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:
-
Hannah Knox
(University of Manchester)
Emilie Glazer (UCL)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Kim Fortun
(University of California Irvine)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the role of digital infrastructures in framing, shaping and constituting environmental relations in the anthropocene. We explore how models, maps, databases, archives, sensors, images and algorithms are implicated in the conduct of contemporary environmental politics.
Long Abstract:
The idea of a 'natural' environment has long been deconstructed and critiqued by anthropologists who have shown the diverse ways that human beings shape, work with and remake land and forest, rivers and sea, air, desert and tundra. In this panel we seek to extend this conversation into an appreciation of the role of contemporary and historical information systems in framing, informing and shaping environmental relations. Building on long histories of environmental information gathering, contemporary 'informated' environments (Fortun, 2004) involve such infrastructures as global monitoring systems that track animals, particles, and plastics; climate models that map and predict global and local climatic futures; big data-driven mapping tools aimed at planners tasked with rethinking urban and rural landscapes; and digital or bio-sensory devices that detect, reveal and act back on materials flows, chemical traces, or environmental rhythms. We invite papers that explore ethnographically, the role and effects of such data driven information technologies on environmental processes in different parts of the world. We are also interested in papers that explore how counter-informational tools are remaking environmental relations through new forms of representation, archiving and prototyping, and the role that these might play in a refigured anthropology of the anthropocene.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how the arrival in Copenhagen of Google’s Project Air View has re-invigorated debates over responsibility for air pollution. We discuss how groups of citizens, corporate, and municipal actors deploy informational tools to justify positions of politicisation.
Paper long abstract:
The introduction of Google’s Project Air View (PAV) in Copenhagen has re-invigorated local concerns over air pollution. In contrast to established techno-scientific networks which deploy well-known air pollutants as visible in accordance with European limits, the PAV has both contributed with fine-grained measurements at street-level and it has amplified the visibility of new and emerging objects of aerial governance such as ultrafine particles and black carbon over which there is yet to form scientific consensus. The objective of this paper is twofold: Firstly, we analyze the divergent and heterogeneous identifications and representations of air pollution in Copenhagen. Secondly, we demonstrate how groups of concerned citizens in their push against entrenched ways of thinking about air pollution are empowered by the PAV’s fine grained air pollution visualizations in different ways. While some citizens deploy the PAV to politicize pollutants stemming from aviation, busses, and smaller vehicles, others propose novel urban green designs. At the same time corporate and governmental actors attempt to depoliticize the problem of air pollution by deferring responsibility to established conventions for which air pollution ‘counts'. All in all, we argue that Google’s contribution to the ‘informating’ of air pollution in Copenhagen is a multi-facetted process, which solidifies existing political environmental contrasts rather than depoliticizing or solving them.
Paper short abstract:
Against the abstraction of information from physical data servers, how might information workers might think more about the physicality of their labor?
Paper long abstract:
Library cataloging metadata systems might be imagined as a back and forth of water-power infrastructure and lived experiences. Users of library platforms take up space in colonial frameworks. The environmental impacts of cataloging are obscure. The future of cataloging, the Library of Congress's proposed BIBFRAME ontology, increases centralization to reduce waste, while maintaining ideological predilections that are extractivist. This warrants discussion of responsibilities in relation to material and energy use, in terms of environmental impact and human affect.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the paucities and continuities in the knowledge infrastructure that enables carbon offsetting after the Paris climate agreement. We show how the knowledge infrastructure of offsetting has an afterlife that perpetuates problematic commensurabilities, (in)visibilities and harms.
Paper long abstract:
Knowledge infrastructures are key in the making and maintenance of contemporary environmental relations, yet they are often also opaque, technical, and expert-led, thus leaving little room for critical interventions. In this paper, we focus on carbon offsetting as an example of a knowledge infrastructure that both requires and generates an elaborate assemblage of carbon accounting metrics, methodologies and expert networks. While increasing attention has been paid on the 'lively' remnants of built structures, the afterlives of knowledge infrastructures have received less attention. Possibilities for intervening in such knowledge infrastructures emerge at temporal disjunctions - or when the continuity of such infrastructures is under negotiation. We argue that such a moment of disjunction opened following the negotiation of the Paris Climate Agreement.
In the paper, we focus on the making of Article 6 market mechanisms and analyse the debates that have shaped them prior to, during and after the COP26 negotiations in Glasgow. We also compare the emergent mechanisms and methodologies with those of the Kyoto-era. We show how the knowledge infrastructure of offsetting has been both questioned and reasserted, and demonstrate the persistence of offsetting infrastructures through the carryover of previous 'zombie' carbon credits and methodologies. We argue that making climate ambitions 'easy' and business-friendly through sustaining carbon offsetting is in effect coupled with the lingering power effects of 'zombie infrastructures'. We also highlight the problematic commensurabilities, (in)visibilities and harms this infrastructural afterlife potentially perpetuates.
Paper short abstract:
We explore how notions of automation and control alter the ecology of sensing practices within the Danish water industry. How do more-than-human networks of sensemaking (in)form the future history of water? And how is ethnographic sensemaking transformed when making sense of water is datafied?
Paper long abstract:
Water management has always been carried out in networks of humans, technologies and infrastructures, and information about water – its availability, flow, and pressure – has been crucial for securing water supply for as long as humans have built water infrastructures. In recent decades, this information is increasingly becoming digital, but with the introduction of automation and AI, water, flows, data on water, and the human relations around these are altered, demanding renewed ethnographic attention.
We explore modes of sensemaking in Danish water supply systems, and how these are transformed through digitalization. How do digital technologies alter the ecology of sensing practices within the Danish water industry, and what repercussions do these transformations have on human-water relations?
Digital water technologies are perceived by its pioneers as modular – comprised of independent and potentially scalable units that may unlock great socio-economic benefits – and to carry the promise of solving global water problems through context-based solutions, along with a new global export adventure for the Danish water industry. The narrative is that, with the introduction of machine learning and integrated devices, decision-making in everyday water management transitions from being driven by “gut feelings”, to solid and data-driven accuracy. But, to utility operators, automatization prompts a sense of loss of situated knowledges and control over the infrastructure...
How do such novel forms and relations between holism and the particular (in)form the present and future history of water? And how is ethnographic sensemaking transformed when making sense of water is datafied?