[This video was a contribution to the Participatory Environmental Humanities workshop held at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia in July 2017. For further details see: sites.google.com/view/peh]
Citizen sensing practices and technologies, from monitoring air quality to counting organisms for biodiversity surveys, have the potential to generate new forms of environmental participation. Yet in what ways are these monitoring experiments not just a matter of enabling “citizens” to use technology to collect data, but also projects that involve creating new environments, entities, relations and interpretive registers of sensing?
Jennifer Gabrys is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Principal Investigator on the European Research Council funded project, Citizen Sense. She is the author of Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (University of Michigan Press, 2011), and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and co-editor of Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic (Routledge, 2013). Her work can be found at citizensense.net and jennifergabrys.net.
