Making breathable worlds through citizen engagement
What might it mean to be doing this research when you're not part of Google Arts and Culture Lab and actually when you're resisting that?
Jennifer Gabrys:This issue of who is authorized to monitor environments gets to, I think, the larger issue of how much the citizen sensing can disrupt these usual power structures. Hello. I'm Jennifer Gabries, author of Citizens of Worlds, Open Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle, published with the University of Minnesota Press in November 2022. I'm delighted to be here as part of the University of Minnesota Press podcast today with Helen Pritchard. I'm also professor in the department of sociology at the University of Cambridge.
Jennifer Gabrys:And today, I'll be discussing with Helen, who's a member of the Citizen Sense project, our collaborative work from the Citizen Sense research. Citizen Sense is a research initiative that began ten years ago in early twenty thirteen with the aid of European Research Council funding. The project creatively investigates how citizens are beginning to use digitally enabled sensors to monitor their environments. We focused especially on air quality sensing and worked with communities to test, build, set up, troubleshoot, and question how sensors and sensor data can help or hinder efforts to improve environmental conditions. Citizens of Worlds was written almost ten years after the start of this practice based and participatory research to reflect on the project, to bring together a sprawling set of project materials, including on the Manifold platform with University of Minnesota Press, and to identify possible trajectories toward ongoing research at the intersection of digital, social, and environmental justice.
Jennifer Gabrys:Helen, thanks so much for joining me in this conversation today. I'll let you introduce yourself before we begin to have a more detailed conversation of the book.
Helen Pritchard:Hi, Jennifer. It's really, fantastic to be in this space together today, and I'm really looking forward to having some time to talk about the book and your work. So I'm Helen Pritchard, and I'm based at IXDM, the Institute for Experimental Design and Media Culture at the HagerKah in Basel, which is part of the FHNW University of Applied Arts and Sciences in Northwestern Switzerland. And I'm a professor and the head of research there in IxDM where I contribute to the Critical Media Lab and HyperWork. I also, as an artist and designer, I co organize together with two different groups, the Regenerative Energy Communities Project and the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest.
Helen Pritchard:And since 2013, been working, as part of Citizen Sense together with Jennifer.
Jennifer Gabrys:So it's really great to be having this conversation with you today because we collaborated for so long on this project and because of your incredible background in creative practice, participation, and digital social research, really. So there's just so many possible threads that we could pick up in this collaborative work as well as the the book itself. Hopefully, we'll be able to kind of contain it within the space of a kind of reasonable podcast length. But I think we were gonna start with this concept of how to make breathable worlds that comes up in the the introduction to Citizens of Worlds. Here's something where I think a lot of our conversations when we were collaborating were about DIY technologies and instructions and forums and tutorials.
Jennifer Gabrys:So the how to really came up as this recurring format that we noticed in sensor spaces. I don't know if you want to sort of mention anything about the how to and instructions more broadly as as part of working on this practice based work.
Helen Pritchard:Yeah. I mean, if I think back to especially the early days with Citizen Sense when we were almost in a kind of sedimented of, like, stacks of how to instructions, manuals, videos, protocols. You know, the office was kind of full of this detritus of how to kits that in some ways, it almost could feel like the how to was in a way of many of the different groups that we were engaging with and the different, technologists who were working on some of those how tos at the time, that they almost could have a kind of techno solutionist paradigm. Like, the how to in a way was the kind of space of in a way of the tech bros in some ways in that kind of area of citizen science and citizen sensing. When I think about the kind of citizen sense project and especially during the time when we were intensely working together, the way in which the work really allowed to bring up a kind of feminist practice or a trans feminist practice of working with citizen sensing and with all these how tos that were surrounding us.
Helen Pritchard:And I was thinking when reading the book and, thinking about the concept of how to make breathable worlds that you bring to us in that. And I was so interested in a way because in some ways, I think like, I was amazed in a way the way in which you could make the how to this expansive space in which you could take it from being, something that was a kind of instructional space in which is kind of a thing that was kind of circulated in particular ways to then extending it to really think about in in a way that could propose, I guess, another type of political arrangement, set of practices, types of engagements. And so I was wondering, really, in a way, at what point did the how to make breathable worlds emerge for you in the project? Because in some ways, we were, of course, through the project, thinking about air and breathing and breath, and that was something very present. More so air, right, than breathing in some moments.
Helen Pritchard:And so I was wondering at what point it started to open up in that way for you.
Jennifer Gabrys:Yes. I think this is a really interesting question because the how to is an organizing logic and practice for the book. So Citizens of Worlds is really organized as a how to guide, but it does attempt to disrupt the logic of the how to by actually passing through it. And here's where I draw on a whole range of, different approaches, pragmatism, practice based theory, and participation, to think about how following instructions rarely goes according to plan. And that's something that really we found through our own practice based research.
