Episode 5 - Feminist and Creative Approaches to Atmosphere and Environmental Knowledge-Making with Dr. Sasha Engelmann

[Music] [Music] Welcome to the Dicolonia Ecologies Podcast Series. A podcast series in which we talk about the history of ecology, how it became a scientific academic field, interconnected with systems of power and oppression. Colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, Euro-centricism, and ethereal normativity have been applied to produce ecological knowledge that claims to be universal and objective. Therefore museums and universities have contributed to shape and justify an extractive way of inhabiting the earth. In each episode you will hear a researcher, an activist, or an artist who challenges a Western mainstream narrative on ecology with intersectional feminist and queer perspectives, perspective from black, indigenous, and people of colors. We will discuss the colonial practices in both the global south and the global north to more ethically respond to the current climate and social crisis. Besides individual and citizen actions, we will also take a look at the responsibility of museums and universities to deconstruct the colonial heritage of their own structures. For example, we will discuss how a restitution of colonial artifacts by museums can be seen as a part of the climate and environmental justice agenda. I'm Awefa Amusouvi. I'm your host for this podcast series. In today's episode, our guest is Dr. Sasha Engelman. Dr. Sasha Engelman is a geographer, an artist, and a lecturer in geohumanities at the Royal Holloway University of London. She's also the author of the book "Sensing Art in the Atmosphere", "Elemental Lures and Iro Solar Practices". Today our guest is Sasha Engelman. We will talk about feminist and creative approaches to atmosphere and environmental knowledge making, design justice tools for citizen-led monitoring of air quality and weather patterns, the feminist satellite imaging project called Open Weather and how to deconstruct power structure in atmosphere and air knowledge making within the academy. My first question is how is the atmosphere in your current location? We are Friday, December 16 of the year 2022. Thank you so much Awefa. It's really nice to be on this podcast with you. I would say that the atmosphere is very clear. It's cold. The sky is very blue. I'm situated here in London. I live in a third floor flat overlooking the neighborhood of Camerwell. Normally I can hear the trains that pass by right next to my flat every couple of minutes, but today I can't because the UK were experiencing many, many strikes. So train strikes, postal office strikes, university academic strikes. And so the atmosphere that I'm experiencing right now is very much informed not only by the meteorological weather, but by the sort of political weather of the UK right now. It's like a little image of what could be in the surrounding which is very nice. I'm in the end term of flight, of color, of temperature, but also like what's the social climate around you. It's very beautiful as well because we've had snow earlier in the week and so the tops of the houses and the outlines of balconies are all still dusted with snow, but it's kind of mostly melted. It's kind of like someone has sparkled light over different parts of the city. It's very beautiful. Yes. I'm like this is it seems that it's one of these very nice winter days in comparison with I'm like currently I'm in Berlin where it's very grey. It's also very cold and also icy, but it's very, very grey and yeah, so I think that I have like another kind of winter winter climate. Yeah, I think that this this first question is for me. I'm like maybe an introduction for one so that I had which is that for a long time, I think as a child. And I think that this is the case of I would say like the mainstream culture and maybe like you could tell us a bit more but maybe also for a long time the scientific community for me, the sky was empty. I knew that sometimes it's cloud that like what are my fall from the sky, but as a child, I think that I have this image that the sky, the atmosphere is empty. And so I wanted to ask you, I'm like first how crowded is the sky and since when did people started to see the atmosphere not only as this empty space between the earth and the space, but as something that yeah, which has a specific composition and that has different dynamic and also that it would be way to the time. Well, I think it's no accident that I'm a geographer of the air. Because since you started out speaking about your memory from your childhood, I wanted to offer that when I was a child, I grew up in Los Angeles with very severe asthma. And one of the reasons why I'm fascinated by the air is I think related to the fact that as a child, I was very viscerally aware that I couldn't always have it. So I spent many hours on certain kinds of machines that would enable my body to breathe better and more easily. And so having this experience of air actually as a medium that, you know, without which one cannot live, one cannot survive was very present for me, I think quite early in my childhood. But speaking more broadly, air and atmosphere are fast dating because they're largely invisible and intangible to us until. Again, either we experience the absence of it or we see things being moved by the air. So trees swaying in the wind or a heavy storm affecting buildings. And interestingly, that relates to the history of the interest in air academically because. And here I'm over generalizing, but a lot of scholars point to the fact that the interest in air and atmosphere can be connected to the learning in the early 20th century that air could be weaponized to kill. So in, I mean, it's a very famous case study pulled by Peter slaughter dike that in the trenches of World War One was the first moment where gas weapons were used by one army against the other. He says by the French against the Germans. Many people also critiques slaughter dike and I joined them by saying that actually gas warfare is much older and was used as a means of colonial suppression far before it was used on the battlefields of Europe. But people say that it was this moment of realization that it's not a gun that would kill you, but it's your own breathing of a gas. And it was that realization that really prompted both military and industrial interest and atmosphere and the widespread growth of the industry of chemical warfare and weather modification and cloud seating as well as the rise of what we know today as atmospheric science. Which was also of course linked to the tracing of radiation and the atmosphere from nuclear tests. So in many ways, I'm telling a very particular story here, but I think it's not unfair to say that academic interest in the air relates to our understanding that it can be weaponized. Which is quite shocking. It's a strong beginning. I know. I suppose this podcast. But we are already directly in the middle of the. subject of power structure in the making of knowledge production. And yeah, and I think that I also had the question about how, when did the scientific community started to understand