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This editorial examines how sensing practices are transforming through proliferating sensor technologies and altered sensing relations. Rather than engage with sensing as a project of the human mind or body as usually delineated within sensory classifications, this overview of sensors and sensing practices documents how sensing entities are emerging that are composed of shifting ensembles of multiple humans and more-than-humans, environments and technologies, politics and practices. By decoupling sensing from its exclusive human orientation, the editorial and collection demonstrate how reworked approaches to sensing make it possible to tune in to how involvement with environmental problems unfolds and endures. The collection asks how sensing practices might be crafted that attend to the distributed and accumulative inequalities of environmental problems and to speculate toward differential collectives for addressing environmental crisis and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica's aquifers using LandSat imagery and a specialized algorithm. The project aims to make subterranean formations accessible for public agencies mediating recent environmental conflicts over underground water, which have been diagnosed as the country's first "water war." I analyze the presentation to the public of this project and the technology it uses to show how vision and touch are conceptual resources that people use to describe the technicalities of satellite imagery. Attending to the semiotic and technical power of vision and touch requires a nonessentialist understanding of the senses. It requires moving away from a narrow understanding of sensing as embodied, phenomenological practice. Focusing on the role of texture as that which operates in the interstices of vision and touch, I propose going beyond panoptic imaginaries in order to grasp the diverse social lives that technologies such as satellite imaging have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, I reflect on the differences between two independent citizen approaches to monitoring radiological contamination, one in Belarus after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and the other in Japan following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident. I examine these approaches from the perspective of their contribution to making radiological contamination more publicly visible (i.e., publicly recognized as a hazard). The analysis is grounded in my earlier work (Kuchinskaya 2014), where I examined how we have come to know what we know about post–Chernobyl contamination and its effects in Belarus, a former Soviet republic most heavily affected by the fallout. As I described in this study, much of what we know about the consequences of Chernobyl is based on the work of the Belarusian nonprofit Institute of Radiation Safety, "Belrad." I compare Belrad's approach to radiological monitoring with the work of the volunteer network Safecast, arguably one of the best-known citizen science projects in the world, which is working to monitor the scope of the post–Fukushima contamination. Through this comparison of approaches, I raise broader questions about a form of sensing practices—data-related practices of citizen science that make environmental hazards publicly in/visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ocean's properties and processes are now mostly known through distributed sensor networks. Among the most widespread of such networks are those that connect wave-measuring buoys. Buoys have been deployed and consulted by national meteorological organizations, state militaries, multinational corporations, and citizens. This paper zeroes in on the Directional Waverider, the most widely used buoy, manufactured since 1961 in the Netherlands by Datawell. I am interested in this buoy's material qualities and networks of use, its life within legal frameworks, and its media ecology. Staging my account against the metaphysical Italian author Italo Calvino's "Reading a Wave," I explore what it means to "read" a sensing technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a controversy over the construction of a waste incinerator in the Fos-sur-Mer industrial area (France), residents pointed to the lack of knowledge of the industry's cumulative impact on their health and environment. Under pressure, some of their elected representatives supported the creation of an independent scientific organization, the Ecocitizen Institute for Pollution Awareness (Institut écocitoyen pour la connaissance des pollutions [IECP]). Its objective was to conduct localized scientific research on the effects of pollution and to lobby the administration to change its regulatory practices. This paper examines the efforts made to ensure that the "undone science" gets done, by focusing on the specificities of this industrialized site. We look at a participatory biomonitoring experiment that aimed to document pollution in the Gulf of Fos where scientists working for the IECP accepted anglers' requests and switched from an acknowledged sentinel species to another species. We tell the many stories that were shared with us about how conger qualified as a more suitable "cosmopolitical fish" in the study of pollution. Elaborating on actor–network theory and multispecies ethnographies, we discuss the appropriateness of congers as the newly appointed sentinel species. We argue that this demonstrates the importance of the "ecology of relations" in maintaining the livability of the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic identification system (AIS) is a vessel tracking system, which since 2004 has become a global tool for the detection and analysis of seagoing traffic. In this article, we look at how this technology, initially designed as a collision avoidance system, has recently become involved in debates concerning migration across the Mediterranean Sea. In particular, after having briefly discussed its emergence and characteristics, we examine how through different practices of (re)appropriation AIS, and the data it generate, have been seized upon, both to contest and to sustain the exclusionary nature of borders, and the mass dying of migrants at sea to which it leads. We do so by referring to forms of data activism we have contributed to in the frame of our Forensic Oceanography project as well as to situations in which AIS has been mobilized by xenophobic groups to demand even stronger exclusionary measures. At the same time, we point to the multiplicity of actors who participate in the politics of migration through AIS in unexpected ways. We conclude by highlighting the irreducible ambivalence of practices of appropriation and call for persistent attention to one's own positioning within the global datascape constituted by AIS and other data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a water management project in the remote Aboriginal community of Milingimbi, Northern Australia. Drawing on materials and experiences from two distinct stages of this project, we revisit a policy report and engage in ethnographic storytelling in order to highlight a series of sensing practices associated with water management. In the former, a working symmetry between Yolngu and Western water knowledges is actively sought through the practices of the project. However, in the latter, recurrent asymmetries in the research work continue to appear: a bilingual diagram of water usage is displayed but produces confusion; measuring a water hole for salinity, a member of the scientific team throws in a water meter, while a Yolngu elder prefers the telling of an ancestral story; a collaborative 3-D mapping exercise invites participation from community members but struggles to develop an outcome that differs from existing maps used by scientists and government staff. Focusing on these moments as subtle points of rupture, we suggest that attending to "seeing," "telling," and "mapping" in both stages of this water management project offers a way to explore the political work of crafting climate futures and beginning to interrogate differing means for "doing difference" within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is an examination of how sensing capacities can draw in, and from, other-than-human entities—both animate and inanimate. Based upon ethnographic field research in Iceland, it describes sensory encounters that are realizable through the bodies, sensations, and ontological status shifts of other beings and entities, namely, in bears and ice and earth. As anthropogenic impacts deepen, the essay argues, sensing ought to be practiced as a collaborative effort among human and other-than-human entities. Sensing by other means entails sensing through others' means and beyond the human sensorium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]