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[Commlist] Call for Papers: The Infrastructures of Socio-Ecological Knowing in the City
Tue Nov 28 21:07:01 GMT 2023
2nd Call for Papers: The Infrastructures of Socio-Ecological Knowing in
the City
Abstract Deadline: 14th December 2023
We invite you to our workshop on ‘the infrastructures of
socio-ecological knowing in the city’ that will take place on the 11th
January 2024, at King’s College London. The output of this workshop will
be proposed as a special issue, which will be submitted in late Spring
of 2024. Contributors to the workshop will be encouraged to submit to
the issue, understanding the workshop to be a space for developing works
in progress, rather than necessarily presenting complete papers.
Please submit your 200 word proposals by the end of 14th December to
(gunes.tavmen /at/ kcl.ac.uk) <mailto:(gunes.tavmen /at/ kcl.ac.uk)>
We have funds to cover (at least partially) the travel expenses for
Early Career Researchers who otherwise don’t have funding. If you need
to obtain visa to travel, let us know and we’ll expedite the decision
making process in your case.
Overview
When the concept of the smart city emerged, one of its primary promises
was to make cities more sustainable. With ubiquitous sensing and real
time data flows, city administrators, we were told, would be able to
monitor levels of urban pollution, energy use and air quality, which
would lead to more efficient and sustainable management of resources.
Whilst it is true that technologies, including cameras. sensors, and
more recently AI, have been effective at recognizing and tracking
environmental impacts, there is also much evidence that highlights the
environmental cost of these same technologies, which rely on energy
intensive infrastructures (Monserrate, 2022). Moreover, several scholars
have observed that the quantifiable logics of data collection on this
scale (the datafication of pollution, tree coverage, air quality etc.)
does not necessarily lead to meaningful policy changes or straight
forward action (see, for example, Gabrys, 2020).
With the recent progress (and hype) in data and AI technologies, some
have argued that other ways of knowing the city have been eclipsed by
the episteme of data and algorithmic imaginaries, which offer seemingly
objective views on urban processes due to their impressive technical
capabilities (Mattern, 2017). Following Louise Amoore’s (2020) work,
however, we know that AI and Machine Learning techniques can be
understood as an aperture – or a perceived opening to new ways of
knowing, but also a foreclosing of possible futures into computational
and statistical ways of knowing. So, taking the urbanists Brenner and
Schmid (2015)’s question: ‘through what categories, methods and
cartographies should urban life be understood’?, we instead ask,
‘through what other categories, methods, and technologies could urban
ecology be understood?’
We invite papers that are grounded in the reality of how data and AI
technologies, and the situated socio-political ways they have become
embedded in city governance, have come to shape our understanding of
ecological processes in the city, thus moving us away from the
imaginaries of smart city techno-utopias. We aim to bring together an
understanding of the current state of play, but also to develop future
directions for urban-ecological relations that are guided not by today’s
focus on datafication and algorithmic processing, but by other ways of
knowing the city.
Some questions to guide submissions:
• How do sensing and algorithmic technologies shape understandings and
perceptions of socio-ecological systems in cities, and how might they
foreclosure other ways of knowing?
• Which ways of knowing the city are obscured by our society’s focus
on the logics of datafication?
• How are socio-ecological relations made visible through the lens of
digital media? And who are they made visible for?
• What role do digital media platforms play in our understanding of
socio-ecological ways of knowing the city?
• What are the ways of socio-ecological knowing that may be localised,
digital or non-digital that might help in working towards environmental
justice in the urban environment?
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