that the atmosphere, the composition of the atmosphere has been changing over time. I'm like, I know about the work of Lynn Maghulis. Can you tell us maybe a little bit about how did the scientific understood that the composition of the air of the atmosphere is changing? I think this takes us into more positive and uplifting territory in the conversation. So again, I'm not an atmospheric scientist by training. So I really can't speak to the history of atmospheric science. But one of the one of my opening lectures and of course I teach at Royal Holloway University of London is about how the atmosphere was not always the one that we breathe today. And the atmosphere in the early days, the kind of young earth atmosphere, was composed of very different chemicals than the ones that we have in our atmosphere today. And my understanding is that there was something called the great oxygenation event, which happened about 3.5, I believe, billion years ago, which was when a form of life emerged called cyanobacteria. And the cyanobacteria began to basically translate and transform. What was then, I believe, a very sulfuric atmosphere into an oxygen-based atmosphere. And they really kind of chemically engineered the atmosphere on the scale of the planet, which is a wild idea. And there's an anthropologist, Elizabeth Pavanelli, who says that humans are the afterlife of cyanobacteria breath. So we are the outcome, we are the consequence, we are the leaders of the breath of the bacteria that emerged so many billions of years ago. And I think that's another important point about the atmosphere is that even if we have a very different composition of bacteria and life forms on earth today, the atmosphere is always exchanging an interlinked with life. So life produces atmosphere, atmosphere produces life, and one cannot separate these things, even if we often find it difficult to perceive the air as important. Yeah, yeah. And I think that this question of, I'm like the composition of the atmosphere is changing, but also that the atmosphere and the air can be like used as a weapon. I know that you are a senior lecturer in geohumanities, and for me understood, geohumanities is branching together geography, arts, the arts, and humanities, also looking at which are the geopolitical maybe aspects of the knowledge of geographies. And I would like you to maybe like comment maybe a little bit more or maybe like explain what is geohumanities. Thank you for that question. So in my understanding, the geohumanities is as old or older than geography because geography, if we trace it back to the ancient Greek tradition, which is the tradition in which I work here in London and in the west, geography means earth writing. So back in those ancient days it meant literally the study of any mark or trace or pattern or network or scalar distribution of things on the earth, how things are written and inscribed into the earth. But back in those ancient days geography was not necessarily a social science or a science or a humanities. It was actually all these different things. People would write poetry about earth writing. People would study the mathematical shape of the earth and that was also geography. So in many ways there were different disciplines combined in this early idea of geography, which then through the enlightenment period, at least in Europe, disciplines began to get much, much more narrow and geography became a very specific thing even before the enlightenment. And so in many ways the it's a very, it's a very long story to be to be saying a very few words, but the geohumanities is trying to make space once again for the intersection of geography as an understanding of the planet and of space and of place and of people and of mapping and all of these things. And putting that in conversation with the arts and humanities because our composition is that one cannot understand the planet and its richness and its vibrancy and it's the kind of ways in which it is written without arts and humanities based lens. And so all of my work fits into the geohumanities both what I do research in and also what I teach. [Music] I know that you started in October of this year a two-year project called Advancing Feminist and Creative Method for Sensing Air and Atmosphere. So I would like to talk a little bit more about you with you about this project. I think that my first question is maybe what do you mean by Feminist principle? What does that mean in the context of geohumanities and also why do we need them? I stand that if you specifically say that you are using a Feminist principle in your work it means that they are absent of maybe the mainstream traditional geography. If it's okay I think I might just practice that briefly by saying a little bit of background about the project. So it's a two-year-long grant project as you said called Advancing Feminist and Creative Methods for Sensing Air and Atmosphere. And it very much emerges from about 10 years of work I've done previously where I've been studying air atmosphere and weather primarily through the lens of art and creative practices. And that took shape first in my PhD research which was an ethnography in the studio of Thomas Seruseno in Berlin. Not far from the homeboat farm. And I spent four years working in Tomas' studio learning how to both work with him but also make sculptures in his studio and he as many people may know is invested in this idea of floating cities or cloud cities. So he makes sculptures that can fly using only solar energy and leave the so-called white key with the gallery and enter the stratosphere and perform different sorts of relationships to the atmosphere. Perhaps more ethical ones based on not extraction and domination but on like moving with the air that is around the earth. And so in my PhD project I learned a lot about I guess the value and the power of artistic methods for understanding air and atmosphere for an also entering air and atmosphere is very you know because you were asking earlier what's in the air. So I learned a lot about what's in the air through literally launching things into the air. You know we would lodge sculptures from Berlin and they would fly to Poland or they would fly other places and we would track them. So we had to know all the kinds of information about what is in the air before putting something else in the air. And I can return to that later but I think coming out of that PhD project where I was thinking very closely with the work of a particular artist and then thinking about how I had learned within that work that there were also a lot of questions being asked about how we how we make knowledge on air and atmosphere, how we know air and atmosphere but also a lot of critical conversations about how that happened. So I had learned that it's very common for air quality scientists to parachute technologies into communities extract data, leave the community publish work about it and raise up in their status as academics. I had learned that you know the atmosphere is highly surveilled by government technologies. I had learned that there are things like satellites that are constantly tracking weather systems and