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- Convenors:
-
Hannah Knox
(University College London)
Emilie Glazer (UCL)
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- 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, -Emily Wanderer (University of Pittsburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the development of facial recognition for bears, analyzing how bear facial recognition it was identified as a tractable technological problem, the consequences of its deployment for ecological research, and production of species divides in facial recognition technology.
Paper long abstract:
Scientists are developing an ever expanding “internet of animals,” a collection of tools that includes machine learning, AI, and GPS-telemetry. These technologies have changed the way animal life is tracked and quantified, fundamentally transforming scientific understandings of wildlife. These new technologies include the use of machine learning for animal facial recognition. While many big tech companies are growing more circumspect about the use of facial recognition for humans, interest in animal facial recognition is surging. This paper examines the development of facial recognition for bears, termed “FaceNet for bears” by its developers (a reference to Google’s human facial recognition program). It analyzes how bear facial recognition was identified as a tractable technological problem for computer programmers and ecologists and the consequences of its deployment for ecological research. Bear facial recognition is made possible by developments in camera technology, the popularity of bears on social media, and the artificial neural networks making image recognition possible. It is meant to assist ecologists in studying individual bears and changes in overall population size and health, improving on human ability to recognize and process data about individual bears. This paper examines how bear facial id is like and unlike human facial recognition. Machine learning and AI for conservation are often siloed and treated as if the ethical concerns that apply to human-directed technology are irrelevant; this paper examines how divisions between humans and other life forms are created in the design of technologies and when and how these divides are transgressed or breakdown.
James Stinson (York University) Rebecca Zarger (University of South Florida) Tieneke Dykstra (York University) Lee Mcloughlin (Florida International University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents an analysis of the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) in Belize, and explores what happens when protected area management is increasingly "datafied" and decisions made not by humans but algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents an analysis of the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) and its use in terrestrial and marine protected areas in Belize. SMART is a software application used by park rangers on mobile communication devices that makes it possible to collect, store, share and analyze data on wildlife observations, poaching, arrests and other events in real-time. The most recent update to the platform (SMART 7) includes the rollout of “Predictive Patrol Planning,” which uses machine learning to predict poachers’ future behavior based on patrol records and data about the physical and human geography of the protected area. In 2018, Belize adopted SMART as the country’s official monitoring system for their protected area network. Significantly, the adoption of SMART in Belize has seemingly coincided with a shift away from a focus on community-based conservation toward an emphasis on surveillance technology, law-enforcement and combatting the illegal wildlife trade. Based on a literature review, as well as interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with protected area managers, this paper describes the impacts of the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool, and the recent adoption of SMART 7, on the practice of protected area management in Belize. Framed theoretically as a transition from “intimate government” (Agrawal 2005) to algorithmic ontopower (Massumi 2015; Büscher 2018), this paper explores what happens as protected area management is increasingly "datafied" and decisions are made not by humans and local knowledge but by algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Lucia Jalon Oyarzun (EPFL)
Paper short abstract:
A study on environmentality’s haptic quality through a series of minor spatial ethnographies of how urban sensors and other environmental devices nudge bodies and shape a soft enclosure and interface informing their encounter with the world, modulating its behaviours and practices within it.
Paper long abstract:
Environmentality, as a new form of governmentality, works through an ubiquitous and distributed network of sensing and communication devices, simultaneously capturing and emitting information (Gabrys, 2014). Part of this environmentality works through the nudging of human and non-human bodies, creating an informational surround with the ability to move bodies, push them to action or inhibit them (Ain Al-Shams, 2017). The nudge is any “gentle poke” inscribed in an environment and capable of altering people’s behavior without forbidding any options (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). We see, for instance, the presence of a camera or an Intelligent Personal Assistant influences our behavior around it, the coming notifications in a smartphone create a diffuse while alert ecology of attention, while the visualization of urban data on air quality can change our mobility behaviors. With this contribution, we will present the nudge as a point of entrance into a manifold of environmental “algorithmic touches”—from smartphone notifications, home-system devices, environmental sensors, urban dashboards, surveilling devices and other environmental agents—which are shaping this soft enclosure and interface informing the encounter between body and world and modulating its behaviours and practices within it. We will propose minor spatial ethnographies of these and other nudging cases to frame the haptic quality of this computational environmentality (Marks, 2002), and describe this interface and its effects on both individual and collective bodies’ agency.