Proposal for a panel series at the 11th Tensions of Europe Conference, Frankfurt/Oder 19-21 September 2024. Transformations, fundamental change and technology.

Title of the panel series: Datafying the environment, environmentalizing data

Conveners: Gemma Cirac-Claveras (UAB) and Sabine Höhler (KTH)

Over the last decades, the environment and its governance have undergone a transformation towards progressive datafication. Environmental goals, indicator systems and performance reviews build on the availability of environmental data. As the environment becomes “datafied”, data become increasingly “environmentalized” – as proxies for the environment itself or currencies in environmental discourses. This ongoing transformation has become so comprehensive that scientific, political and economic knowledge about the oceans, the atmosphere, the land surfaces and the ice, and their governance, today rely on vast flows of data gathered, made evident, shared and consumed through a myriad of tools. Concepts such as “environing media”, the “digital climate/digital environment” or the “mediated planet” have been proposed to capture the epistemological, political, social and environmental implications of such transformation.

This panel series features empirical cases and examples that research on the history of the people, their technological, professional and institutional resources, their forms of organization, the power relations that go with them, and the perceptions that enable to generate, negotiate, disseminate, maintain and consume environmental data. While particular interest will be given to satellite data, the focus will be on environmental monitoring and sensing tools and operations in a broad sense. The aim is to gain understanding about the politics, epistemologies, technologies, vulnerabilities and social norms that made environmental data available and even vital for science and policy.

This panel series aims at integrating the following topics: Producing environmental data: Data must be actively produced by people, their technologies, forms of organisation, purposes, worldviews and social relations. Environmental data become data for someone, and through organized practices in specific contexts. If it is the context that makes data meaningful, then their technological, institutional, social, economic and political configurations must be examined.

Disseminating environmental data: Environmental data do not flow effortlessly and smoothly. If data flows are managed to overcome technical and social frictions, then the challenges to classify, rank, organize, store and reprocess data but also to render them accessible need to be addressed, including the norms and behaviours underpinning epistemic practices and the ways of thinking about intellectual property, sharing, quality control, standards, liability, use and reuse, and ownership.

Using environmental data: If the socio-economic and cultural importance of knowledge is a function of its widespread circulation and utilisation, then it is important to ask how environmental data became extensively entrenched and assimilated in scientific, commercial, political and cultural processes and how they shaped environmental perception and politics.

This panel series is jointly coordinated by Gemma Cirac-Claveras (UAB, ERC StG CLIMASAT project) and Sabine Höhler (KTH, Formas SDGs, The Mediated Planet project).

Interested scholars are invited to contribute. Please send your paper proposals (title, abstract of 150 words, name, affiliation and short biography) before 10 November 2023 to both Gemma Cirac and Sabene Hoehler.