Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Alex Wilkie
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Mike Michael (University of Exeter)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- Theater 1, NU building
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how ‘commoning’ operates with regard to metrology and metrological assemblages that mediate between aesthetic experience and knowledge practices and how these sensitise the researcher and researched to contemporary concerns regarding environmental and climate crisis.
Long Abstract:
Aesthetics – understood ontologically rather than phenomenologically – is a central feature of how socio-material events unfold insofar as the elements that compose such events make themselves commonly available to one another. Such ‘commoning’ entails the researcher as well as the researched in the process of the research event. This panel explores how this commoning operates with regard to metrology and metrological assemblages that mediate between aesthetic experience and knowledge practices. Specifically, we ask: how do modes of sensitization and measurement become available to – in common with - that which they measure? This is not a straightforward question as that which metrological devices measure are complexly configured to include not only the ‘thing’ being measured against an accredited ‘scale’, but a panoply of things and a heterogeneity of scales (including what might be call ‘lay metrologies’) that can implicate the socio-material, the affective, the narrative, the economic, and so on. The panel will focus on how we can operationalise this broad schema of commoning through aesthetic engagement practices that draw on social science, design, artistic disciplines and the environmental humanities. We are particularly interested in empirical examples or proposals ideally those that address contemporary climate crisis and environmental concerns as well as frameworks such as the Anthropocene or Chthulucene.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Against standardised metrology, ‘lay metrology’ spans affect and narrative. ‘Size of Wales’ illustrates how lay units mediate cultural identity. Combining formal and lay scales to measure the physico-social extent of ecological damage, we ask inventive questions that embrace the Chthulucene.
Paper long abstract:
If metrology entails the standardisation of units not least for the purposes of various mathematical operations, ‘lay metrology’ entails units whose interconnections are more overtly multiple spanning the affective, the aesthetic, the narrative, the cultural and the sensorial. Illustrating this with the ‘Vague Ruler’, the paper will specifically examine how ‘area’ measured in standardised units (specifically as applied to environmental devastation) can be translated into folk units. Drawing on the charity ‘Size of Wales’, the paper discusses the ways in which the unit of ‘the size of Wales’ serves in narratively and affectively mediating cultural identity. The paper goes on to explore speculatively how one might go about bringing together - commoning - standardised and folk scales – that is, institutionalised and lay metrologies in order to invent ‘hybrid scales’ that might be used in ‘measuring’, for example’ the ‘physico-social’ extent of environmental damage. The aim of this exercise is to at once illuminate the implicit functioning of formal metrologies (and their tacit affectivities) and allow for the development of more ‘interesting questions’, including those that embrace such hopeful futures as the Chthulucene.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how wildfires in rural-urban edgelands might be understood as aesthetic events by enhancing the kinds of ‘social’ data available to wildfire management experts and response services.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how wildfire data and reporting might be enhanced with knowledge of ‘aesthetic’ experience that allows UK and European fire and rescue services, wildfire responsible agencies and government policy to better understand and manage wildfires that occur at wildland-urban interfaces (WUI). With the rise in global temperatures brought about by climate change, wildfires have become an increasingly hazardous socio-environmental risk at the interstices and edgelands that bifurcate the rural add the urban. Furthermore, fire scientists are now witnessing larger and more severe wildfires that exceed current wildfire models and such fires are expected to increase in frequency as the climate warms and protracted drought conditions become more frequent in the Europe and the UK. At present, wildfires remain poorly understood as sociomaterial events, as there is a distinct lack of ‘social’ data for wildfire analysis and modelling and, where such data does exist, it is somewhat crude, reflecting the rudimentary nature of wildfire data more generally. If, however, as Seghal and Wilkie argue (2024), knowledge and social processes are primarily aesthetic and, as Latour contended, new modes of sensitisation are required to address matters of concern, then new techniques for producing aesthetic data are required that supplement and enhance ‘social’ data. This paper proposes three techniques of more-than-human enquiry (Whatmore, 2002) that each explore different aspects of aesthetic engagement with social data and how data might become aestheticized. In so doing, the paper explores how aesthetic commoning might enhance wildfire management.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is about encounters between ways of measuring the effects of the overlap between reindeer and wind turbines, by my participation in initiatives to understand herded reindeer selection of habit amidst human disturbance.