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This article examines the generation of digital outer space natures in the space exploration game, No Man’s Sky. Using procedural generation, No Man’s Sky offers nearly infinite planets, flora, and fauna on the fly. With the rapid... more
This article examines the generation of digital outer space natures in the space exploration game, No Man’s Sky. Using procedural generation, No Man’s Sky offers nearly infinite planets, flora, and fauna on the fly. With the rapid development of gaming technology and tools, game developers and others are attempting to diversify the representation of various forms of nature in gaming content and to expand the use of games in behavioral change, education, conservation, and other fields. Many scholars argue that games offer promising ways for various publics to understand their place and their interconnectedness with microbes, ecosystems, planet Earth, and beyond. We examine how No Man’s Sky struggled to coproduce digital outer space natures at the two scalar extremes of the vast expanse of outer space and of the embodied player relating within complex biomes. Our results from an in-depth, qualitative analysis of the initial version of the game, of player world-building experiences in No Man’s Sky, and of subsequent developer modifications to the game demonstrate that nonscalability theory is useful for studying what digital outer space natures do in games. We also argue that nonscalability theory would benefit from a more robust engagement with the digital. No Man’s Sky was initially scalable to such an extreme that it made players into objects without an origin story, broader purpose or way to build meaningful relations in the game. For a brief period, this game undermined players’ interplanetary colonial imaginaries. Subsequent updates to the game introduced a limited scope of nonscalability, but only to the extent of satisfying gamers’ desires to become more impactful agents of exploration. We see great potential for analyzing the role of innovations in computing and game design in linking multiscalar digital, outer, and earth spaces, which as other scholars have shown, bear significantly on our understanding of multiple worlds and natures.
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Sustainability professionals working on university campuses in the United States increasingly use data management and analytics platforms for tracking proliferating energy and other sustainability data. Such practices reflect a pervasive... more
Sustainability professionals working on university campuses in the United States increasingly use data management and analytics platforms for tracking proliferating energy and other sustainability data. Such practices reflect a pervasive audit culture replete with version upgrades, ratings and rankings. Numbers-driven practices can move decisions affecting particular places and people from political spheres of governance to technical realms managed by experts and administrators. I draw from my ongoing ethnographic study of energy analytics services marketed to those attempting to ‘green’ higher education campuses to examine networks of sub-metering devices, advertisements, online interactive energy dashboard platforms and sustainability conferences. I argue that a diverse and intersectional feminist energy politics demands critical attention to power, expertise and technological innovation in the energy transition.
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This commentary proposes a research agenda for the concept of feminist digital natures (FDN). To demonstrate how we see FDN connecting existing research efforts, we review both the well-established and much-needed work in three... more
This commentary proposes a research agenda for the concept of feminist digital natures (FDN). To demonstrate how we see FDN connecting existing research efforts, we review both the well-established and much-needed work in three overlapping areas of scholarship where we see the potential for productive discussions, new questions, and empirical analysis: feminist digital geographies (FDG), digital natures (DN), and feminist political ecology (FPE). We offer specific and grounded examples of topics and questions that scholars might pursue through an FDN approach. We encourage sustained, collaborative, and critical attention to the uneven consequences and political terrain of understanding natures as increasingly digitally monitored, managed, manipulated, and represented. We can and should think with digital relations, and we might benefit from new creative conversations across our areas of inquiry and action.
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This article examines the generation of digital outer space natures in the space exploration game, No Man’s Sky. Using procedural generation, No Man’s Sky offers nearly infinite planets, flora, and fauna on the fly. With the rapid... more
This article examines the generation of digital outer space natures in the space exploration game, No Man’s Sky. Using procedural generation, No Man’s Sky offers nearly infinite planets, flora, and fauna on the fly. With the rapid development of gaming technology and tools, game developers and others are attempting to diversify the representation of various forms of nature in gaming content and to expand the use of games in behavioral change, education, conservation, and other fields. Many scholars argue that games offer promising ways for various publics to understand their place and their interconnectedness with microbes, ecosystems, planet Earth, and beyond. We examine how No Man’s Sky struggled to coproduce digital outer space natures at the two scalar extremes of the vast expanse of outer space and of the embodied player relating within complex biomes. Our results from an in-depth, qualitative analysis of the initial version of the game, of player world-building experiences in ...
