Computational Nature-Cultures: Problematizing Dichotomies Between Nature, Culture, and Computing With a Library Aquaponics System

• In Event: Games and Emerging Technologies in Environmental Education

Abstract

This paper details how the Be Yourself Beauty library program used feminist technoscientist, Donna Haraway’s (2008) concept of “contact zones” as an organizing mechanism for co-shaping and co-constituting relationships between nature, culture and technology. Treating an aquaponics system as a contact zone does not subsume each entity--the plants, water, fish, growing media, tank, nitrifying bacteria, nitrates, and so on--into a whole, but instead acknowledges histories of relational differences and possibilities for future relationships not yet established. We describe the ways that youth engaged with aquaponics systems as contact zones to co-shape and co-constitute the material relationships between computer science, Black entrepreneurship, natural hair care, and urban gardening. When comparing pre/post-survey data, students had an increase in “confidence” with CS.

Authors

• Michael L Lachney, Michigan State University

• Madison C. Allen, Michigan State University

• Matthew Drazin, Michigan State University

• Christa Robinson, Michigan State University

• Briana Green, Michigan State University