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is about encounters between ways of measuring how reindeer move and respond to wind turbines. Inspired by the salient literature on data, multispecies co-existence, and context, in STS and Anthropology, I take ethnographic insights from my collaboration with experts and published literature reviews and reports as my empirical site. My entry point are the contingencies of the encounters emerging in the field (e.g. conflict, assimilation, co-existence, mutual indifference, separation etc.). In Norway, impact assessments focusing on the before-after approach and relevant variables from established literature and quantitative data, without the influence of affected collectives, have documented herded reindeer grazing by wind farms and powerlines. In Sweden, collaborative impact assessments have questioned habituation as not unequivocally good for reindeer. In collaboration, while ecological scientists worked with the notion of cumulative impacts, herders' practices centered on the notion of grazing peace and their classification of winter conditions included a gradient between accessible and blocked lichen pastures. Herders were concerned that snow-blocked pastures push reindeer towards other sources of stress, and about the growing need for artificial feeding and intensive herding restricting free-ranging. What best explained the presence of reindeer near the turbines in the statistical models was not the presence of the turbines alone, as an attractor, but the avoidance of an area of lichen grounds blocked by poor snow conditions in the lower valley region. They reported the notion of increased tolerance to modernizing stressors describing nuanced reindeer behaviors and performing the differentiation of measuring practices and collectives.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on the project Walking & Reading, conducted with the European Architecture Student Assembly (EASA) in Sheffield in 2023 to investigate the commons and commoning.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on the project Walking & Reading, conducted with the European Architecture Student Assembly (EASA) in Sheffield in 2023. The starting points for the project were two-fold: to approach common land literally by engaging with the specifics of Sheffield’s long history of access movements and campaigns, while at the same time taking heed of the historian Peter Linebaugh’s call to treat commons as a verb; an action, process, or way of being, by considering the kinds of practice that are involved in commoning. Over the course of two weeks this consisted of Walking: being guided by local experts, repairing and maintaining footpaths and bridleways, seeking out old and forgotten pathways to map, trespassing by walking and swimming on private land, & Reading: reading the landscape and our affective experiences of it, while situating and discussing literature and theory on topics including enclosure and commons, repair and maintenance, mapping, infrastructures and access while we walked. This conceptual and physical journey was eventually distilled into a series of small publications containing stories, poems, audio pieces and films held together in a ‘pack horse library’; a coat that was designed to hold publications acting as a roaming (or rambling), expanding library.
Paper short abstract:
To measure accurately is to weed out discrepancies. Yet in the archives of colonial science, discrepancies persist. They afford affective networks that bypass imperial as well as nationalist frames. As forms of error, these apprehend the planetary as a cartography of that which eludes measurement.
Paper long abstract:
This talk is concerned with standard time and the colonial observatory as a node of scientific archival. While the rationalization of time has largely been framed within narratives of disenchantment and protocols of governmentality, public irritation at time reform—as in the case of Bombay (1890s-1940s)—has been read for nationalist gestures of agency. Such unrest also expresses local standpoints of cosmology as recorded daily at sites such as the Bombay observatory. Amidst anxieties produced by colonial time reform, local and colonial time turned mutually irrational as soon as Greenwich became the (0,0) of temporal common sense. Yet scientific writing had its unrest too, as I show by close-reading two neglected sources: the 1943 records of the Bombay Observatory in Alibaug, and volumes of the Geological Survey of India (GSI) memoirs that cover the 1897 and 1905 earthquakes. In their folding of figurative and metrical registers, these records afford cartographies of shock and nausea from the Himalayas to Bengal to Iran. Are these intimations of the nervous geological body that eludes nationalism? Are they eddies of a wider affective pattern of unease, error, and remainder that anticipate the theme of planetarity? The ethics of empiricism--as I argue, drawing on Isabelle Stenger’s notion of idiocy and its reception in STS—rely on such formal and stylistic discrepancies in the scientific archive.
Paper short abstract:
The 3D revolution in archeology has produced two different ways of working with digital 3D models in which diverging paradigms have developed distinct approaches to working with 3D with different implications for how archeologists combine experiential and digital data to construct new knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
The last twenty years have seen 3D documentation and modelling emerge as an important vector for methodological innovation in cutting-edge research in archeology. Adopting techniques such as photogrammetric modelling and laser scanning, archeologists are experimenting with new ways of producing and communicating knowledge; and they do so by innovating and developing new ways to record, report, and reconstruct archeological excavations, finds, and structures in three dimensions. However, the adaptation of these novel technologies has not been without its challenges and questions of standards, best-practices, and sustainable long-term storage linger while innovation keeps moving forward. In this paper, I present the results of a multi-sited ethnographic study of epistemic work and epistemic divides in contemporary archeology and highlight how the adaptation of digital 3D technologies has taken two different paths as two archeological paradigms – the processualists and the post-processualists – have developed diverging strategies for how to incorporate digital 3D into their work. While the processualists foreground the capacity of 3D recording and modelling to produce accurate and precise versions of the world and use 3D to make claims about the pasts they excavate the post-processualists approaches models as spaces with which to reflect on and document the interpretative process underlying their version of knowledge production in archeology. Exploring the differences between the two paradigms’ work with digital 3D technologies in knowledge production, I ask what implications they have for the practical work of digitizing the often embodied, multisensorial experiential data archeologists produce in the field and in the lab.