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In 2013, Vermont Gas Systems (VGS) received a certificate of public good for their proposed 41-mile pipeline extension called the Addison Natural Gas Project (ANGP) for transporting fracked gas from Alberta, Canada via the TransCanada... more
In 2013, Vermont Gas Systems (VGS) received a certificate of public good for their proposed 41-mile pipeline extension called the Addison Natural Gas Project (ANGP) for transporting fracked gas from Alberta, Canada via the TransCanada Mainline. The ANGP is the largest expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure in Vermont in decades. Activists, those working and studying in higher education, local residents, and others have resisted the ANGP with diverse strategies. An investigation launched in 2017 regarding the pipeline’s ongoing safety and construction problems remains open. In co-writing this chapter, we offer brief autobiographical comments, followed by a “multi-logue” consisting of a facilitated and recorded discussion, which we transcribed and circulated among ourselves for revision and reflection. Our “multi-logue” writing experiment highlights our multiple perspectives on the ANGP and on broader pipeline pedagogies and entanglements. We reflect on our experiences learning to undermine the ANGP through two themes: (1) strengthening human and more-than-human relationships with places threatened by pipeline expansion, and (2) practicing pipeline pedagogies amidst Higher Education Institution (HEI) politics.
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Sustainability professionals working on university campuses in the United States increasingly use data management and analytics platforms for tracking proliferating energy and other sustainability data. Such practices reflect a pervasive... more
Sustainability professionals working on university campuses in the United States increasingly use data management and analytics platforms for tracking proliferating energy and other sustainability data. Such practices reflect a pervasive audit culture replete with version upgrades, ratings and rankings. Numbers-driven practices can move decisions affecting particular places and people from political spheres of governance to technical realms managed by experts and administrators. I draw from my ongoing ethnographic study of energy analytics services marketed to those attempting to ‘green’ higher education campuses to examine networks of sub-metering devices, advertisements, online interactive energy dashboard platforms and sustainability conferences. I argue that a diverse and intersectional feminist energy politics demands critical attention to power, expertise and technological innovation in the energy transition.
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Abstract Recipient communities often distribute humanitarian aid in unexpected ways that reveal critical power dynamics and relationships. This article examines a case involving ‘orphan kits’ distributed by the staff of an international... more
Abstract Recipient communities often distribute humanitarian aid in unexpected ways that reveal critical power dynamics and relationships. This article examines a case involving ‘orphan kits’ distributed by the staff of an international non-governmental organization in Mozambican woodland communities. The kits contained food and school supplies allocated according to a strict gender distribution mandate, which was of secondary importance compared with local obligations tied to enduring matrilineal social relations. Families divided the kits among kin and allocated a portion of the kits to local leaders as tribute. The seemingly simple act of leaders placing orphans on a list can signify the future arrival of much-needed support while also sparking fears of disciplinary powers governing family structures, labor and culturally and politically oppositional lives. Rumors narrate the effects of particular list-making procedures, allowing families to observe, interpret and express ideas about coercive and productive power relations. Rumors took up kit contents such as sardine tins to catalyze debates about proper leadership and comportment of orphans and their families. The article illustrates how feminist geographers can treat rumor and liminal interventions seriously as constitutive of contested power relations rooted in eco-social spaces.
