Roundtable: Sensors and Sensing Practices

Abstract

Sensing is a topic that has been extensively discussed across multiple fields of study. Usually, some version of a cognizing human is at the center of work on sensing, where a particular delineation of the five senses is the organizing logic for making sense of the world. However, there are many more sensing entities and modes of experience that are now coming into view, from computational sensors that monitor environmental pollution, to organisms that sense and bio-accumulate environmental toxins, and satellites that remotely sense aquifers. The focus in this roundtable is on the proliferation of sensors, sensing entities and sensing practices that become evident through distinct encounters with changing environments and technologies. “Sensing practices” is a term that captures these formations of experience. It is an analytical device for thinking through how experience and relations are reworked across entities, environments and technologies. Rather than reinscribe the classification of “the senses,” this approach seeks to disrupt and transform sensing away from a classificatory and exclusively human project. This roundtable stages a conversation among contributors to a special issue published on “Sensors and Sensing Practices,” published with Science, Technology & Human Values and launched during 4S in New Orleans. The contributors to the collection will discuss their different ways of grappling with an array of new sensing entities, technologies practices, relations, and milieus that are concretizing as experiencing assemblages, and how these distributions of experience have distinct social and political effects.

Chair

• Jennifer Gabrys, University of Cambridge

Discussants

• Andrea Ballestero, Rice University

• Cymene Howe, Rice University

• Helen Pritchard, Goldsmiths University of London

• Endre Dányi, Bundeswehr University Munich

• christelle gramaglia, UMR GEAU IRSTEA

• Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Session Organizer

• Jennifer Gabrys, University of Cambridge