Books by Jennifer Gabrys
Forerunners, 2019
Sensors are increasingly common within citizen-sensing and DIY projects, but these devices often ... more Sensors are increasingly common within citizen-sensing and DIY projects, but these devices often require the use of a how-to guide. From online instructional videos for troubleshooting sensor installations to handbooks for using and abusing the Internet of Things, the how-to genres and formats of digital instruction continue to expand and develop. As the how-to proliferates, and instructions unfold through multiple aspects of technoscientific practices, Jennifer Gabrys asks why the how-to has become one of the prevailing genres of the digital. How to Do Things with Sensors explores the ways in which things are made do-able with and through sensors and further considers how worlds are made sense-able and actionable through the instructional mode of citizen-sensing projects.
Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate u... more 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 Earth examines 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 Earth asks 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 Earth suggests 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.
"From food punnets to credit cards, plastic facilitates every part of our daily lives. It has bec... more "From food punnets to credit cards, plastic facilitates every part of our daily lives. It has become central to processes of contemporary socio-material living. Universalised and abstracted, it is often treated as the passive object of political deliberations, or a problematic material demanding human management. But in what ways might a 'politics of plastics' deal with both its specific manifestation in particular artefacts and events, and its complex dispersed heterogeneity?
Accumulation explores the vitality and complexity of plastic. This interdisciplinary collection focuses on how the presence and recalcitrance of plastic reveals the relational exchanges across human and synthetic materialities. It captures multiplicity by engaging with the processual materialities or plasticity of plastic. Through a series of themed essays on plastic materialities, plastic economies, plastic bodies and new articulations of plastic, the editors and chapter authors examine specific aspects of plastic in action. How are multiple plastic realities enacted? What are their effects?
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, human and cultural geography, environmental studies, consumption studies, science and technology studies, design, and political theory."
This is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its p... more This is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away.
Electronic waste occurs not just in the form of discarded computers but also as a scatter of information devices, software, and systems that are rendered obsolete and fail. Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural, and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies.
"Like pennies from heaven, airdrops occur in many guises, from food to fleas, from prosthetic lim... more "Like pennies from heaven, airdrops occur in many guises, from food to fleas, from prosthetic limbs to exploding decoy frogs, the ethos of the airdrop falls somewhere between destruction and creation.
This topical new publication sketches the history of the airdrop; providing a creative survey and investigation into this very particular form of tactical weaponry. Presenting examples and information, this fascinating and personal overview demonstrates the unusual imagination and ingenuity involved in the design and dispersal of this critical medium."
Papers by Jennifer Gabrys
Progress in Environmental Geography
Forests are increasingly central to policies and initiatives to address global environmental chan... more Forests are increasingly central to policies and initiatives to address global environmental change. Digital technologies have become crucial components of these projects as the tools and systems that would monitor and manage forests for storing carbon, preserving biodiversity, and providing ecosystem services. Historically, technologies have been instrumental in forming forests as spaces of conservation, extraction, and inhabitation. Digital technologies build on previous techniques of forest management, which have been shaped by colonial governance, expert science, and economic growth. However, digital technologies for achieving environmental initiatives can also extend, transform, and disrupt these sedimented practices. This article asks how the convergence of forests and digital technologies gives rise to different socio-technical formations and modalities of “political forests.” Through an analysis of five digital operations, including 1) observation, 2) datafication, 3) partic...
Environmental Politics
Digital technologies are increasingly influencing forest landscape restoration practices worldwid... more Digital technologies are increasingly influencing forest landscape restoration practices worldwide. We investigate how digital platforms specifically reconfigure restoration practices, resources, and policy across scales. By analyzing digital restoration platforms, we identify four drivers of technological developments, including: scientific expertise to optimize decisions; capacity building through digital networks; digital tree-planting markets to operate supply chains; and community participation to foster co-creation. Our analysis shows how digital developments transform restoration practices by producing techniques, remaking networks, creating markets, and reorganizing participation. These transformations often involve power imbalances regarding expertise, finance, and politics across the Global North and Global South. However, the distributed qualities of digital systems can also create alternative ways of undertaking restoration actions. We propose that digital developments for restoration should not be understood as neutral tools but rather as powerladen processes that can create, perpetuate, or counteract social and environmental inequalities.
Environmental Humanities
The question of who participates in making forest environments usually refers to human stakeholde... more The question of who participates in making forest environments usually refers to human stakeholders. Yet forests are constituted through the participation of many other entities. At the same time, digital technologies are increasingly used in participatory projects to measure and monitor forest environments globally. However, such participatory initiatives are often limited to human involvement and overlook how more-than-human entities and relations shape digital and forest processes. To disrupt conventional anthropocentric understandings of participation, this text travels through three different processes of “unsettling” to show how more-than-human entities and relations disrupt, rework, and transform digital participation in and with forests. First, forest organisms as bioindicators signal environmental changes and contribute to the formation and operation of digital sensing technologies. Second, speculative blockchain infrastructures and decision-making algorithms raise question...
ions. In undertaking this trajectory she moves through Whitehead’s central philosophical (rather ... more ions. In undertaking this trajectory she moves through Whitehead’s central philosophical (rather than earlier mathematical) texts, including Concept of Nature through to Process and Reality and Modes of Thought. While on the one hand this approach could be seen as a genealogical tracing from early work to more developed later work, this is far from a linear account of Whitehead’s work, since there is always an anticipatory way in which the move beyond the bifurcation of nature in Concept of Nature, for instance, will turn up again as a transformed approach to perceptive experience in Process and Reality. Concepts are at once anticipatory and revisited, addressing questions that may have been left open or not realized until later work made them apparent. And as we find out when it comes to reading Whitehead (as well as Stengers), the circling round of ideas means it may also be helpful to navigate these texts with an index, since ideas are not staked out in advance and demonstrated i...
Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022 - Volume 2
This paper details a research project and design, the Smart Forests Atlas, which expands open-dat... more This paper details a research project and design, the Smart Forests Atlas, which expands open-data research platforms toward pluralistic and participatory practices. Working with the under-examined practice of 'digital gardening', the project reconfigures the opendata research platform into a dynamic and participatory space for cultivating ideas and generating content. However, we found that digital gardening could risk reinscribing existing colonial and anthropocentric practices of gardening and digital archiving. To challenge these risks, we propose six complementary design qualities that inform the design of the Atlas and could influence other open-data research platforms. We developed these qualities from a design inquiry into open-data platforms, environmental atlases, and digital gardening practices, while designing and developing the Atlas together with a digital tools cooperative. We argue that transformed digital gardening practices could advance more pluralistic, participatory, and more-than-human approaches to open-data research platforms while contributing to epistemic justice. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Interaction design process and methods; Participatory design.
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Books by Jennifer Gabrys
Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines 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 Earth asks 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 Earth suggests 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.
Accumulation explores the vitality and complexity of plastic. This interdisciplinary collection focuses on how the presence and recalcitrance of plastic reveals the relational exchanges across human and synthetic materialities. It captures multiplicity by engaging with the processual materialities or plasticity of plastic. Through a series of themed essays on plastic materialities, plastic economies, plastic bodies and new articulations of plastic, the editors and chapter authors examine specific aspects of plastic in action. How are multiple plastic realities enacted? What are their effects?
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, human and cultural geography, environmental studies, consumption studies, science and technology studies, design, and political theory."
Electronic waste occurs not just in the form of discarded computers but also as a scatter of information devices, software, and systems that are rendered obsolete and fail. Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural, and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies.
This topical new publication sketches the history of the airdrop; providing a creative survey and investigation into this very particular form of tactical weaponry. Presenting examples and information, this fascinating and personal overview demonstrates the unusual imagination and ingenuity involved in the design and dispersal of this critical medium."
Papers by Jennifer Gabrys
Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines 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 Earth asks 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 Earth suggests 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.
Accumulation explores the vitality and complexity of plastic. This interdisciplinary collection focuses on how the presence and recalcitrance of plastic reveals the relational exchanges across human and synthetic materialities. It captures multiplicity by engaging with the processual materialities or plasticity of plastic. Through a series of themed essays on plastic materialities, plastic economies, plastic bodies and new articulations of plastic, the editors and chapter authors examine specific aspects of plastic in action. How are multiple plastic realities enacted? What are their effects?
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, human and cultural geography, environmental studies, consumption studies, science and technology studies, design, and political theory."
Electronic waste occurs not just in the form of discarded computers but also as a scatter of information devices, software, and systems that are rendered obsolete and fail. Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural, and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies.
This topical new publication sketches the history of the airdrop; providing a creative survey and investigation into this very particular form of tactical weaponry. Presenting examples and information, this fascinating and personal overview demonstrates the unusual imagination and ingenuity involved in the design and dispersal of this critical medium."
This paper examines the specific “smart urban infrastructures” that are proposed and imagined in the “Connected Urban Development” initiative. To what extent do proposals for managing and regulating existing urban processes attend to the political ecologies that surface in attempting to make urban ecologies more efficient? The “green apparatus” of the connected sustainable city further encompasses efficient citizens who are wired to track and monitor practices of environmental excess. The second aspect of this paper will then consider the enfolding and imagining of citizen sensing projects within the connected sustainable city. To what extent does the feedback loop between efficient urban metabolisms and personally accountable and efficient urban citizen capture what Foucault might call the subject-making processes of green urbanism, or even a form of biopolitics 2.0?
From citizen science projects to animals that are tagged to gather and relay environmental sense data, and from material transformations of data that generate new political encounters with environmental issues, as well as alternative practices, devices and platforms for harvesting data, this presentation will focus on the ways in which creative practitioners are generating diverse approaches to gathering environmental data. These projects raise questions about who or what data are for, which interpretive practices are productive of data, and the new collectives that data might mobilize.
Plastics are material substances often condemned for their inability to biodegrade in the environment. New forms of plastics have been developed with capacities for biodegradability, a material strategy that is meant to remedy the (visible) problem of plastics accumulation. This paper discusses the distinct types of work undertaken by humans and more-than-humans in the material processes of bio-degrading plastics. The paper focuses on three distinct examples of biodegradable practices and processes, including EU fisherman paid to fish plastic from European seas, the accumulation of plastics and plasticizers in marine organisms’ bodies, and the discovery of ‘plastic-munching’ bacteria in oceans.
The concept and practice of work in relation to plastics indicates the ways in which it may be possible to re-conceptualize the notion of “carbon workers,” a term used in relation to climate change that points to the diverse if at times problematic ways in which any number of humans and more-than-humans are enrolled in the work of mitigating climate change. Here, I extend and translate this notion of “carbon workers” toward plastics. Plastics are composites of carbon, both in their physical form as petro-chemical hydrocarbons, and in the carbon energy used to manufacture them. I focus on biodegradability as a specific form of carbon work that involves site work, as well as processes of transformation, deformation and generation of materials and bodies. From this study, I then ask: How might plastic accumulation and biodegradability point toward specific types of carbon work that allow for new understandings of material politics through more-than-human material processes? What types of carbon work become identifiable in relation to plastics as they biodegrade, and what types might be imagined in order to engage new material political practices?"