The
Forest
Multiple

Download the program in PDF

Planetary crises are contributing to the stress and loss of forests, while in other areas forests are expanding due to climate change. Yet the question of “what is a forest” runs through numerous environmental research and policy discussions.

Forests are not singular or self-evident entities. Instead, they are composed of many mutually constituted relations. Far from being merely a collection of trees, many different life forms, ecosystems, and other entities interrelate and grow together into what people differently recognize to be a forest.

This event, developed as part of the ERC-funded Smart Forests research project, engages with the “forest multiple” to consider the pluralistic mobilizations and inhabitations of forests in locations worldwide.

Forest fieldwork. Photo by Priscila Santos da Costaa
Forest fieldwork. Photo by Priscila Santos da Costa
Forest fieldwork. Photo by Priscila Santos da Costaa
Gordon Creek Timber Demo. Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington from Portland, America, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Screenshot of the iPlantforest’s code of conduct.
Screenshot of the iPlantforest’s code of conduct. Image source: iPlantforest. Retrieved 24 June 2022, from https://iplantforest.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Code-of-Conduct-iPlantForest-2020.pdf
Sensors in experimental forests. Photo by Jennifer Gabrys
Sensors in experimental forests. Photo by Jennifer Gabrys.

Visit the Smart Forests Atlas, an open data platform from the Smart Forests Research Group.

atlas.smartforests.net

27 OCTOBER 2022

Plenary: Smart Forests Atlas

16.00 - 17.30 PM

Webb Library, Jesus College

JENNIFER GABRYS, KATE LEWIS HOOD, MICHELLE WESTERLAKEN, AND TRISHANT SIMLAI (SMART FORESTS RESEARCH GROUP) — Discussion and demonstration of Smart Forests Atlas (atlas.smartforests.net)

GEMMA COPELAND AND ALEX WORRAD-ANDREWS (COMMON KNOWLEDGE) — Development of the Smart Forests Atlas

SABINA LEONELLI, CHRIS SANDBROOK, and ALEX TAYLOR — Responses to the Smart Forests Atlas

17.30 - 18.30 PM

Foyer at Frankopan Hall, Jesus College

Reception with wine and canapés

Members of the Creatures collective walt at the SMEAR II station in Jupajoki, Finland. Photo by Sjef van Gaalen
Members of the Creatures collective walt at the SMEAR II station in Jupajoki, Finland. Photo by Sjef van Gaalen

Bios

Adeniyi Asiyanbi is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Community Culture and Global Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of British Columbia – Okanagan Campus. His research focuses on political ecology at the intersections of forests, climate change, neoliberalism and development. His current projects examine the co-existence of forest fires and carbon offsetting in western Canada and the financialization of the ‘carbon forest’ in West Africa. His works have been published in Political Geography, The Geographical Journal, Geoforum, Journal of Political Ecology, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Andrea Botero Cabrera is a designer and researcher exploring technologies, services and media formats for collectives and communities. Through her research work she aims to understand how collectives come to understand the design spaces available to them and how designers could support infrastructuring processes. Andrea works as Professor and Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of Aalto University, Finland; conspirator at the design studio Suo&Co; and Adjunct Professor at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.

LIANA CHUA is Tunku Abdul Rahman University Assistant Professor in Malay World Studies in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Gemma Copeland is an interdependent digital designer and member of the digital tools cooperative, Common Knowledge.

Steffen Dalsgaard is Professor in Anthropology of Digital Technology at the IT-University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and Ethnography from Aarhus University (2010) where he did research on the state and leadership in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. He is the editor (with Morten Nielsen) of Time and the Field (Berghahn, 2015) and has published about the anthropology of the state, politics, technologies, and climate change in a variety of journals, including Social Analysis, Social Anthropology, and Ethnos. He is currently directing research projects on the cultural value of “carbon,” on technoscientific perceptions of urban air, and on the hope that digital technologies can be “decoupling.”

Véra Ehrenstein is a sociologist of science and technology and CNRS researcher based at the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France. Her research explores how to study and make sense of the climate crisis as a new social reality. She is interested in topics including the United Nations’ REDD+ policy and scientific collaborations to measure the world’s forests, the economics of carbon markets, and the engineering of low-carbon innovations. Together with Daniel Neyland and Sveta Milyaeva, she has published Can Markets Solve Problems? An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberalism in Action (Goldsmiths Press, 2019).