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Two key figures analyzed in Donna Haraway’s monograph, Primate Visions: Gender Race and Nature in The World of Modern Science (1989) warrant further analysis in the emerging cyber politics of environmental conservation. These figures are... more
Two key figures analyzed in Donna Haraway’s monograph, Primate Visions: Gender Race and Nature in The World of Modern Science (1989) warrant further analysis in the emerging cyber politics of environmental conservation. These figures are Koko, a female lowland gorilla born in the San Francisco Zoo and her companion Dr. Francine (Penny) Patterson, a developmental psychologist who taught Koko how to communicate with a modified form of American Sign Language (ASL). Nine years after Haraway’s initial analysis, Koko and Patterson became early examples of conservation-related Web 2.0 engagement with their unprecedented inter-species America Online chat room encounter with 7811 member participants. Today, Koko has a Twitter account (@kokotweets), a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and a website where users watch videos of Koko celebrating birthdays and donate to ‘distant’ conservation projects. One project site is a gorilla reserve in Cameroon and another is a former pineapple plantation turned private nature preserve in Maui, Hawai’i. Inspired by recent analytical work in animal geographies and feminist political ecology, this article explores complex landscapes of caring, aging and conservation in a time of proliferating social media engagement from colonized sites of enduring privilege. The article argues that new media adds layers of violence, disciplinary techniques and co-dependence to the aging bodies, caring practices and landscapes that Koko, Patterson and others inhabit in California and in the proposed physical spaces of a repurposed pineapple field in Maui.
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Building on 18 months of ethnographic research between 2007 and 2011 in Mozambique, this article explores how sweeping practices elaborate multiple temporalities and thus can serve as powerful sites of “brokerage” where diverse actors and... more
Building on 18 months of ethnographic research between 2007 and 2011 in Mozambique, this article explores how sweeping practices elaborate multiple temporalities and thus can serve as powerful sites of “brokerage” where diverse actors and their many agendas meet. Sweeping renders daily activities legible to local residents and illegible to others. Daily sweeping just outside of the home signifies a day’s routine beginning and a family’s availability for receiving visitors. Sweeping also prevents the rapidly growing miombo woodland undergrowth from invading the home space, which partly explains differences in why many local residents see the woodlands as advancing and environmentalists’ argue that the “forest” is disappearing due to illegal logging. Limited understandings of sweeping as banal or wasted time miss the links between many urban-based non-governmental organization and activist practitioners who implement their projects in rural areas. Sweeping blurs and challenges assumed boundaries between urban and rural woodland spaces.
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This paper applies a feminist political ecology approach to ask: How do sustainability in higher education (SHE) conference events co-produce the subjectivities and expertise of campus sustainability professionals (CSPs) emotionally?... more
This paper applies a feminist political ecology approach to ask: How do sustainability in higher education (SHE) conference events co-produce the subjectivities and expertise of campus sustainability professionals (CSPs) emotionally? Specifically, how do SHE conference spaces cultivate particular embodied practices and discourses in CSPs who are meant to translate at times irreconcilable practices and discourses in their daily campus-based work? Through multi-event ethnography and autoethnography of SHE events and comparisons with academic conferences more broadly in my role as a teacher-scholar-activist, I analyze how CSPs encounter and challenge ‘green’ knowledge claims emotionally. Vignettes from a sample of conference spaces demonstrate that SHE events provoke a confusion of conflicting emotions, all while promoting products, services and solutions to ‘fix’ the distressing emotions they provoke. Furthermore, the emergence of informal and formal wellness discourses and performanc...
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Time can be an organizational framework, a commodity and a corollary of space. Time and temporality are central constitutive elements of any NGO – or research or development project – undertaking or intervention. There can be multiple... more
Time can be an organizational framework, a commodity and a corollary of space. Time and temporality are central constitutive elements of any NGO – or research or development project – undertaking or intervention. There can be multiple temporalities, which we define here as ontological conditions dictated by cultural rules or norms for how time can be measured, lived, practiced, and experienced. Although time has been an issue increasingly tackled by anthropologists in the recent years (Bear, 2014; Birth, 2012; Munn, 1992), we argue that time is also underutilized as a lens within NGO studies. Issues commonly discussed or debated in NGO studies, such as fiscal cycle limitations, length of stay, ‘‘sustainability’’ of an intervention, and project operationalization are organized around topics other than time or they treat time as a site of cultural disconnection and misunderstanding. The goal of this special section is to foreground time as a key analytical category for NGO studies – one that provides an integrative way to consider topics of
