Political airs : from monitoring to attuned sensing air pollution

In Madrid, as in many European cities, air pollution is known about and made accountable through techno-scientific monitoring processes based on data, and the toxicity of the air is defined through epidemiological studies and made political through policy. In 2009, Madrid’s City Council changed the location of its air quality monitoring stations without notice, reducing the average pollution of the city and therefore provoking a public scandal. This scandal challenged the monitoring process, as the data that used to be the evidence of pollution could not be relied on anymore. To identify the characteristics of some of the diverse forms of public’s participation that emerged, I route theories of environmental sensing from STS and feminist theory through the notion of attuned sensing. Reading environmental sensing through the processual and orientational processes of attunement expands the ways in which toxicity can be sensed outside of quantitative data. This mode of sensing recognizes how the different spontaneous attunements to and with air pollution and the scandal acknowledged Madrid’s chemical infrastructure, rendering visible qualitative conditions of toxicity. This mode of sensing politicized the toxicity of the air not through management or policy making, nor only through established forms environmental activism, but through contagion and accumulation of the different forms of public participation. All together, they made air pollution a matter of public concern. They also redistributed the actors, practices and objects that make the toxicity not only knowable, but also accountable, and most importantly, they opened up spaces for citizen intervention

Towards a more-than-human approach to tree health

New ways of working and thinking in relation to tree health and plant biosecurity are required. The climate is changing and the number of pests and diseases is increasing. A review of the social science literature on plant health reveals that scholars are not quite sure what this ‘new thinking’ might entail. In this chapter, we begin the process of re-imagining tree health by starting with the trees and our research engagement with them. Trees are acknowledged in this chapter as never static, but rather fluid, shape-shifters, translated across time and space. Health and disease are revealed as relational, and a fixed approach to tree health management won’t work. In a world of rapid change, this way of working is not just relevant for trees

Speculative Research

This entry begins by distinguishing speculative research from the broader cultural and academic meanings of “speculation.” The present “constructivist” approach to speculative research places emphasis on the ways in which the research question, the researcher, the researched and research device are actively involved in a process of becoming-with one another. This is explored through the notion of the “research event” into which a multiplicity of divergent elements (micro and the macro, the social and the material, the cognitive and the affective, and the human and the nonhuman) enters. In combining, they also “become-with” one other thereby opening the potentialities of the research event, including the possibility that it is no longer “about” research. Speculative research concerns enabling a sensibility attuned to this process of co-becoming. The entry suggests that a sensitivity to, and a taking seriously of, the “idiot” (i.e., that which does not make sense in the context of the research event as typically understood) facilitates this openness to the possibilities of the research event. More proactively, speculative researchers can also introduce idiocy into research events as a way of prompting participants to explore potential ways of reframing the research question, that is, of inventing new problems. The device of the “probe” (drawn from design practice) is used to illustrate this. It is further proposed that speculative research extends to the data analytic phase: introducing alternative materials (e.g., nonacademic artifacts) or traditions of engagement (e.g., aesthetic) can also enable “possibilistic” accounts

Towards an empirical ethics in care: relations with technologies in health care

This paper describes the approach of empirical ethics, a form of ethics that integrates non-positivist ethnographic empirical research and philosophy. Empirical ethics as it is discussed here builds on the ‘empirical turn’ in epistemology. It radicalizes the relational approach that care ethics introduced to think about care between people by drawing in relations between people and technologies as things people relate to. Empirical ethics studies care practices by analysing their intra-normativity, or the ways of living together the actors within these practices strive for or bring about as good practices. Different from care ethics, what care is and if it is good is not defined beforehand. A care practice may be contested by comparing it to alternative practices with different notions of good care. By contrasting practices as different ways of living together that are normatively oriented, suggestions for the best possible care may be argued for. Whether these suggestions will actually be put to practice is, however, again a relational question; new actors need to re-localize suggestions, to make them work in new practices and fit them in with local intra-normativities with their particular routines, material infrastructures, know-how and strivings