[STS-Africa] INVITE | Technoscapes Guest Lecture by Jenny E. Goldstein | 4 Nov | 2pm to 3.30pm SAT / 3pm to 4:30pm CET / 9:00 to 10:30 EST | ONLINE

[Richard Rottenburg]

Technoscapes invites to its 4th and last Guest Lecture of this year by 

Jenny E. Goldstein (Cornell)
Title: Interstices in remote sensing: Scale, surveillance, and the role of strategic ignorance in Indonesia’s peatlands
Abstract: Knowledge claims generated through remote sensing technologies have become ubiquitous in expert monitoring of large-scale environmental change in out-of-the-way places. Satellite surveillance via remote sensing is also tasked with providing objective, ground-verifiable knowledge about large-scale environmental changes and harms, such as deforestation and wildfire. Yet people undertake ‘small-scale’ illicit forest-based activities that contribute to such environmental change, like selective logging, land burning, mining, sometimes with full awareness of this satellite surveillance. In doing so, they deliberately or incidentally take advantage of remote sensing’s blind spots and limitations. This is particularly the case in Indonesia’s peatlands, which are difficult to access on foot or by transport, making remote surveillance of these areas particularly attractive. Bringing together geographical literature on scale, sociology of knowledge on strategic ignorance, and recent work on illicit agrarian activities, I argue that there is a strategic ignorance of and as rural resistance that emerges in the gap between large-scale environmental monitoring and small-scale illicit activities. I show this by drawing on ethnographic research from Indonesia’s peatlands, where smallholders and small-scale miners practicing illicit activities both use and produce ignorance to evade satellite detection in forested and semi-forested areas.
Respondents: Vera Ehrenstein, Meredith Root-Bernstein
November 4, Friday, 
2pm to 3.30pm SAT / 3pm to 4:30pm CET / 9:00 to 10:30 EST

Register for this event:  https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceyurjMtHtOJxEAFDZ5wy_tl1XT2lREk <https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceyurjMtHtOJxEAFDZ5wy_tl1XT2lREk>
 
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