Practicing with Data to Understand Crises: Mapping Diverse Environmental and Societal Data to Situate Transboundary Crises

• In Event: Practicing Epistemologies: Knowledge Work in Everyday Environmental Management and Governance

Abstract

Crises, along with their environmental and societal needs, are increasingly made sense of using maps and centralised tools called common information spaces. These are built upon new data technologies that can compile information from a range of sources and are intended to act as tools to build collaborative insight into the situation beyond what any individual organisation can know. This talk explores how working with tools like these enact and produce knowledge work when managing transboundary crises. These are situations where planners and responders have to engage with data from other organisations, based in different data frameworks, socio-political priorities, goals, and cultures of environmental risk. Drawing on the participant-observation of cross-border collaborative crisis planning platform developed in the 3-year long European Commission funded IN-PREP project (in-prep.eu), it examines how these tools translate complex environmental, societal, and big data frameworks into visualised events and layers on a map. It seeks to understand how the classification and ontological work necessary to bring the data together influence how crisis and hazard governance and management needs are understood. This talk further aims to better understand the ethical debates about who has the authority or responsibility to define a crisis and which social and environmental security measures are justified.

Author

• Katrina G Petersen, Trilateral Research