Environments and ecologies

As well as exploring ecological knowledge, questions and meanings, we’re investigating specific environments such as air and soils to reveal their material, socio-technical and ethical conditions and capacities.

As environmental crises proliferate, an ecological shift is happening across disciplines, creating possibilities for new intersections. The term 'ecology' is used to refer to holistic systems, the life cycle and multi-species environments. It’s also a methodology for thinking relationally. The eco-s0cial challenges we’re facing today require interdisciplinary approaches to explore what counts as environment – and for whom. We also need to find new relational and holistic ways of tuning into and intervening in more-than-human worlds that work across traditional science and non-science binaries.

Our research on ecologies and environments contributes to a range of fields that span computer science, the social studies of science, design, sound studies, the environmental humanities and architecture. We invent interdisciplinary practice-based methodologies involving sound and listening technologies, creative data visualisations, bodily experiencing and participatory designs for raising environmental awareness as we expand the conceptual range of ecological ethics and cultivate speculative forms of intervention and care.

Projects

• Yellow Dust
• War of the Locust: Swarm Intelligence
• When the name for world is soil
• Ec(h)otechnics
• Lithium: Chemicals, Bodies, Media

Publications & other outputs

• Calvillo, N. (2018). Political airs: From monitoring to attuned sensing air pollution. Social studies of science, 48(3), 372-388.
• De La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (Vol. 41). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Marres, N, (2014) The Environmental Teapot and Other Loaded Household Objects: Reconnecting the Politics of Technology, Issues and Things. In: P Harvey; E Casella; G Evans; H Knox; C McLean; E Silva; N Thoburn and K Woodward, eds. Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion. London and New York: Routledge.
• McInerny, G. J., & Etienne, R. S. (2012). Ditch the niche–is the niche a useful concept in ecology or species distribution modelling?. Journal of Biogeography, 39(12), 2096-2102.
  
  Staff associated with this theme: Nerea Calvillo, Naomi Waltham Smith, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Scott Wark, Greg McInerny
  Image credit: Yellow Dust 1: Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, N. Calvillo, 2017