Sensing Technologies Symposium: Imaginaries, Futurities, Practices of Control and Care, University of Bern, 19-21 October 2023

My panel will focus on ecological practices of control and care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) as a means to apprehend contesting theories of futurity. Considering the tensions between statecraft/military technologies and everyday acts of maintenance and repair, the panelists, Zsuzsanna Ihar, University of Cambridge; Carolina Dominguez Guzmán, University of Amsterdam and Darcy Alexandra, University of Bern, will present research into data collection cultures in the Hebridean Sea, the care for water infrastructure in Northern Peru, and citizen science interventions in the Sonoran Desert.

From these three field sites, we aim to discuss the crisscrossing of expertise between different stakeholders, and the interdependencies between the science of diverse forms of monitoring including those intending to protect non-human worlds and the co-existence of different versions of care.In a datafied society, living with and through big data technologies raises many issues: How are bodies and biographies (not) being taken into account in the process of standardization, and what space is left for ‘failing’ bodies and lives unfolding ‘otherwise’? How do individuals, institutions, and societies navigate sense-making amidst often conflicting forms of knowledge? What can practices of implementation, circumvention, and adaptation of diverse technologies tell us about the ways in which people and societies craft their futures?

Symposium description: Scholars studying the role of sensors, Big Data, and AI technologies in the fields of health, policing, and ecology will gather in Bern, Switzerland, to discuss these questions and the broader implications of datafication, in a dynamic, collaborative environment. The Big Data Lives Symposium proposes to engage with technologically mediated practices of control and care, the imaginaries present in sociotechnical assemblages, and to explore how futures are being imagined, and imagined otherwise, in relation to data-driven practices that are already, continuously shaping our lives and the worlds we inhabit. We will engage with a series of thinking pieces and works in progress that will ground in-depth discussion and dialogue.