Jennifer Gabrys:We would have a set of what seemed like quite quite straightforward instructions for how to set up a sensor, and it would rarely actually come to fruition in that way. Or we would have a clear plan for how to set up sensors in communities, and then a whole set of other issues would come up to be troubleshooted. But here's where I think because we were monitoring air quality and thinking about air as not just this sort of biological relation, which is often discussed as though, breathing is a kind of universal thing that everybody shares. Everybody has to breathe. Everybody has to sort of take in air to facilitate the work that their bodies do.
Jennifer Gabrys:And I think this was something that I was aware from the very start. A lot of the work in human computer interaction was looking at air and breathing, kind of even more than ten years ago. And, of course, breathing was coming up in in some of the social, political, and policy spaces of the right to breathe. And I was seeing that there were more people writing about breathing. And in Program Earth in 2016, I was actually engaging with some work, from Alfred North Whitehead who talks about when you're breathing, it's hard to tell where a subject begins and ends in relation to an environment.
Jennifer Gabrys:I thought, well, that's actually quite an interesting way to push the concept of breathing and the practice of breathing, not just as organs, in a kind of essential and universal work that bodies do as though bodies are undifferentiated, but instead is about a kind of environmental relation that's making subjects and making worlds. And so this is where the kind of how to make breathable worlds really started to emerge out of that work in 2016, but through our practice. And this is where the practice based research really was a space of theorizing as much as practicing and thinking about what it would mean for people to be able to make worlds in which they can breathe in all the different registers of breathing, not just as taking in air as a kind of involuntary steady act, but also as an ability to extend ourselves, in ways that can make worlds, that can make worlds in which we can flourish, that can make worlds in which productive exchange is possible. And that also potentially are sites where breathing becomes a form of combat, as Frantz Fanon suggests, to try to sustain or endure particular conditions working toward a kind of transformation.
Jennifer Gabrys:And once I started to really follow through with this idea and look at some of the literature literature that, you know, in some cases is going back now fifty, sixty, seventy years or more, there really was quite a kind of productive way of thinking about breathability as something more than just that root exchange. And I think this resonated very much with the how to and that attempt to open up the how to as something more than a straightforward exchange or practice, but something that was really giving rise to open air relations. And this is why the open air is an important part of how that is conceptualized to think about exchanges and intensities that are taking place within environments, within spaces where subjects are coming into being through attempting to survive and flourish, in their environment. So, yes, that's that's the kind of how to and how that that came together with breathability. But I think once I started to assemble a possible list of how to topics that would be relevant for citizen sensing, really, it's a kind of endless list, and it was difficult to really think about where to contain it.
Jennifer Gabrys:But how to make breathable worlds seem to be the most recurring concept and, recurring approach that could make sense of and help to sort of extend, the work in in many different ways.
Helen Pritchard:Yeah. I mean, I was I was very interested in the way in which you also, through the the practices, think through also what it might mean to be in the conditions or in this, you I think from Fanon used the term of occupied breathing. And I was interested to to know in in some ways to what extent, and you write about this as well, that the kind of the fossil fuel conditions or the conditions of hyper capitalism, you know, are themselves a type of kind of occupied breathing.
Jennifer Gabrys:Yes. Absolutely. I mean, there's there's so much to unpack there in terms of how breathing is shaped into particular projects and logics because of environmental, social, political, economic conditions. And, of course, we saw this in so many of the different sites that we were in. The Citizens of World's book has three main case studies or project areas, where we were working in spaces, including Pennsylvania, in relation to fracking infrastructure.
Jennifer Gabrys:We were working in Southeast London in relation to general kind of urban conditions of of pollution. And then also in the center of London, where attempts were made to mitigate air pollution through air quality gardens. And I think of each of these, we could look at as different cases of occupied breathing in a sense, of course, not to conflate all these different forms of of occupation, but to really think through what are the particular social, political, economic conditions that people are breathing with and through? How might they be attempting to reshape or push against or resist those conditions? How is breathing then part of a kind of political extension of becoming particular kinds of citizen subjects?
Jennifer Gabrys:So this is where breathing, again, didn't just collapse into a biological function, but really became part of a social political project of understanding what does it mean to sustain oneself, to sustain collectives, to try to remake the conditions in which one, is undertaking projects of survival and and and hopefully more. And I think this is something that we saw in different ways with people feeling, in some cases, quite encroached upon by industry and extraction and, development, also being displaced from their environments, feeling that they couldn't stay in environments because of pollution or development. So many of the conditions of breathability weren't just about there being high levels of air pollution, which we found in many cases, but were about people feeling that they couldn't actually continue on as they were in those conditions in which they were attempting, to get by. And so I think there is something there in that notion of occupied reading, of course, written in relation to different conditions and and different time, but still resonant in a parallel way for, I think, this expanded way of thinking about breathability. So I take a lot from that, hopefully, without trying to collapse it within these other sites, but to really think productively then about how how do people resist?