YUTI ARIANI FATIMAH is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies. She writes on digital technologies, environments and social life, with publications including Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle (2022), Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016), and Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (2011). She also co-edits the “Planetarities” short book series published through Goldsmiths Press. 

Lydia Gibson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCL (and at the Center for Science and Society, Columbia University from September 2022), whose work at the intersection of anthropology and ecology focuses on Maroon traditional practices and sociotechnical configurations in a biodiverse Jamaican tropical rainforest. Gibson’s empirical work includes countermapping large, uncharted areas of forest, using and writing about automated sensing technologies (in situ and remote), and monitoring population changes of endemic bird species. Gibson is an IUCN SSC member (birds) and contributes to the monitoring and assessment of native parrots. Theoretically, Gibson writes against and thinks about the Capitalocene, the materiality of environmental practices, and the necropolitical.

Jenny Goldstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University (PhD Geography, UCLA). She draws from political ecology, critical development studies, and science and technology studies to understand the role of digital technology in environmental governance in Indonesia. She is co-editor of the volume The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) and is currently working on a monograph, Land of No Return: Development after Degradation in Indonesia’s Peatlands.

Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter.

KATE LEWIS HOOD is a Research Assistant with the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Naomi Millner is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. Naomi is a political geographer and political ecologist who explores the knowledge politics surrounding the making and management of global “environments” in the context of changing global agendas for sustainability and changing terrains of conflict. Her work explores how conservation has become a vehicle for the militarization of conflicted areas – but also how rural communities are using conservation technologies such as drones to defend tenure rights and to articulate other visions of environmental futures. Naomi is currently involved in interdisciplinary projects in Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru exploring the use of drones by communities and other actors.

Tami Okamoto is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. Tami’s work explores alternative concepts and uses of territory in collaboration with Amazonian indigenous peoples in Peru.

CHRIS SANDBROOK is Professor of Conservation and Society in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

Priscila Santos da Costa is Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She completed her bachelor’s in Social Sciences at the State University of São Paulo, Brazil, and her PhD (2018) in Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. She has conducted fieldwork in the Parliament of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, and her research focused on the state, bureaucracy, and religious ideology. Since then, she has begun undertaking a new ethnographic project in Brazil on the sociotechnical dimensions of efforts to develop and preserve the Amazon region.

Trishant Simlai is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Smart Forests project at the University of Cambridge at the University of Cambridge. He has a PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge. His work broadly revolves around the politics and geographies of biodiversity conservation in India. His current research focuses on the social and political impacts of surveillance technologies.

Alex Taylor is Reader in Human Computer Interaction at City, University of London.

Esther Turnhout is a Professor and Chair of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the interactions between science, technology, policy and society, particularly in the context of environmental governance and sustainability transformations. She has published widely on topics such as the politics of knowledge, forest and biodiversity conservation, and global science-policy interfaces. She is first author of the book Environmental Expertise: Connecting Science, Policy and Society with Cambridge University Press, editor in chief of Environmental Science & Policy, and selected expert in Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). 

Tone Walford is a Lecturer in Digital Anthropology at UCL. Their research explores the effects of the exponential growth of digital data on social and cultural imaginaries and practices, with a focus on the natural sciences and environmental politics. They have published on topics such as data power and the politics of informational practices in the sciences, data aesthetics, and transdisciplinarity. They recently co-edited, with Rachel Douglas-Jones and Nick Seaver, a special issue in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, “Towards an Anthropology of Data” (2021).

Michelle Westerlaken is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project at the University of Cambridge. She has a PhD in Interaction Design from Malmö University in Sweden. As an interdisciplinary researcher and designer her work builds on science and technology studies, critical animal studies, game studies, and participatory design methods to investigate possibilities for humans and other species towards more relational – multispecies – ways of living on this planet. So far, these projects have involved design negotiations together with cats, dogs, ants, penguins, forests, and various interactive technologies.

Alex Worrad-Andrews is a software engineer and faciliator, and member of Common Knowledge.

