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Metodologías Experimentales Para Escuchar el Presente: Entrevista a Alejandra Osejo-Varona

Alejandra Osejo-Varona, Karina Aranda, nicolás gaitán-albarracín March 13, 2025
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Este Mes de la Historia de la Mujer, queremos publicar una entrevista con la antropóloga colombiana Alejandra Osejo-Varona (Rice University). Su trabajo etnográfico tiene una importante influencia de las epistemologías feministas latinoamericanas y de los Estudios Sociales de Ciencia y Tecnología (STS), por lo que nos pareció valioso compartir su perspectiva sobre la investigación etnográfica multimodal. Esta entrevista fue realizada por Nicolás Gaitán y por mí, vía videoconferencia. En esta conversación, Alejandra Osejo-Varona nos cuenta cómo colabora con diferentes comunidades científicas para explorar nuevas formas de escucha de los seres que viven debajo del agua. Tecnologías como micrófonos, hidrófonos, algoritmos, modelos mapas y espectrogramas nos permiten imaginar otras formas de relación con las especies que viven en los ríos, especialmente aquellas a las que se ha catalogado como “invasoras”. Estas nuevas aproximaciones metodológicas abren formas de trabajo colaborativo e interdisciplinario para la construcción de nuevas sensibilidades y empatías, capaces de visionar otros mundos humanos y no-humanos. (read more...)

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Experimental Methodologies for Listening to the Present: An Interview with Alejandra Osejo-Varona

Alejandra Osejo-Varona, Karina Aranda, nicolás gaitán-albarracín March 13, 2025
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This Women’s History Month, we are publishing an interview with Colombian anthropologist Alejandra Osejo-Varona (Rice University). Her ethnographic work is influenced by Latin American feminist epistemologies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), so we thought it would be valuable to share her perspective on multimodal ethnographic research. Nicolás Gaitán-Albarracín and I conducted this interview via videoconference. In this conversation, Osejo-Varona tells us how she collaborates with different scientific communities to explore new ways of listening to the beings that live underwater. Technologies such as microphones, hydrophones, algorithms, model maps, and spectrograms allow us to imagine other ways of relating with the species living in rivers, especially those cataloged as “invasive” in socio-ecosystems of Colombia. These new methodological approaches open forms of collaborative and interdisciplinary work to construct new sensitivities and empathies capable of envisioning other human and non-human worlds. (read more...)

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Responsible AI in Action: Beyond Policy Regimes

Cheryl Hagan February 27, 2025
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Work on Artificial Intelligence writ large has moved past laudatory excitement to one of vast critique. This recent scholarship has demonstrated the various racist and sexist biases embedded within algorithmic systems (Benjamin, 2017; Browne 2015; Noble, 2018). More recently, scholarship into AI has sought to define AI as part of longer histories of colonial exploitation and extraction (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). Others have argued for postcolonial or decolonial AI which is “about interrogating who is doing computing, where they are doing it, and, thereby, what computing means both epistemologically (that is, in relation to knowing) and ontologically (that is, in relation to being)” (Ali 2016, 20). Geographer Louise Amoore also defines AI not as the objective and all-encompassing thinking machine AI proponents claim, but instead an always already partial aperture. This method of doing ethics is not about claiming transparency, but about acknowledging the ways in which ethics, for humans and algorithms, is always emplaced and partial (Amoore, 2020). (read more...)

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The Cyborg is Dead: The Node Rises

Katrina Nicole Matheson February 25, 2025
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This essay uses the demise of the cyborg candidate to challenge faith in social constructionism without an examination of how authenticity sows meaning.  I begin by revisiting the cyborg as an entry point to feminist social science, drawing a connection to Kamala Harris as the cyborg’s political manifestation, and placing both in an epistemic context defined by algorithmic logic.  In part 2, I propose the node as a theoretical successor to the cyborg, however representative of a new way of thinking that I call matrix thinking. (read more...)

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Major Internet Outages are Getting Bigger and Occurring More Often: A Reflection on the CrowdStrike IT Outage

A.R.E. Taylor February 18, 2025
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At 09:30 a.m. BST on 19 July 2024, IT systems around the world suddenly ground to a halt. Without their computer systems, pharmacies, doctors’ surgeries, airports, train providers, and banks, among other critical services, were unable to operate. Websites and entertainment platforms went offline. Supermarket deliveries were cancelled. Retailers’ payment systems were unable to process transactions. Emergency services were disrupted. TV Channels were unable to air. (read more...)

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Common(s) in Science and Technology? Dispatches from the SEEKCommons Network

Insha Bint Bashir, Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Matias Milia December 17, 2024
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This is the Introduction post to our new SEEKCommons series. The posts in this series are forthcoming, and will be linked here in this Introduction as they are published over the next several months. What does the “common(s)” mean for the present and future of science and technology? Are there novel dynamics at play in how knowledge infrastructures are being built, controlled, and contested today? It is with the goal of exploring these interconnected questions that we conceived of the Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons (SEEKCommons) network—a collective platform where the “common” stands as a political horizon for collaborative social, technical, and environmental work. (read more...)

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The MQ-9 Reaper Amid Environmental Crisis: Weapon of War or Humanitarian Tool?

Georgia Butcher November 5, 2024

On Saturday of Labor Day Weekend 2020, a situation was rapidly deteriorating north of Fresno, California. Sometime around 6pm on September 5, the Creek Fire started, gained momentum, and burned north (Gabbert 2020a). The fast-moving fire blocked the road from campgrounds in the area, stranding hundreds of campers visiting Mammoth Pool Reservoir. Quietly circling overhead was an MQ-9 Reaper, observing the apocalyptic looking situation. The sensors attached to the bottom of the MQ-9 Reaper could see through the billowing clouds of smoke. The California Air National Guard crew flying the MQ-9 was looking for something: a landing spot for evacuations (Solman 2020). (read more...)

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Geoengineering: De Facto Environmental Governance and Alternative Future Making

Cody Skahan September 24, 2024
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I first heard about Solar Radiation Modification (SRM)—a form of geoengineering meant to address climate change through planetary cooling—during the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland, at a networking lunch for youth working in environmentalism. My Master’s thesis in Anthropology at the University of Iceland focused on Ungir Umhverfissinnar (English translation: the Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association), which I (from the United States) had joined the board of both as a climate activist and engaged anthropologist. During my interviews and participant observation with the organization, geoengineering had never come up until my colleague from Ungir Umhverfissinnar and I were approached by representatives from Operaatio Arktis (OA). Intent on “ the polar ice caps and preventing global tipping points,” OA has followed prominent research advocates in fostering discussion around an SRM technique called Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). (read more...)

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