Jennifer Gabrys:What kinds of citizen subjects do they become? Do they actually manage to realize conditions of breathability? And if not, why not?
Helen Pritchard:And that's something I think in a way that's almost the mundane that you point to in the book or the way in which resistance and struggle and the limiting of breathable worlds actually becomes this kind of, like, everyday struggle, everyday resistance, which doesn't make it any less of a struggle. I think you describe it as this kind of, like, the daily pulsations or very much as kind of, like, this continuous condition that many of the people who we work with in a way were within in terms of the atmospheres and the the the pollution that they were being exposed to. Because breathability and making breathable wells, like, rendered as these kind of, like, daily pulsations, and then what does it mean to kind of have these kind of, like, daily practices of resistance to them and the way in which through practice based research, like many of those practices, you know, they take a long time. They're often inhabiting and and being within those kind of community practices, which sometimes might amount to nothing, but it's still part of a kind of what it might mean to make an otherwise, to make a resistance, much like, I guess, in some of the work that you draw on as well, the kind of abolitionist proposal, right, of these small everyday acts of resistance.
Helen Pritchard:And that some of them, that kind of, like, the mundane or the everyday or the daily pulsation is very different to the glossy devices and this kind of, like, figures of, like, citizen science or citizen sensing or smart cities in which the techno science is gonna be the kind of instant answer to a set of relations that are already predetermined because they're made in particular situations or they're coming from, you know, maybe particular idea of relations as formed through, like, human computer interaction scenarios in some ways. And I and when I think about the work that we did in Pennsylvania or in South London, and especially in Newcross and Deptford, you know, it's really on our doorstep. So we were working in the office in Goldsmiths. It was very much those kind of small everyday acts together with people that actually looked very different to, I think, in some ways, a lot of the imaginaries around what sensing might do or what kind of, like, smart cities monitoring pollution might do or what these kind of infrastructures might provide. And I guess as well, I was thinking in terms of the Making Breathable Worlds, also, you're drawing on the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs and and also what it might mean in terms of the poetry of Making Breathable Worlds and how that's also emerging in the book and in your work as well.
Jennifer Gabrys:Yes. Well, there's there's a lot to, pick up on there, and I think this notion of the daily pulsations, which you you flag in relation to the introduction, is an interesting one vis a vis Fanon because there's another way of perversely reading that in relation to sensor data and how the assumption with sensors is that monitoring will take place almost for a kind of collapsed period of time. Time doesn't figure in that promise of the of the technology, and the kind of political environmental solution will be realized through the monitoring. And this is what I think we found through the practice based research and through deploying sensors and through, attending to the data and attending to people's concerns, having to really inhabit those daily pulsations and to understand what people were flagging in response to what was happening in their environments, their own sorts of struggles that might be taking place in relation to planning applications or development or other events that might be underway with industry, and their struggles in what might be community forum spaces or town hall meetings, and how the sensor data then became interwoven with these daily pulsations. And it wasn't just this kind of immediate solution or outcome that transformed the political, or environmental landscape, but was something that was being logged along with these other, daily pulsations.
Jennifer Gabrys:There was something that was quite interesting and demanding about that. You know, there might be times when there were spikes in the data for a whole variety of reasons, and then we would be sort of called upon by community members to to look at the data and to sort of explain and understand what was going on, or where sensor data was being called up and presented at town hall meetings and being, shown as proof of pollution and then being brought into those spaces to try to justify, what was going on in these pluralistic, I suppose, daily pulsations because it there were a whole set of struggles of sensor readings, of sensor data, and of attempts to really make more breathable worlds, that were all sort of folding in together. And it's quite, you know, then a challenging form of of research to engage in because it's not just participation in the sense of asking someone to do a kind of focus group or a consultation of some kind. It's a participation that is a kind of inhabitation of living with and alongside of actually going out to polluted sites and, experiencing that pollution, understanding people's concerns, and really living also with the the sensors and sensor data, trying to join up many of these observations also to kind of understand what would an effectiveness look like here.
Jennifer Gabrys:If that's what sensors are promising, is it simply a sensor data reading that says that pollution is above a regulatory threshold, or does it require more than that? So there is something about this notion of daily pulsation that is also accumulative, and this is perhaps where to get to Gums where breathability is as a vector of transformation and inhabitation, but it also is a kind of accumulation, and all sorts of things are being accumulated and can lead to those demands and needs for struggle and and ongoing sorts of violence that people might be enduring, but also can become vectors for transformation. So there there's something interesting about reading that work alongside the work that we were doing as a way to think through the practice and and to hopefully more thoroughly and effectively reflect on that and think about what would it look like for people to be able to use the sensor, data in, ways that could have an effect. And is it just the sensor data? Because that's how it's presented.