28 OCTOBER 2022

Frankopan Hall, Jesus College

09.30 - 10.00 AM

Arrivals, tea and coffee

Introduction

10.00 - 10.15 am

JENNIFER GABRYS — Introduction to The Forest Multiple symposium

panel 1: Making and Unmaking Forests

Chair: Chris Sandbrook

10.15 - 10.30 am

Adeniyi Asiyanbi— Making and Unmaking the Carbon Forest in Cross River

10.30 - 10.45 am

Esther Turnhout— Framing the Forest: Carbon and Communities in REDD+

10.45 - 11.00 am

Véra Ehrenstein— Weighing the Forest: Field Measurements, Remote Sensing and Carbon Payments in Central Africa

11.00 - 11.15 am

Panel conversation and response

11.15 - 11.30 am

Q&A with audience

11.30 - 11.45 am

Tea and coffee break

Panel 2: Forests and Resistance

Chair: Liana Chua

11.45 am - 12.00 pm

Jenny Goldstein — The Volumetric Political Forest

12.00 - 12.15 pm

Naomi Millner — Drones in Community Conservation and Territorial Defence: Configuring a Vertical Politics of Contestation in the Maya Forest, Guatemala

12.15 - 12.30 pm

Lydia Gibson — Silent Forests: Intransigent Topographies, Microrefugias, and Technical Abandonment in Island Tropical Montane Forests Central Africa

12.30 - 12.45 pm

Panel conversation and response

12.45 - 13.00 pm

Q&A with audience

13.00 - 14.00 PM

Buffet lunch

Panel 3: Amazonian Forest Worlds

Chair: Tami Okamoto

14.00 - 14.15 pm

Steffen Dalsgaard and Priscilla Santos da Costa — Carbon Value and the Salvaging of the Amazon

14.15 - 14.30 pm

Tone Walford — The Post-environmental Condition? The Data Frontiers of Environmental Science in the Brazilian Amazon

14.30 - 14.45 pm

Panel conversation and response

14.45 - 15.00 pm

Q&A with audience

15.00 - 15.15 PM

Tea and coffee break

Panel 4: Forest Practices and Cosmopolitics

Chair: Yuti Fatimah

15.15 - 15.30 pm

Andrea Botero — Open Forest: Data, Stories and Walking-With

15.30 - 15.45 pm

Jennifer Gabrys,Michelle Westerlaken,Trishant Simlai(Smart Forests) — From the Political to the Cosmopolitical Forest

15.45 - 16.00 pm

Panel conversation and response

16.00 - 16.15 pm

Q&A with audience

Conclusion

16.15 - 16.30 pm

Concluding discussion

Bios

Adeniyi Asiyanbi is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Community Culture and Global Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of British Columbia – Okanagan Campus. His research focuses on political ecology at the intersections of forests, climate change, neoliberalism and development. His current projects examine the co-existence of forest fires and carbon offsetting in western Canada and the financialization of the ‘carbon forest’ in West Africa. His works have been published in Political Geography, The Geographical Journal, Geoforum, Journal of Political Ecology, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Andrea Botero Cabrera is a designer and researcher exploring technologies, services and media formats for collectives and communities. Through her research work she aims to understand how collectives come to understand the design spaces available to them and how designers could support infrastructuring processes. Andrea works as Professor and Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of Aalto University, Finland; conspirator at the design studio Suo&Co; and Adjunct Professor at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.

LIANA CHUA is Tunku Abdul Rahman University Assistant Professor in Malay World Studies in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Gemma Copeland is an interdependent digital designer and member of the digital tools cooperative, Common Knowledge.

Steffen Dalsgaard is Professor in Anthropology of Digital Technology at the IT-University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and Ethnography from Aarhus University (2010) where he did research on the state and leadership in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. He is the editor (with Morten Nielsen) of Time and the Field (Berghahn, 2015) and has published about the anthropology of the state, politics, technologies, and climate change in a variety of journals, including Social Analysis, Social Anthropology, and Ethnos. He is currently directing research projects on the cultural value of “carbon,” on technoscientific perceptions of urban air, and on the hope that digital technologies can be “decoupling.”

Véra Ehrenstein is a sociologist of science and technology and CNRS researcher based at the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France. Her research explores how to study and make sense of the climate crisis as a new social reality. She is interested in topics including the United Nations’ REDD+ policy and scientific collaborations to measure the world’s forests, the economics of carbon markets, and the engineering of low-carbon innovations. Together with Daniel Neyland and Sveta Milyaeva, she has published Can Markets Solve Problems? An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberalism in Action (Goldsmiths Press, 2019).

YUTI ARIANI FATIMAH is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies. She writes on digital technologies, environments and social life, with publications including Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle (2022), Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016), and Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (2011). She also co-edits the “Planetarities” short book series published through Goldsmiths Press. 

