PCF Talk #52 – Agenda Monthly Meeting – Hybrid
This is a hybrid event, please join in person, or via the zoom link below!
I Public Event
9:00 - 9:10
Introduction of the Day: Fransje Hooimeijer (TU Delft, PCF)
9:10 - 10:00
Theme: Climate citizenship in coastal regions
Chair: Fransje Hooimeijer (TU Delft, PCF)
Presenter: Andrew Littlejohn (Leiden University)
Andrew Littlejohn is an assistant professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. His teaching specialties include political ecology and environmental anthropology, qualitative methods, ethnographic media (particularly sonic ethnography), and the anthropology of Japan. Prior to joining Leiden, he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs’ Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University, where he received his PhD in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice in 2017. He has also studied Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University (M.Phil.) and Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (B.A.). Alongside his teaching and research, he produces works of audiovisual media with a particular focus on the ethnographic and documentary possibilities of sound.
Title: Climate citizenship in coastal regions
Abstract: In this talk, I introduce my forthcoming research project, recently funded by an ERC Starting Grant. The project will investigate how altering environments to adapt to or mitigate climate change depends on and stimulates changes in social contracts. Comparatively and ethnographically, it will research when and how the material transformations implied by adaptation gather new publics and produce new forms of ‘climate citizenship.’ We will focus specifically on green infrastructure projects where changes in environmental management are depending on and creating new political communities (or ‘publics’), citizenship agendas, and subjects. I hypothesize such sites as experiments where not only new ecological and material conditions but also forms of citizenship are being prototyped and sometimes resisted. To investigate this, I will develop a collaborative ‘ecographic’ approach that combines data garnered through ethnographic methods and the ecological and other sciences. By deploying this method in dialogue and collaboration with officials, scientists, and citizens in Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States, the project will ask how addressing climate changes goes hand in hand with reshaping citizenry, political coalitions, and more, and how this is being negotiated.
10:00 - 10:15
Break
II PCF Community Engagement
10:15 - 11:00
Moderator: Fransje Hooimeijer (TU Delft, PCF)
Presenter Jackie Ashkin (Leiden University):
Title: Digital Twinning, Computational Universalism, and the Making of a Legible Ocean
Abstract: Digital twinning is at the forefront of new technologies that promise to generate a view of whole complex systems, and in doing so, render them more amenable to management goals. While computational practices play an important role in (coastal) ocean research, enabling experimentation through time and space, much of the field is premised on how little about the ocean is known or understood. Building on ethnographic insights with ocean researchers beginning to develop digital twins of the ocean in the Netherlands, this talk explores the challenges of making waterways legible – partially comprehensible through relations between observational data, numerical modelling outputs, and various user communities. Attempts to digitally twin the ocean highlight frictions about what and who computational practices are for. Rather than critiquing the impossibility of developing perfect representations of the complex systems, I suggest that digital twins might best be understood as interfaces that render heterogeneous ways of knowing legible to different epistemic communities. Engaging the needs and expectations of different epistemic communities can help to better design the role of technologies like digital twins in planning coastal and port futures.
11:15 - 11:30
Break
III PCF lighthouse projects and new opportunities
11:00 - 12:00
Matteo D'Agostino
- Port city territories ProfEd
- Nijmegen
- Blue Papers 6
Yi Kwan Chan, Foteini Tsigoni, Wenjun Feng, Eliane Schmid
- Blog updates and call for submissions
Costanza Franceschini
- Reminder: Open Maps Meeting
- Call for participation: Everyday Infrastructures thematic group