Jennifer Gabrys:But, of course, as as we soon found out, that's just one of many components, in how people try to put pressure on various regulators, industry, and each other to try to realize change. So I think this notion of daily pulsations is is an interesting one to weave then into the conditions of breathability and how that might transform. But I think here, you know, also just to ask you as someone working on the project and, you know, very much a part of these ongoing attempts to keep the sensors working, to join up community concerns, to participate in workshops, how you would narrate this space of breathability through the the kind of struggles that, you know, you noticed in communities and how you felt I don't know if positioned is the right word, but, involved as a researcher in making that research. Because, of course, it transforms people not only as citizen subjects, but it transforms us as researchers. And this is something that you wrote about, in an article we put together in 2016 is, you know, what does it mean to be affected by these problems and to have to respond to them?
Jennifer Gabrys:What kind of research comes out of this struggle? How does this transform the conditions of doing research altogether?
Helen Pritchard:Yeah. I think there's something around how to make breathable worlds that in terms of the transformation possibilities that I was part of in a certain sense in terms of what it meant to enter into that commitment with others, with the communities that we were working with, with the people we were working with. And in a way and I and I think that's also the way, of course, in which you take that concept up in the book and mobilize it is that the how to make breathable worlds was never a kind of cookie cutter answer in any way in terms of the conversations that we were having, the commitments that we were making together, the transformations or the impacts or effects that we wanted to get close to, as the collective of of researchers who are working on it both within the team, but also within when I talk about the kind of collective of researchers, you know, researchers, you know, really the communities who we worked with were really our coresearchers in this project. And in a way, I think, you know, part of the how to make breathable worlds, what I experienced in the project is really how to make collective research possible in ways that kind of actually can leave spaces for it to be pluralistic, I guess.
Helen Pritchard:I don't know if you would agree that that's a condition of that research, but in some ways, you know, actually, also the kind of how to make breathable worlds in the way emerged, I think, often as in many things that perhaps didn't work out or were kind of small experiments towards something. And that the commitment wasn't necessarily to always be solving something, yet always, of course, to be engaging with the problems which were being brought to the table and those concerns that were being brought to the table. And I think that that's a very, very different type of practice, a very different type of research, and also activist practice than a way in which citizen science or citizen sensing or a techno science research might be set up in which there needs to be a kind of singular narrative, right, of the relations that people are gonna come into. There needs to be a particular set of computational infrastructures that those researchers are engaging with and maybe even sometimes promoting to these communities. And in a way, I think part of the practice based research in a way emerged in citizen sense and that you made space for Jennifer is really actually like, what might it mean to be doing this research when you're not part of Google Arts and Culture Lab and actually when you're resisting that or when you're not kind of actually assigned to a military contract, which is asking you to test a particular machine learning algorithm that you need to kind of basically wash together with communities on an air quality project?
Helen Pritchard:You know, we were really actually, like, what does it mean together with people who have concerns about air quality to take up these practices together in ways which then might be able to, I don't know, make impacts or even to be able to just engage with what was happening. Like, I really think that's why I kinda was picking up on that daily pulsation because I think in a way, we did a lot of work to really often try to resist the silver bullet question or this idea that we would be solving the issue of air quality in Southeast London, for example. It was something that we often were repeating. And in a way, I think that's, like, a big part of it, what it means to unlearn in a way, unlearn together that something's gonna be solved by going in and doing those practices. Because I think maybe that sometimes if we were to be critical of practice based research, it often might set itself up with something to be solved.
Helen Pritchard:And so perhaps the how to make breathable worlds is not letting go of the fact that there are things that we want transformational change about, and there are kind of other types of political arrangements that we desire and we have, like, effective attachments to, but that they might not be overdetermined or there might not be a kind of easy way to solve them. And so really when I was reading the book, I was really felt like I was reinhabiting in some ways all of these different kind of pluralities around, like, what does it mean to make these breathable worlds? There's not a kind of framework or a set of principles that's gonna be, able to be produced.
Jennifer Gabrys:Yes. I think that's right, and it's a very apt way of characterizing the how to, which is usually organized toward solutionism, could still be working toward, as you said, transformational change, but not in a way that is clear, straightforward, prescriptive, or necessarily even going to arrive at the outcomes that people expected or hoped for. And this was, I think, a real challenge in undertaking this collective research because people did want to affect change, but none of us necessarily knew what that was going to look like. And it's a question that I'm often asked. So did this realize any sort of impact or output?
