This editorial examines how sensing practices are transforming through proliferating sensor technologies and altered sensing relations. Rather than engage with sensing as a project of the human mind or body as usually delineated within sensory classifications, this overview of sensors and sensing practices documents how sensing entities are emerging that are composed of shifting ensembles of multiple humans and more-than-humans, environments and technologies, politics and practices. By decoupling sensing from its exclusive human orientation, the editorial and collection demonstrate how reworked (...) approaches to sensing make it possible to tune in to how involvement with environmental problems unfolds and endures. The collection asks how sensing practices might be crafted that attend to the distributed and accumulative inequalities of environmental problems and to speculate toward differential collectives for addressing environmental crisis and change. (shrink)

This paper investigates the dynamic and performative construction of publics in public engagement exercises. In this investigation, we, on the one hand, analyse how public engagement settings as political machineries frame particular kinds of roles and identities for the participating publics in relation to ‘the public at large’. On the other hand, we study how the participating citizens appropriate, resist and transform these roles and identities, and how they construct themselves and the participating group in relation to wider publics. The (...) empirical basis of our argument is a discussion of four different kinds of participation events in Austria. Building on these observations we develop conclusions about the public up-take of public participation in technoscience and the role of public engagement in current techno-political cultures. (shrink)

Thinking at the scale of the Anthropocene highlights the significant burden on all life imposed by the residues of industrialization as well as continued pollution. But it also risks a disconnect between the functioning of planetary atmospheres and the functioning of local airs. In this thought-piece, we consider together the potato chip bag, the asthma inhaler, and climate positive building design as scalar practices of Anthropocene air. By figuring Anthropocene air as an interscalar vehicle, we show connections between matter and (...) relations that seem distant and disconnected. We do this by honing in on respiration as a transformative atmospheric process that has been designed in advanced capitalism to extend life for some, while denying life for others. We point to seconds, hours, days, weeks, and seasons to highlight how containment technologies and respiratory processes function in the Anthropocene to remake air. These technologies and practices, which all too often go unnoticed in consumption landscapes, demonstrate that despite Anthropocene air’s tendency to exceed human agency, it is liable to engineering. Doing this offers insight into where different scales of action can be mobilized. (shrink)