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- Convenors:
-
Michaela Spencer
(Charles Darwin University)
Endre Dányi (University of the Bundeswehr Munich)
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- Format:
- Closed Panel
- Location:
- HG-15A33
- Sessions:
- Thursday 18 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Long Abstract:
It may be tempting to read ‘voicing’ as an attempt to give voice to places, to make them talk and thereby integrate them into a particular understanding of politics – one that works through speeches and arguments and carries an emancipatory impulse. But here our intention is different: the ‘voicing’ we have in mind is closer to sounding a musical instrument, to hearing and responding to harmonies and discordances. What might it mean to inhabit places in this way, and what might that mean for our scholarly methods and analyses? In this panel we aim to bring together a series of empirical stories that foreground our methods as arising in specific places and finding a resonance between such places and various attempts to know and govern them. Understood in this way, ‘voicing places’ requires learning, making mistakes, being clumsy, but also becoming proficient. It sensitises us to the difference between speeches and cries, grunts and gurgles, vibrations and silences embedded in sites (such as rivers and waterways, farmlands, data centres, councils and ceremonies). Through attention to multiple senses of voicing, our proposal expresses a methodological sensibility to the various ways in which places ‘are,’ and explores STS dispositions by which we may participate carefully, and lyrically, within their making and doing (as a politics).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
It's clear what politics does to rivers: it turns them into borders, transport routes and sources of energy. But what do rivers do to politics? This paper engages with this question with the help of the Danube: the only river in Europe that connects the Eastern and the Western parts of the continent
Paper long abstract:
It is more or less clear what politics does to rivers: it turns them into well-policed borders, busy transportation routes and sources of hydraulic energy. But what do rivers do to politics? More precisely, what kinds of politics becomes thinkable and doable if we foreground rivers and their modalities? In this paper I engage with this question with the help of the Danube: the only river in Europe that connects the Eastern and the Western parts of the continent, flowing from the Black Forest in Germany to the Black Sea in Romania and Ukraine. Blurring the boundaries between the past and the present, nature and culture, and the East and the West, my contribution to the ‘Voicing Places’ panel revisits the Danube Confederacy – a more than a century old proposal to organise countries along the river into a political entity – as an impossible political imaginary. It then uses ethnographic fragments collected along the Danube to indicate how the impossibility of this political imaginary has been shaping political practices on the shores of the river, both within the world of nation states and beyond it.
Paper short abstract:
We ask about managing the incommensurable/commensurable tensions in voicing watery people-places in contemporary Australia. On the one hand this involves modern algorithmic models and on the other Indigenous story, song, image and dance.
Paper long abstract:
Are you flood ready? The question was asked by Melbourne Water in inviting us to a webinar. Constituted under the Victorian State Water Act (1989) Melbourne Water has the power to make by-laws. In 2018 the corporation gave itself the power to prevent damage to the water catchments and supply system of Melbourne, and to police access to certain areas and facilities. Making models is the core epistemic device the corporation uses to make decisions associated with the exercise of these powers. We read this model as 'voicing a people-place'... the Maribyrnong catchment.
Descendants of settlers, freed convicts and economic migrants, we are inheritors of a politico-epistemic tradition that regards the lands we walk upon and the water we drink and bathe in, as essentially inert. Our compatriots who descend from members of the many Australian sovereign Indigenous polities despite the best murderous efforts of early settlers to eradicate their forebears, tell other stories of the land and its many Beings. The epistemic devices mobilised within the metaphysical commitments of Indigenous traditions are at first blush incommensurable with those derived from Settler traditions.
We ask about managing the incommensurable/commensurable tensions in voicing watery people-places in contemporary Australia
Paper short abstract:
While Dinaric karst challenges groundwater management due to scientific uncertainties, post-war legacies affect legal authorities, water utility companies and the water infrastructures they maintain. This ethnographic contribution studies karstic materiality, management and intimate geomorphologies.