hardly even it's hardly even known to people on the ground but they are constantly sending images of people's houses to various institutions and we used to use a lot of weather satellite data and imagery in our work in commissaritino studio for sculptural and creative reasons but I was kind of becoming aware of the different I guess knowledge hierarchies, controversies, ways of doing things, ways of knowing air and atmosphere. And so the whole point of the grant is to think about okay so if there have been some traditional ways of knowing air and atmosphere that have I think it's widely acknowledged produced hierarchies, extracted things benefited largely elite academics, institutions, and not communities, generated regimes of surveillance. If this is the kind of traditional way of working, how can we change that? How can we craft alternative ways of knowing air and atmosphere? How can we craft alternative ecologies of practice in knowing air and atmosphere? And so my hypothesis in this project, which is not answered yet because it's only, but only began two months ago, is that we can combine creative and artistic methods with intersectional feminist principles to produce more ethical and equitable and community-based knowledge of our atmosphere. And so to answer your question now about the role of feminist principles in the project I'm thinking with feminist ideas specifically on equity and the role of the body. And the politics of location and in brief, feminists have been really important in emphasizing how embodied knowledge is just as important as quantitative or technical knowledge and understanding our environment. So as an example, rather than coming into a neighborhood with air pollution sensors to make a spreadsheet of numbers of lists of air pollutants in a neighborhood, why don't we also use our bodies? Like why don't we also think about intergenerational memories of air, how we feel when we walk into the neighborhood? So that would be how a feminist lens suddenly complicates a traditional mode of operating and measuring air quality or another way of thinking about it would be. We know that, rather I know that and I'm sharing with your listeners that that the history of monitoring weather has largely been dominated by powerful governments and powerful military institutions. One of the largest players of which is the US government which created an organization called the National Oshianneican atmosphere administration or NOAA in 1970 precisely as a tool to map and capture the atmosphere over North America the better to colonize it. So an idea was that if we if we can predict hurricanes, if we can predict droughts, if we can map and totally capture through the highest amounts of surveillance of the atmosphere, what is happening over North America? We can we have a we have a leg up, we can better dominate this space. And so if the history of knowing the weather is a history of dominance and cloniality and depression and the use of satellites who are these machines orbiting around the earth that we cannot see that are there without our knowing it that image the earth from afar in what Donna Haraway calls a God-side trick. So that's the history of weather monitoring, how might we complicate that? So one of the projects I have in the grant which is called Open Weather that you mentioned earlier is about trying to use or subvert these tools of satellite earth imaging to produce other kinds of knowledge of the weather. Do you have any ideas of how many satellites currently like in the air? I don't I would I would guess it's it's it's in the high it's been the many many thousands. I would I wouldn't I think that's a really good question because it also reveals that the satellites with which I work are only three. There are only three satellites with which with whom I I work in this project Open Weather and that I'm trying to use to complicate I know ideas of how we measure and monitor whether but there's there's thousands and thousands and every year there are launched more thousands of satellites and they're on satellite geographies and orbital geographies that most of us again have no daily understanding or sense of. Yeah could you maybe tell us more about your three or about the three satellites you work with and I think that with this you could also explain us what are they what's the particularity of them compared to other. So in a project called Open Weather which is a it's a feminist artistic experiment in imaging and imagining the earth and its weather using DIY tools. My collaborate tonight whose name is Sophie Dyer we work with three primary satellites and these satellites are operated by the institution called NOAA that I mentioned earlier. Yeah so they are their names are NOAA 15 NOAA 18 and NOAA 19 and very simply that just means that NOAA 15 was the 15th weather satellite launched by NOAA NOAA 18 was the 18th NOAA 19 was the 19th so the numbers just refer to the order in which they were launched. But Sophie and I have so if you know kind of co-founded Open Weather in relationship to these satellites because these are very special satellites and that they I think are the some of the only remaining satellites that transmit images to earth in an analog format so yeah and this will be a little bit maybe technical for your listener so to explain this it basically means that the images collected by the satellites are not sent in digital packets that require like decryption codes to be unlocked but rather they are the images are actually encoded into a sound that is inscribed or held in a radio wave and so the image actually is the radio wave and it is the sound there's no separation between the radio wave and the image and these satellites are sending constantly images to earth in this analog radio based format and Sophie and I found it very interesting and alluring to to work with these satellites because the nature of their transmissions allows us to allows us to find noise and to see interference and to capture all kinds of other strange things and images other than the images themselves if that makes sense yeah the one of the first things we did in Open Weather was a performance called Open Work Second Body where it was during the first COVID-19 lockdown in London and Sophie was in her flat in northwest London I was in my flat in southeast London and you know we were in the same city but we couldn't meet in physical space because of COVID so we did a performance where the livestreamed ourselves both of us on our balconies simultaneously receiving a image from the satellite NOAA 18 as it orbited for 11 minutes over London and our kind of proposal was a little bit that you know in this time of the weather of COVID and the weather of the pandemic we are sensing that weather of the meteorological atmosphere through the eyes of a satellite but in doing so and precisely because we were stuck in our flats the images that we received have all kinds of gaps in them and they have all kinds of pores and blank spots because it was simply not a great place we were seeing a satellite image we were we were blocked our our kind of line of sight reception from our antennas was