Jennifer Gabrys:And, you know, of course, there were things that were realized, in Pennsylvania. Some federal regulators picked up the findings and did a follow on sensor study and basically had very similar findings and then asked the state to take various measures to mitigate air pollution and to work with industry to do this, which then led to an expansion of the air quality network in Pennsylvania. There was a kind of an effect. There was a kind of outcome that the community was pleased with with on one level because they felt their voices had been heard. But there was a kind of broader question, I think, still of, is this a kind of breathable world when regulatory infrastructure has expanded but pollution potentially continues.
Jennifer Gabrys:So that's to kind of show how these really can be quite iterative, ongoing, as you said, daily attempts to affect change that aren't this kind of straightforward realization of of a solution, and then it's the end of the project and the the end of the pursuit as it were. And that's what's kind of curious about the way that many of these digital technologies are packaged and and sold sold both literally and sold as a kind of promissory project of being a kind of instrument that will clean up a kind of problem that will sort out a kind of issue because politics have become too thorny or too impossible as a means for realizing that change. And so the technology has to sort of take the place of that social political engagement. But what we found was actually quite the opposite. As the technology just becomes a different vector through which to undertake practices.
Jennifer Gabrys:It can differently gather sets of concerns. It can generate things like data, but none of that alone is going to realize a final definitive outcome. Even if you have a determination that air pollution is occurring, you then need changes to occur in industry practice and infrastructure and larger systems of fossil fuel extraction and even sort of economic growth. So there's so many levels and layers to how this collective research would then take place. But I think this is where it, you know, it was interesting how we moved from a space of doing participatory, practice based and collective research to this space of activism that in some ways felt like a label applied to the research as much as something that we deliberately set out to do.
Jennifer Gabrys:And this is, I think, in part because, you know, our first project area was in Pennsylvania where activism was a term that communities in some cases were disavowing because they wanted to be taken seriously by policymakers. They were disavowing it because people who were more openly fractivist were ending up on FBI watch lists, and it was a term that people sort of danced around. But then it was a term that was also applied to us as a label that we didn't necessarily set out within the first instance. So I wonder if you want to say anything about these dances with the term activism, the concept activism, the practice of activism, and how, you know, on one level, it can be a way to characterize research, but also context dependent, in relation to communities and the struggles that they're undertaking. It can also be something that people try to sidestep or can be a term that's used to denigrate or even dismiss academic research.
Jennifer Gabrys:If it's labeled as activist, then it's seen to be not objective, for instance. So activism is something that kind of emerges in all of these pluralistic ways, and it's something that we were attempting to wrestle with. And maybe this is where it would be nice to hear from you, a kind of anecdote about how in Pennsylvania this activism label was something that led to quite interesting skirmishes in the field.
Helen Pritchard:Yeah. I mean, I could talk about that. I also think about how in some ways there's a kind of queer activism really present in this project and also in the way in which we understand or got to understand our own activist practices and our own positions with that. Because, you know, in some ways, if I I think about the work of Lauren Berlant or, like Heather Love in Feeling Backwards, right, this idea of a kind of political or activist practice, which might not be a form of direct action. It might also involve, like, crying, sleeping, being depressed, like, all these kind of slow forms.
Helen Pritchard:And the way in which as well Lauren Berlant writes about that kind of magnetism that people have towards things in which they might have very, like, different attachments, which is in many ways, I think, also how the practice of citizen sensing brought people together in the project, especially in Pennsylvania, right, with different forms of attachment to that and different types of political positions, different types of political positions, different types of friendships and relations, different types of, conflicts as well between them. And I guess also, like, different attachments to what that knowledge practice might be and who could be the expert in that space. And so one of the things, which I think, Jennifer, you're bringing up here that we found ourselves susceptible not susceptible to, but I guess was kind of put upon us, very often was this question of, are you expert enough to be doing this research, this pollution monitoring? Are you from a kind of validated scientific lab whose equipment, devices, and so on are valid enough and expert enough to be used in this space? And it started to kind of unravel in a way that it was a very protected space actually of who would be able to do monitoring there, especially if once the data started to actually perhaps have some resonance with people's experiences on the ground.
Helen Pritchard:So we were kind of I think at first, things were less combative, let's say, when we were in the field and monitoring. And then I guess kind of halfway through the monitoring that we were doing in Pennsylvania, the anxiety in a way that at the federal level or the state level or those who might not want people to be monitoring the potential of pollution in those spaces started to arise. And one of those things was the interest in Fox News in the data that was being produced. Fox News had been contacting as many people as they could who they thought might be working as part of this citizen monitoring group. Some of the people were quite publicly sharing their data in different things like town hall meetings, and other people were anonymously participating.
