Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
47
result(s) for
"Gabrys, Jennifer"
Sort by:
Smart forests and data practices: From the Internet of Trees to planetary governance
Environments are increasingly becoming technologized sites of data production. From smart cities to smart forests, digital networks are analyzing and joining up environmental processes. This commentary focuses on one such understudied smart environment, smart forests, as emerging digital infrastructures that are materializing to manage and mitigate environmental change. How does the digitalization of forests not only change understandings of these environments but also generate different practices and ontologies for addressing environmental change? I first analyze smart forests within the expanding area of smart environments, and then discuss five digital practices that characterize smart forests. Based on this analysis, I suggest that forests are not only becoming highly digital environments but also that forests are transforming into technologies for managing environmental change. Smart forest interventions therefore expand the scope of what could count as a technology, especially in the context of data-oriented planetary governance.
Journal Article
Program Earth
Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available.
Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world,Program Earthexamines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing,Program Earthasks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become?
Program Earthsuggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new \"technogeographies\" that connect technology, nature, and people.
eBook
Planetary health in practice: sensing air pollution and transforming urban environments
Often, health is seen to be a matter of attending to individuals and their behaviour, or of studying populations in order to manage disease. However, pollution is a problem of the health of environments, as much as it is a problem of the health of bodies. To understand health and pollution, it is necessary to examine energy-intensive infrastructures and developed environments that produce air pollutants and impair ecosystems. In other words, air pollution requires approaches to health that are planetary in scope and that account for the socio-environmental processes and relations that make health possible. Planetary health is often approached as a broad analysis of earth systems. However, diverse and situated environmental practices also contribute to the formation of planetary health. This article asks how citizen-sensing practices tune into the problem of air pollution in Southeast London, and in so doing differently configure pollution and planetary health. While many sensing technologies promise to make citizens into more capable political actors through the collection of data, this research investigates how communities use sensors in distinct ways to support, activate or extend community-led projects in urban environments. Rather than citizen-sensing practices contributing to improved air quality through the abstract circulation of data, we found that environmental monitoring became enmeshed in ongoing and broader struggles to improve the health of urban environments. These practices not only challenge the official scripts of sensing devices, they also remake the usual ways of demarcating health in relation to air pollution by shifting away from individual behaviour and toward collective environmental actions. This article then asks how community proposals for urban design and action conjoin with citizen-sensing practices to generate strategies for reworking and reconstituting health toward more planetary compositions.
Journal Article
AirKit: A Citizen-Sensing Toolkit for Monitoring Air Quality
Increasing urbanisation and a better understanding of the negative health effects of air pollution have accelerated the use of Internet of Things (IoT)-based air quality sensors. Low-cost and low-power sensors are now readily available and commonly deployed by individuals and community groups. However, there are a wide range of such IoT devices in circulation that differently focus on problems of sensor validation, data reliability, or accessibility. In this paper, we present AirKit, which was developed as an integrated and open source “social IoT technology”. AirKit enables a comprehensive approach to citizen-sensing air quality through several integrated components: (1) the Dustbox 2.0, a particulate matter sensor; (2) Airsift, a data analysis platform; (3) a reliable and automatic remote firmware update system; (4) a “Data Stories” method and tool for communicating citizen data; and (5) an AirKit logbook that provides a guide for designing and running air quality projects, along with instructions for building and using AirKit components. Developed as a social technology toolkit to foster open processes of research co-creation and environmental action, Airkit has the potential to generate expanded engagements with IoT and air quality by improving the accuracy, legibility and use of sensors, data analysis and data communication.
Journal Article
Sensing a Planet in Crisis
People seeking information on pollution levels often consult an official Air Quality Index (AQI). [...]technology companies such as Google are deploying Street View cars in cities from San Francisco to London to scan urban streets with “laboratory-grade” sensors installed on the cars, which provide detailed maps of air quality and air pollution data (figure 3).1 As environments are increasingly polluted, razed, and plundered, they are also sites of accelerating technologization, where the “technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” are meant to “offer new tools for enabling better stewardship of the Earth” (World Economic Forum 2018). Planetary stresses, from climate change to biodiversity loss, are to be addressed and mitigated through this “Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth” (World Economic Forum 2018), which consists of media technologies that act on and for very particular versions of environments and environmental well-being. 26278 Figure 3: 3 This view of a planet in crisis as approached through sensors and sensing practices is not the “one world” of Spaceship Earth but rather is composed of multiple sites with disparate and uneven effects, where pollution and climate change impact environments, humans, and nonhumans, with greater or lesser severity in relation to situated conditions.
Journal Article
Sensors and Sensing Practices
This editorial examines how sensing practices are transforming through proliferating sensor technologies and altered sensing relations. Rather than engage with sensing as a project of the human mind or body as usually delineated within sensory classifications, this overview of sensors and sensing practices documents how sensing entities are emerging that are composed of shifting ensembles of multiple humans and more-than-humans, environments and technologies, politics and practices. By decoupling sensing from its exclusive human orientation, the editorial and collection demonstrate how reworked approaches to sensing make it possible to tune in to how involvement with environmental problems unfolds and endures. The collection asks how sensing practices might be crafted that attend to the distributed and accumulative inequalities of environmental problems and to speculate toward differential collectives for addressing environmental crisis and change.
Journal Article
Breakdown in the Smart City
Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives.
Journal Article
INTRODUCTION
The earth became programmable, Marshall McLuhan once wrote, the moment thatSputnikwas launched.¹ Rocketed into orbit on October 4, 1957, and circling around the earth every ninety-six minutes,Sputnikwas a technological intervention that turned planetary relationships inside out. Inevitably, what springs to mind with McLuhan’s easy statement about the transformation of the earth and our relationship to it are the familiar images ofEarthriseand theBlue Marble, which are often pointed to as simultaneously signaling the rise of environmentalism as well as the distancing of the planet through a disembodied space view. And yet,Earthrise, an image
Book Chapter