blocked by buildings there were all kinds of other obstructions in our flats that have stopped us from receiving a beautiful clean image so the resulting images are these very noisy kind of blurry spectral artifacts of us receiving images of a satellite from lockdown. And so this is one of the examples I guess in which we try to subvert or play with or experiment with the satellites from NOAA to ask different kinds of questions about how we see the earth and how we know about earth's weather. I had the chance to attend one or two of your workshop of Open Wizard so I know what you are talking about you know like this antenna and the noise and the resulting images but for the listener could you maybe describe what the technical setting and yeah you can describe you know like how long is the antenna how much does this antenna cost and because I know that you are on the mission with your collaborator Sophie on the mission to train as many people as possible into this do it yourself protocol in order to create as many as possible new images and new representation of the atmosphere of the weather from more personal perspectives than the one that we have on Google Maps that are very smooth and and kind of without any noise, without any discontinuity from one position to the next. Well, it's wonderful to be in conversation with you, Oafa, because you not only took part in an open-weather workshop at Schlaft Solitude and Studegart a couple of years ago, but you've also contributed a lot to the project through doing performances with me, through participating in the latest kind of planetary imaging event that we did in open weather. So I think the listeners should know that you and I have an active conversation, and I'm very humbled that you've been part of the project actually so far. But I think it's a good question because I think it's always important to bring things back to the basics and back to the what we're actually talking about. And so what we're actually talking about here is a DIY satellite ground station setup. And what I mean by that is a free or cheap radio antenna that either you can buy or you can make it home from everyday objects like coat hangers or copper wire. And you can connect this antenna to a laptop using a radio frequency cable, which just looks like a kind of a lack TV cable. And it plugs into your laptop using a device called a dongle, which looks kind of like a USB stick. And what happens is that when a satellite is passing overhead, and after of course taking a few measures like knowing when the satellite will come and how to point your antenna, the antenna receives the transmission of the satellite through the radio spectrum. And that signal gets sent through the radio frequency cable into the USB device called a dongle, which translates the radio kind of mechanical information into a digital signal that can be interpreted by some free open source software that you can download on your computer. So in total, this is a ground station that costs anywhere from 30 pounds to 100 pounds depending on whether you buy or make your antenna. And it's a really wonderful, I would say, an improvement in what's possible with radio. So in the past, what was needed was always a very large transceiver to receive radio waves, often very fancy antennas. And nowadays through developments in software, we can make very cheap, very accessible radio stations. And so what happens during a satellite pass is when set to a satellite ground station, the satellite crests either the north or south horizon, it orbits above you. And if you have antenna called a turn style, you have to track the satellite through the sky as it moves. You have to imagine the satellite tracing an arc from north to south over the sky. And as the satellite is moving, you can hear the sound that it's sending you for your laptop speakers. So there's a bit of a feedback between you trying to see the satellite, you listening to the signal, holding your antenna, moving your body. It's very dance like and choreographic. And at the end of the 12 minutes of the satellite pass, you should be left with the audible recording of the satellite or a sound file actually of the satellite signal, which then can be interpreted into an image. It's a very poetic practice and very kind of, I always thought it was very much like sensing a ghost, because you can feel the presence of something, you can feel the presence of the satellite through its radio transmission, but you can't ever see it. So it is kind of like being in touch with a ghost. I'm like, I remember from the experience I had with you that because one has to hold the antenna in the direction of the moving satellite, it means that we have to move our body, meaning that my body was an extension of this antenna, which was receiving the signal from the satellite. I don't know, like many kilometers up in the sky. And I remember my body was part of this operatives of sensing and measuring the, like the weather on the sky. And I think it's something that is, I know that it's something that you challenge your practice to also bring the human body as part of the measuring tool of geographies and environmental study. I know that in the episode with the other guests, the notion and the concept of human separated of the nature is something very regular in the western, in the western concept of ecosystem. I'm like nature animal as there, human is somewhere else. And I really like that you put the human back in the nature, but I know that it's something which is very critical sized that essential measurement are not precise enough. I think it's a claim of the maybe the scientific community. Could you maybe like say something? How do you respond to maybe this critic? Is it interesting that you make a parallel between some of the conversations around human and nature separations and the role of the body in a open weather performance or in a satellite ground station? Because I think if we're being specific what's happening in a DIY satellite ground station performance with the human body is precisely as you say the body is becoming an electromagnetic apparatus actually becoming part of the receiving system. So part of the antenna so we can no longer separate a technology from the body. And but simultaneously there is this invisible medium of radio which we become aware is constantly moving through entities both human and non human and technological. So I think there's actually several binaries at work there in the DIY satellite translation not just human and non human or human and like elemental but also body versus technology. And I would say also gendered body versus technology so in histories of science and technology often the use of technologies the use of tools was very often coded as male. And so if you nice this very often when we talk to people that also do radio experiments like us who are called radio amateurs or hand radio operators who are who are overwhelmingly white men of the age of 50. And one of the spaces in which we have been critiqued is precisely in those radio amateurs basis where our proposal that the body and more specifically our female bodies are an operative part