Helen Pritchard:And so they were really trying to find out where we were, who we were, and also they had this narrative that we were spreading that they were going to test the validity of our devices, I think, if I remember rightly. When they were gonna prove that these researchers from London, from the citizen sense, were fraudulent, actually. I think this was a kind of narrative. One time, I I'd returned back from a meeting with somebody to the hotel in which I was staying in. And at that point, I think that the the person in the hotel for some reason, I'm not sure why she had a moment, I guess, of perhaps thinking she shouldn't have disclosed what she had.
Helen Pritchard:And she she said to me, Fox News rang. They were ringing everywhere, and I told them you were staying here. They're gonna come at daylight, and they want to, like, ambush you in the car park. And so for some reason, I'm not sure why because she kind of confessed it to me that this was gonna happen. And so at that point, we were also kind of actually working with the, a legal team actually at Goldsmiths also to think about the licenses on the citizen data because they also were quite interested, to get hold of that.
Helen Pritchard:So at that point, you know, there was this question of, like, well, what am I gonna do? Where am I gonna go? And so we kind of made this plan that I was gonna leave the hotel in darkness to avoid this kind of ambush in the car park. But then I had to I think I had to pick up some data or I had to meet with somebody who I really wanted to meet with for a long time. So Jennifer and I made this plan together.
Helen Pritchard:The the one place where they wouldn't look for me would be, the compressor station because some of the people we worked with were also people who had infrastructure on their properties, and they they'd given us the keys because we were also monitoring there, and it was you know, we were collaborating. So the place so I think at, like, four or five in the morning, I drove to the compressor station, and that was where I kind of saw sunrise and hid out from Fox News. And at that point, because, of course, when you're monitoring in these situations as well, there's also people who are working right in these compressor stations. And they were there, and they made me a cup of tea, and then we kind of had a chat. And then as the space cleared, I kind of moved off and I think then kind of made a a dash to a hotel in Upstate New York to avoid the Fox News ambush.
Helen Pritchard:And I think at which point, they I think they tried to then do some other interviews, and they were always sending us updates. So we've interviewed this and this person, but they never managed to launch a story, I don't think. And I really think that was also because, actually, the community members and and one of the reasons that I went to the compressor station is also the person who owned it said, go there because I've not given I haven't given them permission to go on my land. So they actually cannot interview you there or try and question you there. So, I mean, I think this is where that type of Jennifer, the way you write about this co constituted activism really starts to kind of emerge.
Helen Pritchard:Right? Like, what it means to kind of do this work together.
Jennifer Gabrys:Yes. It takes, I think, co constitution to a whole other level, in a certain way. But this issue of who is authorized to monitor environments and who's able to really observe, document, and communicate this gets to, I think, the larger issue of the kinds of power structures that are very much bound up with how knowledge is generated, circulated, and acted upon, and how much the citizen sensing can really potentially disrupt these usual power structures, in relation to environmental knowledge, other forms of of knowledge, and what kind of, entities then come in to try to disrupt that process. And, of course, this is just one of many narratives of attempted disruption. And I think we were really, on a certain level, at least I was surprised by the level of attention that the citizen monitoring was attracting and the attempted disruptions to that and the various, kinds of interactions that we were finding ourselves drawn into in these attempts to explain the project.
Jennifer Gabrys:In one case, I think we were even told we we should have asked for permission to undertake the monitoring. A case did later come up in Wyoming, I think it was on Bureau of Land Management land, about whether people could monitor, and that was eventually protected as a form of, free speech. So these these attempts to disrupt other ways of engaging with and and knowing air quality, of knowing what's going on with environmental change and of circulating that material, I think, has been a kind of interesting way in which we've come to understand that the kinds of action and activism that we thought we might be engaged with, people thought they might be engaged with, could also transform and develop in other ways because of how the monitoring was understood by other entities. And, you know, we even, I think, encountered some interesting disagreements within political organizations, at the state and federal level. There wasn't kind of agreement across environmental health and and other entities about how or whether to respond to citizen monitoring, whether the data could be seen to be legitimate.
Jennifer Gabrys:And, of course, then one of the responses was to do a parallel follow-up study to try to recreate the findings in classic scientific methods. And when the findings were recreated, when a pollution source that we had identified at comparable levels of pollution were established, then that was seen to be a kind of validation and verification of the findings, but, the findings weren't taken at face value in that first instance. So that was quite interesting and really made us think about how we also built an infrastructure for undertaking collective research. Because throughout this whole process, we were then tweaking the platforms that we developed. We were creating a further data analysis toolkit so that communities could do DIY data analysis.