Lydia Gibson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCL (and at the Center for Science and Society, Columbia University from September 2022), whose work at the intersection of anthropology and ecology focuses on Maroon traditional practices and sociotechnical configurations in a biodiverse Jamaican tropical rainforest. Gibson’s empirical work includes countermapping large, uncharted areas of forest, using and writing about automated sensing technologies (in situ and remote), and monitoring population changes of endemic bird species. Gibson is an IUCN SSC member (birds) and contributes to the monitoring and assessment of native parrots. Theoretically, Gibson writes against and thinks about the Capitalocene, the materiality of environmental practices, and the necropolitical.

Jenny Goldstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University (PhD Geography, UCLA). She draws from political ecology, critical development studies, and science and technology studies to understand the role of digital technology in environmental governance in Indonesia. She is co-editor of the volume The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) and is currently working on a monograph, Land of No Return: Development after Degradation in Indonesia’s Peatlands.

Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter.

KATE LEWIS HOOD is a Research Assistant with the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Naomi Millner is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. Naomi is a political geographer and political ecologist who explores the knowledge politics surrounding the making and management of global “environments” in the context of changing global agendas for sustainability and changing terrains of conflict. Her work explores how conservation has become a vehicle for the militarization of conflicted areas – but also how rural communities are using conservation technologies such as drones to defend tenure rights and to articulate other visions of environmental futures. Naomi is currently involved in interdisciplinary projects in Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru exploring the use of drones by communities and other actors.

Tami Okamoto is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. Tami’s work explores alternative concepts and uses of territory in collaboration with Amazonian indigenous peoples in Peru.

CHRIS SANDBROOK is Professor of Conservation and Society in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

Priscila Santos da Costa is Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She completed her bachelor’s in Social Sciences at the State University of São Paulo, Brazil, and her PhD (2018) in Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. She has conducted fieldwork in the Parliament of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, and her research focused on the state, bureaucracy, and religious ideology. Since then, she has begun undertaking a new ethnographic project in Brazil on the sociotechnical dimensions of efforts to develop and preserve the Amazon region.

Trishant Simlai is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Smart Forests project at the University of Cambridge at the University of Cambridge. He has a PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge. His work broadly revolves around the politics and geographies of biodiversity conservation in India. His current research focuses on the social and political impacts of surveillance technologies.

Alex Taylor is Reader in Human Computer Interaction at City, University of London.

Esther Turnhout is a Professor and Chair of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the interactions between science, technology, policy and society, particularly in the context of environmental governance and sustainability transformations. She has published widely on topics such as the politics of knowledge, forest and biodiversity conservation, and global science-policy interfaces. She is first author of the book Environmental Expertise: Connecting Science, Policy and Society with Cambridge University Press, editor in chief of Environmental Science & Policy, and selected expert in Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). 

Tone Walford is a Lecturer in Digital Anthropology at UCL. Their research explores the effects of the exponential growth of digital data on social and cultural imaginaries and practices, with a focus on the natural sciences and environmental politics. They have published on topics such as data power and the politics of informational practices in the sciences, data aesthetics, and transdisciplinarity. They recently co-edited, with Rachel Douglas-Jones and Nick Seaver, a special issue in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, “Towards an Anthropology of Data” (2021).

Michelle Westerlaken is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project at the University of Cambridge. She has a PhD in Interaction Design from Malmö University in Sweden. As an interdisciplinary researcher and designer her work builds on science and technology studies, critical animal studies, game studies, and participatory design methods to investigate possibilities for humans and other species towards more relational – multispecies – ways of living on this planet. So far, these projects have involved design negotiations together with cats, dogs, ants, penguins, forests, and various interactive technologies.

Alex Worrad-Andrews is a software engineer and faciliator, and member of Common Knowledge.

Forest fieldwork. Photo by Priscila Santos da Costaa
Forest fieldwork. Photo by Priscila Santos da Costa
Forest fieldwork. Photo by Priscila Santos da Costaa
Gordon Creek Timber Demo. Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington from Portland, America, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Screenshot of the iPlantforest’s code of conduct.
Screenshot of the iPlantforest’s code of conduct. Image source: iPlantforest. Retrieved 24 June 2022, from https://iplantforest.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Code-of-Conduct-iPlantForest-2020.pdf
Sensors in experimental forests. Photo by Jennifer Gabrys
Sensors in experimental forests. Photo by Jennifer Gabrys.

Visit the Smart Forests Atlas, an open data platform from the Smart Forests Research Group.

atlas.smartforests.net