Paper long abstract:
“As you know, here we are in karst, and in karst there are no rules,” declared a civil servant working for a water authority during my ethnographic fieldwork about groundwater management in the Dinarides. The Dinarides are a mountain range in South-Eastern Europe known for stunning mountainous and (ground-) water rich landscapes, characterized by highly karstified environments. The term karst denotes landscapes both subterranean and aboveground, characterized by highly permeable carbonate rock formations. Here, groundwater stands in special relation to karst as it contributes to corrosion of the underground rock formations, a process known as karstification. Simulatenously, the geological sub-disciplines studying karst, in turn, stand in special relation to the Dinaric karst, the first karst systematically studied and proclaimed ‘locus typicus’ in Western academia at the end of the 19th century. Ever since then, karstic groundwater has had a reputation of being difficult to live with due to low agricultural value, to model hydro(geo)logically, therefore to know and to manage. However, inhabiting karst also relates to spaces of death, detainment and refuge during the 1990s warfare in Yugoslavia, which also posed extraordinary challenges in maintaining groundwater infrastructures. Hence, this contribution explores how tracing karstic groundwater ethnographically in administrative bodies, water utility companies, and local and international karst scholarship amidst post-war infrastructural legacies can voice karstic dissonances between its materiality, management and their intimate geomorphologies.
Paper short abstract:
Hyperscale datacentres are rarely problematised in the municipalities where they are built and function. By listening to the silence around a datacentre, soon becoming a ‘datacentre region’ in Denmark, we show that potentials and limits for place-based engagements are designed before construction.
Paper long abstract:
Big Tech’s hyperscale datacentres are built in a variety of landscapes often mobilised via public/private and transnational partnerships, national digitalisation strategies and major investments. Curiously, their impacts to both livelihoods and environments, datacentres are rarely problematised in the municipalities where they are built and function. Why, we ask, do these hyperscale structures not attract more attention in Denmark, where 9 have been built or are in process?
Much work, politics and resource go into building them, but as we show there is more to a hyperscale datacentre than strategy, planning, and global collaboration. Datacentres form a lens into the uneventful, a public, yet not problematized political issue. Our empirical investigation begins with a Meta datacentre in Denmark which despite public attention to it business model and energy consumption is locally somewhat of an un-event. Local utility engineers voice concerns around infrastructural connections, but the resource transformation of the local landscape is not a public issue. We draw on the anthropology of silence to establish a counterpoint to the panel’s suggestion that STS is well-positioned to develop ‘listening techniques’ to sound the composite nature of place. Our analysis shows that to make datacentres politically relevant we need to sound behind the scenes concerns by builders, engineers, a forgotten forest, and surplus light. It shows that potentials and limits for place-based engagements are designed from the outset before construction. To test this point. we compare with Microsoft’s current attempts at what they refer to as ‘leapfrogging’ a Danish datacentre region.
Paper short abstract:
In my conribution I seek to listen to the different signals that are generated as part of urban traffic and administrative information infrastructures and how the resulting data assemble and voice politics in different forms.
Paper long abstract:
Urban streets are filled with noise: roaring engines, chatting neighbours, bicycle bells, all voicing demands for their space in public place. Unheard and mostly unnoticed by road users, other signals fill the urban public space: inductors embedded in the asphalt of the road generate and transmit signals, indicating the numbers and movement of (some) road users and ultimately form the basis for the planing and monitoring of the city’s traffic. My contribution to the panel seeks to listen to these signals and asks how they participate in the politics of redistributing space for urban traffic. As part of the historically grown traffic and administrative information infrastructures, traffic data are assembled in particular ways. To no surprise, signals counting cars and controlling their flows and stops have been central for the development of traffic data infrastructures. Just as cars dominate the roads, traffic data infrastructures are also primarily populated by car data. However, my interest is less on the quantity of certain data but on the trails and forms that data take and how they assemble and voice political claims in different ways. While car data are meant to flow continuously, data on bicycle traffic are knit together in what I call data patches: context-specific and issue-related data collections that span various sources, times and places, enabling different data stories and politics.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on collaborative work with Larrakia elders as together we walk, talk, write, hear, sing Gurambai/Rapid Creek. In telling stories, I experiment with articulating such efforts together as a nascent (cosmo)politics and ask under what conditions such a politics might be cultivated.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on beginning stages of collaborative work with Larrakia elders as together we walk, talk, see, write, hear, sing Gurambai/Rapid Creek. My tasks and roles here are very different to theirs and as we move along the creek together, and amidst quite different configurations of people, seasons, stories, actions. But there is a hope that working together at and with the creek is possible; and that something, we don’t yet know what, will come out of it. It seems odd to make this the subject of a talk in an academic panel, and at the EASST/4S conference in Amsterdam. And yet, it is this bumbling and grappling and missing and connecting which is exactly what I wonder might travel. If it is THIS that is ‘doing creek work’, that voices places, then how might I account such activities? Telling stories of this work together I experiment with articulating such efforts as a nascent (cosmo)politics and ask under what conditions, and via what kinds of specifications, might such a politics be cultivated. Then beyond this, also explore the kind of STS knowledge work that this implies.