of a DIY satellite ground station has been seen as threatening. I get not only because of that body nature body technology by me but also because of the gender associations with technology. So linking to the other question you asked about the role of embodied sensing in making knowledge I think more broadly relation to quantitative sensing I think it's actually receiving a lot of attention now. A lot of people are asking okay when I study the water pollution in a particular site I don't just go there with sensors and water pollution devices I also do interviews with the community. I understand people have tasted different kinds of water or you know what they do to cook with their water do they boil it for us all kinds of things like that. So I think these sorts of questions are rising but I think the contribution of feminist thinking has for me been. So does the data serve how is the data produced and what is missing from environmental data sets. So if we ask those questions all three of those questions at once so the answer to what is missing might be okay embodied knowledge central knowledge intergenerational knowledge which seems to be kind of being asked by some people right now or being answer people right now. So how do we produce environmental data and who does that data serve then it becomes more complicated then it becomes more about how we embed ourselves as researchers in the struggles of communities and serve the needs of those. communities and not only serve our academic objectives to understand something scientific. I would like to jump on a project you told me about and I read a bit about you are doing a project in Argentina in a place which is called the Inflamental City and could you maybe explain a little bit what your goal with this project and also what the challenges of making a project and acquiring that you being affiliated with the university in London which is like in the global North and what are the maybe power structures that are always in such a project and how do you deal with them? This is one of the key questions of the next two years for me so the answer I'm going to give you is a very partial and fragmentary and probably poor answer to that question because again it is a big part of the my current research project which I've only just begun but yes so I've been working for a couple of years in collaboration with an anthropologist in Buenos Aires her name is Deborah Swiss-Dune and Deborah grew up in the town of Vija, Inflammablet or the Flammable town which is not far from the center of Buenos Aires and it's situated next to the largest petrochemical facility in Argentina so we're talking about an industrial facility where I think there are something like 40 companies from Shell, major oil and gas company to waste incinerator companies to manufacturing companies all of whom pollute the air-water and soil in different ways and from my understanding the name flammable for this town also originated from a fire on an oil tanker called the Perto Moreno that was that happened in the 80s so an oil tanker kind of caught caught fire on the on the canal right next to the town and it looked like the town was on fire and so this name flammable stuck and Deborah and I had been speaking a lot about air and atmosphere Deborah wrote a groundbreaking ethnographic book on environmental racism and activism in the town it's called flammable flammable environmental stuff for even an Argentine chanty town and her book really shows that you know we cannot always use narratives of kind of like activists rising up successfully against evil corporate actors when we're talking about community involvement in environmental racism and there there these kinds of very heroic stories told very often especially in a North American context about environmental racism but her book and her ethnography shows that there was what she calls a labor of confusion happening in the town toxic uncertainty where through the actions of both the government the local municipality journalists and politicians there were many kind of fake claims about the nature of the environment in the town made toward residents of the town so that some residents of the town believed that they lived in a toxic place some people fundamentally didn't believe that believe that their water and the air was clean so to come to what we're doing together Deborah and I had been speaking a lot about the town and I was really inspired by one passage in her book where she talks about the weather a visa in flammable which is an event that she describes where she is in her mom's house and she's trapped in her house because there has been this fog that descended over the town and it smells so bad that one can't go outside and she's complaining to her mom and I think her mom says like oh that's just the latest emission of the waste plant and Deborah says something like yeah that's the weather of flammable it's the literal weather so weather again weather is not rain sun cloud weather whether or the emissions of these industries so through talk with Deborah about this town Deborah and I arrived with this idea that we would like to collaborate on a project to monitor the air or sense the air of flammable because the soil had been studied the water had been studied to some extent but there had been no project really to this point that measured the air quality but through conversation we realized that we wanted to do this in a way that privileged the role of residents that made sure that the knowledge that or the data coming out of this project was actually controlled and owned by the citizens and that's early on in the project we collaborated with the Aerosene project which was launched by Thomas Cerrice you know because the Aerosene project uses solar lighter than air sculptures to lift different kinds of things off of the earth's surface and so early in the project there was a bit of an idea that we could maybe think about or dream about attaching air pollution devices to Aerosene sculptures and float them in the town and not only map the air on the ground but also the air on a vertical access up into the atmosphere which we speculated could also show us about the sources of some of these emissions coming from this nearby project chemical facility so what has happened so far is that we've and when I say we I really want to make very clear that's primarily been the work done in Buenos Aires by Deborah by Joaquin Escuda who represents Aerosene and by a team of local students programmers and scientists and anthropologists I am really the only member of the team who's not in Buenos Aires so they have done the large majority of this work but the team has part of tied to air pollution monitors in conversation with the community of the Jensomable who had all kinds of input on to how the monitors were designed how they were what were their interfaces like how they could be used how heavy were they when a what kind of LED lights flash when something is toxic or not all kinds of there were all kinds of user design and user experience steps and the making of these air monitors and at present there are two working air monitors that are the