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In August 2010 I hurried down the sandy road in a woodland locality in Maganja da Costa District in Zambezia Province, Mozambique. Having just delivered eggs to an ailing friend, I wanted to prepare for a long bicycle journey to a... more
In August 2010 I hurried down the sandy road in a woodland locality in Maganja da Costa District in Zambezia Province, Mozambique. Having just delivered eggs to an ailing friend, I wanted to prepare for a long bicycle journey to a neighbouring povoado1 to investigate several fields where I had heard that a tractor hauling hardwood logs had destroyed a family’s crops. As I passed by the mwene’s house, I noticed that one of the timber bosses, Simao,2 was in the middle of a heated meeting with select regulos (local leaders).3
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This paper applies a feminist political ecology approach to ask: How do sustainability in higher education (SHE) conference events co-produce the subjectivities and expertise of campus sustainability professionals (CSPs) emotionally?... more
This paper applies a feminist political ecology approach to ask: How do sustainability in higher education (SHE) conference events co-produce the subjectivities and expertise of campus sustainability professionals (CSPs) emotionally? Specifically, how do SHE conference spaces cultivate particular embodied practices and discourses in CSPs who are meant to translate at times irreconcilable practices and discourses in their daily campus-based
work? Through multi-event ethnography and autoethnography of SHE events and comparisons with academic conferences more broadly in my role as a teacher-scholar-activist, I analyze how CSPs encounter and challenge ‘green’ knowledge claims emotionally. Vignettes from a sample of conference spaces demonstrate that SHE events provoke a confusion of conflicting emotions, all while promoting products, services and solutions to ‘fix’
the distressing emotions they provoke. Furthermore, the emergence of informal and formal wellness discourses and performances at SHE conferences re-directs CSPs away from critical questions of power toward self-centered, technocratic and technophilic solutions. A politics of failure can challenge audit culture, the bullshitization of sustainability work and neoliberal tropes of professionalism and self-improvement. Such a politics compliments ongoing efforts to center justice-oriented work in sustainability.
work? Through multi-event ethnography and autoethnography of SHE events and comparisons with academic conferences more broadly in my role as a teacher-scholar-activist, I analyze how CSPs encounter and challenge ‘green’ knowledge claims emotionally. Vignettes from a sample of conference spaces demonstrate that SHE events provoke a confusion of conflicting emotions, all while promoting products, services and solutions to ‘fix’
the distressing emotions they provoke. Furthermore, the emergence of informal and formal wellness discourses and performances at SHE conferences re-directs CSPs away from critical questions of power toward self-centered, technocratic and technophilic solutions. A politics of failure can challenge audit culture, the bullshitization of sustainability work and neoliberal tropes of professionalism and self-improvement. Such a politics compliments ongoing efforts to center justice-oriented work in sustainability.
Research Interests:
Two key figures analyzed in Donna Haraway’s monograph, Primate Visions: Gender Race and Nature in The World of Modern Science (1989) warrant further analysis in the emerging cyber politics of environmental conservation. These figures are... more
Two key figures analyzed in Donna Haraway’s monograph, Primate Visions: Gender Race and Nature in The World of Modern Science (1989) warrant further analysis in the emerging cyber politics of environmental conservation. These figures are Koko, a female lowland gorilla born in the San Francisco Zoo and her companion Dr. Francine (Penny) Patterson, a developmental psychologist who taught Koko how to communicate with a modified form of American Sign Language (ASL). Nine years after Haraway’s initial analysis, Koko and Patterson became early examples of conservation-related Web 2.0 engagement with their unprecedented inter-species America Online chat room encounter with 7811 member participants. Today, Koko has a Twitter account (@kokotweets), a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and a website where users watch videos of Koko celebrating birthdays and donate to ‘distant’ conservation projects. One project site is a gorilla reserve in Cameroon and another is a former pineapple plantation turned private nature preserve in Maui, Hawai’i. Inspired by recent analytical work in animal geographies and feminist political ecology, this article explores complex landscapes of caring, aging and conservation in a time of proliferating social media engagement from colonized sites of enduring privilege. The article argues that new media adds layers of violence, disciplinary techniques and co-dependence to the aging bodies, caring practices and landscapes that Koko, Patterson and others inhabit in California and in the proposed physical spaces of a repurposed pineapple field in Maui.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Recipient communities often distribute humanitarian aid in unexpected ways that reveal critical power dynamics and relationships. This article examines a case involving ‘orphan kits’ distributed by the staff of an international... more
Recipient communities often distribute humanitarian aid
in unexpected ways that reveal critical power dynamics
and relationships. This article examines a case involving
‘orphan kits’ distributed by the staff of an international
non-governmental organization in Mozambican woodland
communities. The kits contained food and school supplies
allocated according to a strict gender distribution mandate,
which was of secondary importance compared with local
obligations tied to enduring matrilineal social relations.
