 | Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle An unparalleled how-to guide to citizen-sensing practices that monitor air pollution Drawing on data from the Citizen Sense research group, which worked with communities in the United States and the United Kingdom to develop digital-sensor toolkits, Jennifer Gabrys argues that citizen-oriented technologies promise positive change but then collide with entrenched and inequitable power structures. She asks: Who or what constitutes a "citizen" in citizen sensing? How do digital sensing technologies enable or constrain environmental citizenship? Spanning three project areas, this study describes collaborations to monitor air pollution from fracking infrastructure, to document emissions in urban environments, and to create air-quality gardens. As these projects show, how people respond to, care for, and struggle to transform environmental conditions informs the political subjects and collectives they become as they strive for more breathable worlds. Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture, and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She is author of How to Do Things with Sensors and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (both published by Minnesota), as well as Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. |