first two prototypes and the tentative goal of the next two years in this grant project is to use some of the funding that I've gotten from the UK to further advance the measurement of air quality in this town to build more air quality monitors but more importantly I think Deborah and I really want to develop a model of air quality sensing that is that is a feminist that is focused on design justice meaning that the design of things in our case air-fluen monitors doesn't exacerbate existing power inequalities but rather mitigates against them so the ways in which design can actually serve the needs of communities rather than undermine communities so what would a model of air quality sensing look like that was feminist that was designed justice orientated that was interdisciplinary that involved multiple methods both from the arts and sciences and that had a strong set of protocols in place where the outcome is fundamentally controlled not by me you know the global North academic but by people living who are for most proximate who are in the weather of flammable it's at the dream but let's see I can't promise yeah what will succeed in doing I'm like when I'm hearing this I'm thinking that I'm like one of the very sad effects of the global warming and the current climate crisis is that many of the populations that are the most affected are usually like already marginalized and also many are located in the global South and I found so important that you describe one example of a study where the knowledge is not produced centrally but there's a decentralization of the knowledge because you use I would say more humble maybe measuring tools meaning that you can also like train the community to measure by I know what is happening in the own community. And I also wanted to ask maybe about the challenge, maybe like to also easy or go to publish those data. And I'm aware that in the academic field, there is a big problem that media of the data that are published by academia, meaning by-- with the taxes of the citizens, actually not available to-- I'm like to the mainstream community. And so what will you be doing with this data? I think it's a great question. I also want to preface my answer by saying that we are very careful in the grant to understand, especially because Deborah is on the team, and Deborah grew up in Flammable, that not to only tell a story of this town as a story of damage, where a place in a site has been damaged through pollution and toxicity and oppression and labor confusion, but also to equally tell a story of resistance and struggle. So since the '90s, even the '80s, there's been a lot of environmental activism in Flammable. There was actually a big victory when through decades of work and a lot of local effort, the Supreme Court of Argentina ruled that the companies that cite next to-- or that are cited next to Flammable must clean up their actions. One of the problems has been, however, that it's very difficult to enforce that Supreme Court ruling. So I just wanted to kind of temper this. I guess, story about this place with not only this narrative of damage, but also quite an important and compelling narrative of struggle, of collectivization, and of political pressure. And also then from that to say that it is-- you are right-- that we are trying to-- there will be some dimension of training, I think, local residents about using the air quality monitors. But we're also not only interested in training them, as also them training us and learning from them. So I mentioned earlier that we're thinking about air, not only as a quantitative number. So air is not only a number for us. Air is also an experience. It's about how people inhabit their daily atmospheres, the ways they maybe avoid particular streets because it's dusty, the way they think about their relationship to their breasts. So we're interested in the lived memories and experiences and practices of people and their relationship to air and atmosphere. And then to go into the question of what will this produce, this is a question that I actually can't answer right now. So initially, we had thought to open source all of our data and our tools. There's a bit of a tricky conversation happening right now about what that would mean for the capacity of residents to operationalize and control the results of the project. So open sourcing something can often mean that it can be taken to put it very bluntly, or it can be-- it can frankly be stolen, right? So we're thinking very carefully about, what are the possible harms in open sourcing everything? How might we want to produce repositories, for example, on GitHub, which is a very prominent online archiving system for data that are open to particular people and communities but not open to others? So these are questions that we don't know yet. I always had that word. [MUSIC PLAYING] We are getting slowly to the end of our episode. So I would like to know you are a senior lecturer at the University of London in general humanities. And I wonder how you practice to deconstruct this power structure as lectures in the content of what you are teaching, but also in the relationship between you and your student. So the first thing I do is doing my own homework. And what I mean by that is doing my homework on exactly where and what I'm teaching. And so to gloss over a lot of history, I think you actually began this podcast kind of gesturing to the colonial histories of different academic disciplines. But the discipline of geography was very involved in colonial expansion, and especially UK geography. So teaching geography in the UK, which has been historically one of the greatest colonial powers and whose geographers were so central to colonial expeditions to producing high quality maps, to producing even paintings of the places that were visited by explorers. But more specifically thinking about today, I'm kind of aware of the administrative colonialism of the UK government. So what I mean is we can think about how Caribbean people were dispossessed of their right to remain in the UK in what's often called the Windrush scandal. We can think about the self-proclaimed hostile environment of the UK, so a hostile environment to keep out foreigners. And we can think about what Sarah Ahmed calls atmospheric walls. So Sarah Ahmed writes about how universities and higher education institutions in the UK have these atmospheric walls that make these universities comfortable for some bodies and not comfortable for other bodies. And again, going back to the invisibility of aeron atmosphere, one doesn't have to see something for it to have an effect. And Sarah Ahmed talks about the experience of walking into a university classroom and really feeling like she wasn't supposed to be there. And so how did the invisible, the engineered atmospheres of higher education institutions welcome access to some people, i.e. white, privileged, English people, and deny access to other people? So this is the context in which I work. More specifically, geography is extremely white. So more so than other disciplines, the kinds of students who choose geography in their secondary school exams, the kinds of