Jennifer Gabrys:We brought in a consultant atmospheric scientist, to be able to have conversations and to learn about how to do atmospheric science. We also developed a method of data stories so that we could find a way to bring in sensor data, in some cases, official environmental data, community narratives, site observations, and proposals for action to rethink the space of how monitoring is undertaken, not just as a a kind of official declaration of air pollution levels, often in the absence then of of action, but to remake that space through different types of citizen observations, different modalities of, environmental engagement that might be organized toward environmental action. And I suppose that's where a different kind of activism comes up as well, which is about rethinking the project of monitoring as one that, for communities, is always embedded in attempts to make more breathable worlds. So it's monitoring to try to identify problems and to rework those conditions so that they're not suffering from pollution, for instance. And this is where I think another kind of pluralism came up in terms of the sorts of data, the trajectories of action, and the possible ways of transforming environments.
Jennifer Gabrys:So, yes, there's something quite interesting there with the attempted disruptions, but then also the kind of cascading of different ways of undertaking observation and having effects. And those struggles and those conflicts then became part of the collective research and became part of the way of understanding what was at stake and that sensors alone weren't going to simply be able to to solve the broader issues at play in those environments.
Helen Pritchard:Yeah. But, I mean, also when I think about the work that we set up and also the infrastructures that we built in terms of the OpenAir toolkit or the OpenAir platform, the dust boxes, all of the sensing kits, the the community infrastructures, In some ways, you know, at the time, I think there was really this also this kind of emerging proposition, right, of individuals kind of quantifying their exposures or quantifying their experiences of pollution. And, also, the kind of computational practices that were emerging around that were really kind of designed for that, for the individual or this kind of idea of, like, an individual digital sovereign or something who, like, is kind of, turning the camera back on themselves, you know, monitoring, collecting, accumulating all this data, using these cloud services to do that. And if I think about the kind of in some ways, we were through the kind of collective infrastructure that we set up and actually the way in which we worked particularly with this temporal and spatial monitoring that was to get done together with communities in which also people would swap their devices, would help each other to map where their device would go.
Helen Pritchard:So it wasn't necessarily even an individual choice of where that device would be. That in some ways, we were always kind of agitating, like, a number of normative things around what monitoring is. Right? Not just so we were kind of agitating the fracking companies and the fossil fuel companies. We were agitating the department for environmental protection who kind of saw that they should be in charge of monitoring.
Helen Pritchard:We were agitating the kind of expert scientists. We were also, I think, agitating the those designers of, like, ubiquitous computational environmental monitoring, things that really were trying to kind of push forward this very individual practice of monitoring. And it really this the the project itself, right, always was rejecting individual collecting data about their exposure, about their individual experience would be able to lead to transformational change. And I think at the time, I don't think I quite understood how it was for us to be proposing collective community based infrastructures for the citizen sensing monitoring. But, actually, I think that that was also really, really a kind of big part of that provocation that was taking place.
Jennifer Gabrys:Yes. And I I think this is really a central observation. I didn't realize it would be such an agitation either, but in the process of trying to follow through with working with communities, but also trying to do, the digital otherwise, computing otherwise, which I think is a topic what maybe will come up in a moment. But to really think about the power structures, the promises, the usual ways of developing, organizing, and installing technology, that if we thought about this as a collective project that was tuned toward a certain kind of collective inquiry for making more breathable worlds, we would be really remaking the whole diagram of technology and power and possibility. And it's an incredible amount of work, but it also can really start to overturn many of the assumptions about technology and the possible effects it might have.
Jennifer Gabrys:And what was really quite interesting is how we were also being agitated, I think, by communities to think about how to make our projects accountable and to make the technology in a way accessible and usable for them so that they could do the analysis they wanted to do and demonstrate particular concerns. So, you know, we were also being, in a sense, held to account and asked to really think about what these sensors were doing and who they were for. And it was interesting to be in these spaces of really testing and opening up the sensors and trying to think about we how we could both question them, but how we could also collect data that had a level of accuracy and verifiability and could travel in the world in ways that could actually be put to different kinds of uses. So that that, I think, was something that was part of a real challenge of the project because we were having to make these infrastructures really on the fly in response to emerging conditions and attempts to make sense of the data as it was being generated, to make sense of pollution conditions as they were occurring, and to respond to challenges from community members, from state, especially, level, governments, and to industry, you know, who, obviously did disregard the data as speculative and not sort of accurate.
Jennifer Gabrys:But having to then think about building an infrastructure that could enable these collective forms of research and inquiry that could respond to these challenges, and that could become a kind of ongoing space of contribution and encounter really is a particular way of engaging with technology that remakes the usual diagram of how technology is developed as something that's usually within a space of big tech and large funding and is then tested in user groups, kind of quite contained settings. The ethos and the objective of that technology is meeting very particular interest and concerns, and then it's rolled out for universal users to, engage with whether it's relevant or not and often without thinking about the possible harms that can be done at that point of of circulating in the world. And by really working at the point of technology development in this other way with communities, we were really remaking that space of what technology might be able to generate as as part of this larger project of of making more breathable worlds. So I don't know if here you want to also talk about some of your own work on computing otherwise because I think this is really a a force to be reckoned with in your current work, Helen, where you're really taking this computing otherwise into many other spaces.