Families divided the kits among kin and allocated a portion
of the kits to local leaders as tribute. The seemingly simple
act of leaders placing orphans on a list can signify the future
arrival of much-needed support while also sparking fears of
disciplinary powers governing family structures, labor and
culturally and politically oppositional lives. Rumors narrate the
effects of particular list-making procedures, allowing families
to observe, interpret and express ideas about coercive and
productive power relations. Rumors took up kit contents such
as sardine tins to catalyze debates about proper leadership
and comportment of orphans and their families. The article
illustrates how feminist geographers can treat rumor and
liminal interventions seriously as constitutive of contested
power relations rooted in eco-social spaces.
in unexpected ways that reveal critical power dynamics
and relationships. This article examines a case involving
‘orphan kits’ distributed by the staff of an international
non-governmental organization in Mozambican woodland
communities. The kits contained food and school supplies
allocated according to a strict gender distribution mandate,
which was of secondary importance compared with local
obligations tied to enduring matrilineal social relations.
Families divided the kits among kin and allocated a portion
of the kits to local leaders as tribute. The seemingly simple
act of leaders placing orphans on a list can signify the future
arrival of much-needed support while also sparking fears of
disciplinary powers governing family structures, labor and
culturally and politically oppositional lives. Rumors narrate the
effects of particular list-making procedures, allowing families
to observe, interpret and express ideas about coercive and
productive power relations. Rumors took up kit contents such
as sardine tins to catalyze debates about proper leadership
and comportment of orphans and their families. The article
illustrates how feminist geographers can treat rumor and
liminal interventions seriously as constitutive of contested
power relations rooted in eco-social spaces.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Building on 18 months of ethnographic research between 2007 and 2011 in Mozambique, this article explores how sweeping practices elaborate multiple temporalities and thus can serve as powerful sites of ‘‘brokerage’’ where diverse actors... more
Building on 18 months of ethnographic research between 2007 and 2011 in Mozambique, this article explores how sweeping practices elaborate multiple temporalities and thus can serve as powerful sites of ‘‘brokerage’’ where diverse actors and their many agendas meet. Sweeping renders daily activities legible to local residents and illegible to others. Daily sweeping just outside of the home signifies a day’s routine beginning and a family’s availability for receiving visitors. Sweeping also prevents the rapidly growing miombo woodland undergrowth from invading the home space, which partly explains differences in why many local residents see the woodlands as advancing and environmentalists’ argue that the ‘‘forest’’ is disappearing due to illegal logging. Limited understandings of sweeping as banal or wasted time miss the links between many urban-based non-governmental organization and activist practitioners who implement their projects in rural areas. Sweeping blurs and challenges assumed boundaries
between urban and rural woodland spaces.
between urban and rural woodland spaces.
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In W. Harcourt (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 251-261.
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Sustainability professionals working on university campuses in the United States increasingly use data management and analytics platforms for tracking proliferating energy and other sustainability data. Such practices reflect a pervasive... more
Sustainability professionals working on university campuses in the United States increasingly use data management and analytics platforms for tracking proliferating energy and other sustainability data. Such practices reflect a pervasive audit culture replete with version upgrades, ratings and rankings. Numbers-driven practices can move decisions affecting particular places and people from political spheres of governance to technical realms managed by experts and administrators. I draw from my ongoing ethnographic study of energy analytics services marketed to those attempting to ‘green’ higher education campuses to examine networks of sub-metering devices, advertisements, online interactive energy dashboard platforms and sustainability conferences. I argue that a diverse and intersectional feminist energy politics demands critical attention to power, expertise and technological innovation in the energy transition.