asia and more recent STS contributions offer fertile ground for comparison and engagement with the Amazonian region, with particular focus on the marketization of the aguaje palm fruit (Mauritia flexuosa).

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers how the long history of scholarship on forest commodities in Southeast Asia as well as more recent contributions of STS and multispecies ethnography offer a fertile space for comparison and engagement with the Amazonian region. In particular, this paper focuses on the sociality and materiality of the aguaje palm fruit (Mauritia flexuosa) and its ongoing transformation from a prized local foodstuff in lowland Peruvian Amazon to a global superfood. The commodification of aguaje is being heralded as a win-win solution for both the region’s post-Covid economy as well as environmental conservation but to date its ‘unruly’ characteristics seem to resist smooth incorporation into capitalist regimes. Rather, the fruit is largely semi-wild and harvested by felling, spoils rapidly after harvest, and oxidises easily during processing. By drawing on multispecies ethnography, decolonial and feminist STS literature from the Asia-Pacific, this paper seeks to contextualise the aguaje in historical entanglements between the Asia-Pacific and the Amazon as well as highlight opportunities for contemporary engagement in studying the social life of technology.

Paper short abstract:

In a context where AI systems are pushing the aviation industry to interrogate the value of its technology in relation to humans, this paper describes how pilots interpreted and evaluated AI assistants—and the kind of assistance they wanted from them.

Paper long abstract:

As AI systems push the aviation industry to interrogate the value of its technology in relation to humans, this paper uses a critical co-design approach to describe how pilots interpreted and evaluated AI assistants. Pilots who participated in our research saw the digital flight assistants as teammates who would be generally untrustworthy, but, under the right circumstances, very helpful. This evaluation relied upon comparing the DFA with human co-pilots alongside three specific kinds of labour experiences where AI would fail to help them cope with increasingly degraded working environments. Yet, this mistrust was also couched in a layer of optimism. Paradoxically, in a future that they saw as necessarily getting rid of (most of) the humans in the cockpit, DFAs were imagined as possible conversational partners, reminiscent of the golden age of aviation. Taken together, these two aspects suggest the need for an approach to the evaluation of AI that combines structural and emergent factors--blending insights from design anthropology and critical political economy.

Paper short abstract:

Under certain forms of technical pressure, coral skeletons can become temporal proxies. This transformation into time data takes place in laboratories where techniques inherit and reproduce time-depth. But in the lab, encounters with 'dimensional friction' reveal orientations beyond the vertical.

Paper long abstract:

In the 20th Century, coral space — particularly the Great Barrier Reef — emerged as a political battleground. In the 21st Century, coral time, produced in laboratories, emerges as a political battleground. As the temporalisation of reefs becomes a charged inflection point for governance, securitisation, and hallucinatory wars, how can we pay closer attention to the practices of those skilfully making coral time? Based on fieldwork in a coring laboratory at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, I introduce ‘dimensional friction’ as an analytic for considering how the temporal structure of proxy records intersects with the temporal structure of global climate science. Under certain forms of technical pressure, these coral proxies can be transformed into planetary timelines. In the lab, simultaneously discursive, technical, and imaginative problems take coral core scientists — and ethnographers of laboratory times — deeper and deeper inside the mineral matrix of corals, into the carbonate structures that form reefs. ‘Dimensional friction’, appearing when this matrix is manipulated, reveals how ‘vertical time depth’ is reproduced in the laboratory, but also suggests ways of temporalizing (and corporally appropriating) coral time differently.