Sensing Practices

Jennifer Gabrys and Helen Pritchard, Goldsmiths, University of London

If you were to outline a diagram of how an air pollution sensor interacts with an
environment it would look something like this: Air passing across a chemical
membrane or being draw into an optical sensor either forms a chemical reaction in the
case of the membrane, or is passed across an infra-red beam and counted for numbers
of particles in the case of an optical sensor. These sensory readings and reactions
cause voltages in electrical circuits to fluctuate, generating signals that in turn can be
converted into digital output to be read as data in the form of parts per million of the
particular pollutant being sensed. Yet such a sensor might also be used as part of
specific environmental monitoring undertaken by a concerned citizen in order to
document potentially harmful levels of pollution from industry or roadways. The unit
of sense—the seemingly discrete organ or object through which sensing would
occur—becomes entangled as another entity and set of relations in the making
through the specific sensing practices underway.
This example of an air pollution sensor deployed for citizen sensing practices
is just one of many possible examples of the ways in which sensing and units of sense
begin to shift toward what we are calling ‘sensing practices’ (Gabrys, 2012b;
Pritchard, 2013). Sensing practices refer to the ways in which sensing and practice
emerge, take hold, and form attachments across environmental, material, political and
aesthetic concerns, subjects and milieus (cf. Stengers, 2011b). From sensors used for
environmental monitoring to collaborations with lichens to understand air pollution,
as well as smart infrastructures that sense and adjust to real-time conditions, the
registers and practices of sensing are shifting from an assumed human-centered set of
perceiving and decoding practices, to extended entities, technologies and
environments of sense. New registers of sense are becoming evident as organisms
express different and dynamic ways in which environments are changing. And many
of these shifts and extended registers of sense are further captured through ubiquitous
computing that distributes sensing capacities across environments. Citizen sensing
also constitutes a set of sensing practices that is meant to enable and empower people
to sense for political effect, giving rise to questions about the politics of sense, and
how sensing entities transform into agents of provocation and change (Cuff and
Hansen, 2008; Goodchild, 2007).
While we focus on citizen sensing in order to develop this notion of sensing
practices, many other practices could be drawn together to elaborate this concept,
from trans-material and racialized experiences of lead poisoning (Chen, 2012), to
digital simulation environments for battlefield preparation (Suchman and Weber,
2016), to insect-plant couplings forming particular ecologies of sense (cf. Braidotti,
2006). With these developments in mind, how might it be possible to rethink and
rework the practices, entities and environments of sense within this broader context
where the assumed subjects and trajectories of sense are shifting? How might these
expanded approaches to sensing practices recast engagements with experience, while
reconfiguring explorations of practice-based research (cf. Citizen Sense, 2014-15)?
Rather than take ‘the senses’ as a fixed starting point, we suggest that sensing-
as-practice allows for an attention to these different articulations of sense, particularly
in relation to technologies of environmental monitoring, data gathered for evidentiary
claims, the formation of citizens, and more-than-human entanglements. Sensing-as-
practice also allows for an attention to experience that does not concentrate
exclusively on a human subject, but instead accounts for a vast range of sensing
subjects, from stones to insects (cf. Whitehead, 1929). William James (1996), a
philosopher who influenced Whitehead, suggests that a moment of experience
‘proliferates into the next [moment] through transitions which, whether conjunctive or
disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue’ (87). Sensing practices then shift
attention to formations and processes of experience across multiple entities within
particular milieus (cf. Gabrys, 2016).
Such an approach to sensing practices clearly links this way of organizing and
understanding experience to a posthuman perspective. Within a posthuman context,
experience is no longer confined solely to human points of interest or inquiry. Instead,
experiences of more-than-humans become critical to rethinking how sensory relations
form or are excluded, and the subjects—as well as new subjects—that concresce
through these processes (Whitehead, 1929; cf. Åsberg, this volume; Braidotti, 2006).
But this is not just a project in attempting to understand how a myriad of pre-existing
entities perform their discrete sensing operations. While the specificity of organisms
and entities is no doubt important, sensing practices as a concept equally emphasizes
the point that these are also practices that are in transition, as James (1996) suggests,
or in process as Whitehead (1929) has elsewhere suggested. The possibilities for one
particular type of lichen or moss to incorporate and express registers of urban air
pollution in one city could shift in relation to other organisms encountering these
processes, the city in which the entities are located, the development or ruination
underway, and a whole host of other interconnecting factors (cf. Gabrys, 2012a).
By approaching sensing differently, not as the senses or as a human point of
mediation, it is possible to begin to account for the ways in which sensing practices
resonate with particular entities and relations. Sensing is not a project of a human
mind or organs decoding external substantialist phenomena, as Whitehead would
suggest, but rather could be understood as the ways in which experience is expressed
through subjects. Yet this is also a collaborative undertaking, and so ‘collaborative
sensing’ (Gabrys, 2016) is always a key aspect of sensing practices. Far removed
from the Cartesian brain in a vat, here collaborative sensing refers to the ways in
which shared worlds are felt, sustained and even created (cf. TallBear, 2011). If we
were to return to the air pollution sensor discussed at the beginning of this entry, we
find that the initial delineation of a sensor detecting stimuli and converting those
stimuli into data is a rather linear and limited configuration of the sensing work that
goes on with this technoscientific device. Sensors do not merely capture
environmental data, but rather they are involved in collaborative sensing practices for
parsing environments and environmental problems, as well as organizing approaches
for how to take action and generate political responses through particular forms of
environmental citizenship.
Sensing practices are then differently materialized in relation to the subjects
and entities, milieus and environments, processes and situations involved in
experiencing. Distinct affective and political capacities are operationalized through
sensing practices, where the use of an air pollution sensor by a citizen sets in motion a
much different political trajectory than a forest damaged by smog. Sensing practices
are ways of articulating what matters, of signaling an expressive register of relevance,
and affecting and being affected. In this respect, sensing practices are world-making
practices (cf. Stengers, 2011a). They are ways of ‘meeting in a world shared in
common’ (James, 1996: 79). This common world is not so much a place where
entities agree to show up, but rather is a milieu among a diversity of milieus that is
actively made through shared inhabitations and experiences.
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