students that choose geography to study at university level are overwhelmingly white, privileged, English students. And there's many kind of papers on this. So with all of this context, how does one teach geography in a classroom then? To be brief, because I think I could talk about this for an entire podcast. One of the things I do is make it very clear to my students that no matter where they come from, no matter what grades they got in secondary school, no matter what skills they have, or what passions they have, geography is for them. So it's a discipline, it's a knowledge system for them. They are part of it. They're very much already geographers and say it's a discipline that should serve them too. Another thing I try to emphasize is that we are not absorbing geographical knowledge, if it's like held in books and or resides in my brain as a lecturer, we are making geographical knowledge together. So we make something, something kind of alchemically happens in the classroom that is geography, that cannot be contained in a textbook or in a book or in an article or in my brain. And all of my classroom teaching is interactive. And for that reason, actually none of my teaching is really recorded because just for various reasons, it doesn't make sense to record interactive sessions. So I really don't-- I really just stay away from monotonous lecturing as a tactic of teaching. Third, I think related to that is I make a point to set up a kind of collective protocol in my classrooms that we are humble. And that applies mainly to me, that I recognize when I don't know something. And I don't pretend that I know something when I don't. But equally, I ask my students to be humble and be very clear when they don't know something. Because when we don't know something together, we can-- that becomes an opportunity for learning, not the kind of walk to learning. And finally, in my work, I-- I put a lot of emphasis on the speculative. So it's the kind of traditional idea of an academic classroom is one in which you absorb information, you memorize, you inhale, you get things. It's like you're kind of getting something that you can kind of possess, right? And then you're supposed to regurgitate that in an exam where you have to put it out on paper, right? Is if you kind of become this vessel of possessed stuff, then you have to show what you've possessed or what you've captured. And I think that's like fundamentally an inappropriate and actually quite poor model for knowledge and for learning. So in my classrooms, we speculate. We do a lot of kind of imaginative exercises. We try to activate knowledge. So in my model, I think knowledge is only knowledge when you can activate it, when you can not put it to use, but to complicate it, to nuance it, to live it, to show how you can work on it in your neighborhood or your community or your next big project that you're working on. So my classrooms are speculative. We're always reaching for something that we cannot grasp. But I think in trying to reach for that thing, we're getting somewhere that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And I think I'll leave it there. But I think, I guess the last thing I'd say away from is, I have learned the roots the years. And I've only really been lecturing for five years now. So I should be clear, I'm not some wise-and-professor. At this point, I've only-- I'm a very early career teacher. But I've learned that I have as much to learn from my students as they have to learn from me. And I acknowledge them in all of my writings that when they have offered me ideas that I've then cited, I acknowledge that. And so I have many, many amazing students who, without which, who I wouldn't be who I am. Related with this, actually, like asking all of my guests, so Western knowledge production narrative creates isolated genius characters who seems to come up alone with great ideas to highlight the continuity and collectivity of knowledge production. Yeah, I would like to ask you, could you give us maybe one name or few name of people who very strongly inspired and also influenced your work? The person who is very present in my mind because I just saw her last night is Harriet Hawkins. And Harriet Hawkins is a professor of Geohumanities at the University where I work. And she has single-handedly basically opened up this horizon of the Geohumanities, I think, for me and for other scholars. So she founded the center for the Geohumanities that were your hallway where I work. She was part of the editorial board that's setting up the journal, Geohumanities. But more than that, she-- and this is very important, I think, beyond her academic work, she is a profoundly important mentor, not just for me, but for so many other people. And actually, I think her mentorship is part of her academic-- I don't know, not her influence, but the way that she forms a coherent kind of knowledge system, or how she has built a community around an idea. So the amount of intellectual, but also pastoral and personal energy that Harriet has put into people, including me, is a vast. And has really taught me about the ethics of being in academic and of passing down what I can. So people that are in my classrooms. So someone should-- sorry, everybody, not someone-- everybody should check out Harriet Hawkins. You will find many publications. We would put her name in the show note so people can check her work. Yes? OK. I'm also asking all my guests, could you recommend one concrete action that people could do today to enact decolonial ecology? So this is a tricky question to answer, because one of our first conversations we had before I came on this podcast was about the word decolonial. And I follow the work of people like Max Di Boron, but also Eve Tuck and Kewen Yang, who are indigenous scholars and philosophers who say that decolonization really means the repatriation and the giving back of land and resources and cultural artifacts and life worlds to the communities from whom they were taken. And so decolonization means something very specific. And they make a difference between decolonization and anti-colonization or the anti-colonial. And doing anti-colonial work for them may not mean the actual giving back of things, but it may mean not reproducing the colonial norms, knowledge systems, and knowledge frameworks would have enabled the possession and extraction and capturing of indigenous and marginalized peoples, lands, resources, concepts, life worlds. So if we follow that definition, I would position my work as anti-colonial in the sense that I don't think I can fairly say that my work is contributing to the repatriation of land and resources. It may do in the future, but right now, I cannot honestly say that that is what I'm doing. So I align myself with, I guess, anti-colonial and specifically feminist praxis, which doesn't reproduce particular kinds of norms. So that's why I think maybe my question back to you is are we trying to decolonize the collity or are we trying to produce anti-colonial ways of thinking in ecology? It's a really good question, because I've already recorded a few episodes of this podcast series. And you asked the first