Helen Pritchard:Yeah. I was thinking when you were saying about this question of what the monitoring was for or what the sensing was for, and in some ways and you write about this, and it's a key tenant of the book as well in terms of struggle. In some ways, I guess, a kind of computing practice is not necessarily something that is normally aligned with struggle. Like, what does it mean to have a kind of computing otherwise in which struggle is part of that practice or the building of solidarity across struggles? You know, if I think about the work in citizen sense as well, right, that was also about a solidarity across different struggles.
Helen Pritchard:We always kept that in the room, and that's really not the kind of, we might say, like, a mainstream or dominant computer science practice. Right? You don't keep the feminist struggle in the room. You don't keep the queer struggle in the room. You don't keep, like, anti racist struggle in the room.
Helen Pritchard:You don't keep environmental struggles in the room together. You know, there are, I think amazing projects happening in computer science which do do that, but which are often kind of even not recognized as computer science or computing. And I think that they are part of that kind of like, the struggle for I don't know if we could say, like, how to make a computing otherwise, Jennifer. Right? Like, you know, it seems like there are many people, and together with Wren Britain, actually, we wrote this piece, and we've been doing this work called four CS.
Helen Pritchard:So four CS and using the kind of acronym of computer science in which we switch the CS for different metaphors, such as cushions and stargazing, crying sabotage, chance and scandal. But we are also using the project to really try to kind of also document and map different types of projects which we see have kind of affinities and are trying to, like, come together and create solidarities as a struggle to remake a computing and remake it really, really differently. And I think, you know, in some ways, also this question of, like, what is the sensing for or who it's for, you know, is also really present in terms of where do we start on these processes sometimes. And I guess that if we had started with a kind of proposition of, like, how to make more breathable worlds, that probably would have been a very different and impossible kind of proposition. But, actually, like, what does it mean to kind of start with the struggles that communities are facing and concerned about, which was really the citizen sense methodology.
Helen Pritchard:Right? It was to look for and to think about how to work together across those struggles. And in some ways, like, I think that that has really, really fed into the work that we're doing with the regenerative energy community project. And in that project, we are trying to think about what does it mean to think about infrastructure if we start with the soil. If we think about, like, everything that we do on that project needs to somehow regenerate or benefit the soil, and we're really indebted to lots of the work in black agroecology practices and black expressive culture in that project.
Helen Pritchard:But when you start with the kind of thinking it's for the soil, actually, again, it's like a very, very different proposition and sets of practices and infrastructures that start to emerge from that.
Jennifer Gabrys:I mean, I think that gets to this interesting question of what worlds are. Because here, the worlds are not ones of technical circuitry, but rather are about soil and regeneration in the case of your new project. Or in the case of the Citizen Sense project. As you mentioned, we were often starting from within many different community concerns and issues having to do with housing and development and economic and, other forms of displacement that some people might see as tangentially related to air quality and, as you mentioned, completely sort of separate from computation as it's usually configured. But by having this approach of of thinking about people as citizens of worlds as differently sort of engaged with these struggles and that these form conditions of interaction, possibility, changing relations, and multiple different approaches for how technology could be put to work and and how to transform environments.
Jennifer Gabrys:This became a kind of way of bringing together, I suppose, a world's based approach that isn't a container as such, but rather is this set of attractions and possibilities for how to do computation otherwise. So I think this is perhaps the next chapter of this work, which would be to explore exactly this question, drawing on this work, drawing on, as you mentioned, many parallel practices and and ongoing work that really tries to explore how to break with the the logic of big tech, how to, develop other practices for being engaged environmental citizens and how to rework this space of citizenship through environment exchanges that are about making conditions of breathability. So I think that this ideally is a way of writing that is not just documenting a project, but writing as a kind of practice for opening up to other possibilities and other collaborations. So this is a kind of pluralistic project that is about transforming conditions, but also pointing to the next how to. Because with any good, I suppose, pluralist projects, you have to be inviting more possibilities, even, those yet to come that aren't yet part of the existing sort of study.
Jennifer Gabrys:So I don't know if that's a good place to end, perhaps, how to do computing otherwise as the next chapter that is being written, is yet to be written, and hopefully is a way that we could come back together in more collaborations that we have been discussing. But I think, you know, it's been a really fascinating conversation and also incredibly generative collaboration over the last ten years, and I really do hope there's more to come in exploring the space of how to compute otherwise.
Helen Pritchard:Yeah. Thanks so much, Jennifer. And I think yeah. Absolutely. It's kinda great to think about actually also what it meant to make that space, make the space, and hold that space for this type of work to happen and how to make that again.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Citizens of Worlds, Open Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.