that actually asked me what I mean with decolonial ecologies. I haven't been trained in African study or post-colonial studies. So I think that I basically learn about those words. I would say through my private research. And I think that to me, I'm using probably anti-colonial and decolonial. I put them together in decolonial. I think I'm not doing so much difference between the two, because I think for me, if you need to become aware of the problem in order to stop reproducing it, in order also-- And if you are not reproducing the problem, meaning that you need to find new way of alternatives way. And to me, it's something that you cannot do one without the other. I'm not expecting you to do everything on your own. But I think that it's a kind of machinery that some people might have a work which is focusing more on bringing awareness about neo-colonial structure and dynamics. Some other people might come up with protocol about how to stop reproducing those parodynamic. Some people might look at history and maybe research and do work that's focusing on archives in order maybe to bring light about part of history that have been erased. And I think that everything has to happen. I like the work decoloniality. To me, decoloniality is a tool. It's with decoloniality I like to look at other maybe parallel realities or like future realities where we have finished the work of deconstructing colonialism and neo-colonialism. And from this perspective of these realities where colonialism doesn't exist anymore, I'm looking back at our current situation and look what do we have to do and what is missing at home? I love that very speculative idea of decoloniality as something that we're working toward. I can actually try to answer your question if you give me another chance. So I think, if since I'm learning a lot from you in this conversation and think I'm arriving somewhere, I wasn't arriving before. my thoughts. But if I had to answer your question about how do we decolonize ecology? And for me, I guess that means decolonizing the colleges of the air specifically. And so, you know, I couldn't help but think what is more colonial than using air, which is the very medium and means that sustains life and enables us to live. What is more colonial than using air as a means of whether it's using gases in the warfare to oppress people or whether it's extracting data to verify the status of elite academics or it's using air as a means to surveil territories. Right. So, in many ways, like through air, I think we problematize colonialism in a particular way. I think that maybe other mediums or forms of ecology don't. Because air is this life for us. So, if we need to decolonize the ecologies of the air, I think we need to radically reframe our relationships to air, not as a kind of afterthought or a forgettable medium or something we only notice when it's toxic or it fails us or it's disruptive. Rather, we have to develop alternative, probably more equitable, ethical, situated, embodied, collective relationships to the air that undo these traditional ideas of capture and domination and pollution and possession through which air has been the medium of colonization. I'm inspired by one sentence in the introduction of your book. We put the reference to it on the website when we publish the podcast is every time I breathe in to become aware that the air that enter my body and my lungs and that are also chemically on the molecular level become part of my body. This air is a result of the cyanobacteria that has oxygenated the atmosphere. But this air is also the result of all the patriarchy, the colonialism, the capitalism, meaning all the pollution and contamination that has been happening for the last hundred and thousand of years and that those concepts, those power dynamic can be seen as some untangible concepts, but actually like there are present in the air that I'm breathing every day, every second. So thank you for making me aware of this. Maybe one last question, what are you working on at this moment? Do you have anything to add to today's discussion? Well, it's just been a really beautiful afternoon speaking to you and again I've learned a lot during this last hour. I guess what am I working on? Maybe one thing I would like to leave as a speculative tantalizing future. Dremey moment for the listeners is that in open weather which is the project around imaging weather patterns through DIY satellite technologies. We've done two, what we call now casts where we try to image almost the whole planet through asking all of the members of open weather who are now numbering close to a hundred people at different parts of the world to capture satellite images on one day and send us their images along with field notes on weather and climate change. We stitch these images together into a sort of collage of the planet on one single day. We've done two of these now casts and what we're working on in 2023 is going to be a for lack of a better word real time or living now cast so rather than capturing planetary weather on one day like a snapshot. We're working on an open source infrastructure for a constantly changing, updating, living version of this. So whenever someone from the network submits an image to our open weather archive, it would appear on this living weather map. But in thinking about this, we're also thinking very hard about does this living weather map look like a globe? Does it look like the Earth? Does it look like even the Earth? Does it look like something totally weird or alien or very fictional actually? So we're really trying to play with this border of scientific and pragmatic and speculative and fictional in producing an image of the Earth made by people, so not made by like machines. by everyday people. Exactly. That will tell a different kind of story of the Earth, but also Earth's weather and the ways in which weather has impressed itself and continues to impress itself on human life. Wow. Yes, I'm very much looking forward. I was, I think I was part of one of this now cast, so I would, I would get my antenna out of under my bed ready for the next one. Yeah, Sasha, it has been my pleasure to have you as my guest today in this episode of dicholonia and ecologies hosted and funded by the 1999 question at the Humbar Forum. I'm just like again, I would like to express my gratitude for your time and your work and all those knowledge. And I wish you, I don't know what the weather now after one hour talking in London, but I hope that I wish you a great end of the day. Thank you. It's been so wonderful to be in conversation with you, if and to answer your question, it's a very golden sort of sunset moment over here. So a very beautiful kind of atmosphere to to leave this conversation. It's still gray in Berlin. Oh, no, bye. Bye. Concept, research and moderation are made by me, I wish I am a Suvi. Sound production and the human handbag. Thank you to the other bling and Lucille Boever for ideas and exchanges. Thank you to Julia Richard and Alexandra Mayer for the assistance and Mikael Domingue for the invitation. This podcast series is commissioned by 19 and questions at the Humbar Forum.