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Tourism Platforms and the Digital Biopolitics of Nature: An Interface Analysis of TripAdvisor in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile
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In recent years, the concept of Arctification has been used to describe how spatial simplifications and strategic essentialisation of Northern Europe have been used for branding in tourism. This article deconstructs the Arctification phenomenon into three main dimensions, (I) exogenous tourism development, (II) territorialisation, and (III) consumptive ethics of planetary care. The article claims, from a biopolitical perspective, that arctified visions of tourism and sustainable tourism in the Arctic can be understood as the production of heterotopic spaces. By engaging with Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as spaces of exception based on deviation (alterity) and compensation (sustainability), the article further claims that it provides a valuable framework for analysing contemporary challenges and paradoxes of sustainability and tourism growth strategies in the Arctic. The article illustrates its main arguments by drawing examples of Arctification from Finnish Lapland.
This commentary proposes a research agenda for the concept of feminist digital natures (FDN). To demonstrate how we see FDN connecting existing research efforts, we review both the well-established and much-needed work in three overlapping areas of scholarship where we see the potential for productive discussions, new questions, and empirical analysis: feminist digital geographies (FDG), digital natures (DN), and feminist political ecology (FPE). We offer specific and grounded examples of topics and questions that scholars might pursue through an FDN approach. We encourage sustained, collaborative, and critical attention to the uneven consequences and political terrain of understanding natures as increasingly digitally monitored, managed, manipulated, and represented. We can and should think with digital relations, and we might benefit from new creative conversations across our areas of inquiry and action.
The conservation of biodiversity has increasingly been analyzed as biopolitical. That is, conservation initiatives such as breeding programs and protected areas seek to optimize some nonhuman life forms while exposing others to harm or degradation. Biopolitical conservation studies have looked at the implications of how human and non-human lives have been valued differently. Wildlife has received more attention than the lives of conservation laborers in studies of private conservation. The article builds on Foucault's conceptualization of biopolitics to dissect the responses of the eco-tourism and wildlife breeding industries to rhino poaching in the Lowveld, South Africa. There are two central arguments. First, their responses hinge on creating new, and re-instating old, avenues of capital accumulation that ironically prioritize the optimization of the wildlife economy over the lives of rhino. Second, I show that private conservation disproportionately exposes black laborers to harm while attempting to protect rhino from poachers, a function of how conservation labor has been governed since the onset of poaching in 2008. I conclude that private conservationists in South Africa make value judgments to construct a hierarchy of life with whiteness at its apex, rhinos following closely behind, with laborers, and finally poachers at the bottom.
Ecotourism has become an increasingly important market-based practice in nature conservation. Several scholars and non-governmental organizations have discussed this as a commodification of nature in the context of capitalist expansion, but only a few have examined how value is produced in this process. Focusing on ecotourism in Tangkahan, in the Sumatra Island of Indonesia, this paper looks at how value is produced in human-elephant encounters. It builds on the concepts of lively commodities and encounter value to show how the incorporation of captive elephants in ecotourism generates value from two layers of interactions between humans and nonhumans. First, captive elephants are trained by mahouts for the encounters with tourists; then, the production of value takes place through tourists’ encounters with the elephants in ecotourism activities (elephant bathing, elephant grazing, and trekking alongside the elephants). We argue that the expansion of the commodification of nature in some cases requires an understanding of the way this encounter value produces a ‘captive nature’: lively beings that are enclosed, managed, and employed to sell experiences.
Due to habitat fragmentation, Brazil's Atlantic Forest is considered one of the world's most threatened biodiversity hotspots. Much of the biome has become extinct of its largest-bodied mammals,leading some to refer it as a 'half-empty forest.' One of the ways conservation actors are responding to this crisis is by utilizing Global Positioning System(GPS), camera trapping, and remote sensing satellite imagery. Together, these tools enable the collection of data at unprecedent levels. By intensifying wildlife monitoring, it is thought that better-directed actions can be taken to avoid species extinction. Although there is a nascent body of research in political ecology examining the role of these new technologies in conservation,so far there has been little exploration of what this implies for the transformation of the governance of conservation spaces. Bringing together literatures on biopolitics of conservation and conservation technologies, this article reflects on the ways new technologies are changing the biopolitical governance of conservation in the Atlantic Forest. I argue that the increase of information flows, together with the ability to process data through models and algorithms, intensifies the capability of biopolitical governance to justify claims for new protected areas, while changing ecological subjectivities. With the increased use of remote sensing technologies, some ecologists are being distanced from the field, and are consequently having less interactions with rural communities. As pressures on biodiversity increase, this may facilitate advocacy for coercive conservation measures that have adverse impacts on local communities.
In places with a predominantly natural heritage, environmental and development discourses are intertwined and often competing. A key dimension is the social construction of socio-spatial relationships, and particularly, the attribution of core and periphery features. In this article, we investigate environmental and development discourses in the peripheral spatial context of the Aysén region of Chile. Three research questions guide the investigation: (a) What are the dominant environmental and development discourses? (b) what are the main synergies and tensions among discourses? and (c) what are the (discursive) implications for (de-)peripheralization? Based on semistructured interviews and secondary sources, we identify six regional discourses on environment and development. Imaginaries of nature, regional development, and economic growth are the common denominators that create synergies and tensions. We conclude that environmental and development discourses play a key role in the transformation of geographic peripheral areas. Discursive synergies can not only reinforce but also counteract tendencies of peripheralization.
Critical assessments of the conservation-capitalism relationship based on Foucault’s concept of governmentality have generated notions of environmental governance as forms of ‘green’ governmentality or ‘environmentality.’ This paper contributes to the environmentalities literature by demonstrating the utility of a variegated environmentalities approach in understanding how the process of neoliberalization unfolds in different conservation contexts to influence different subjectivities. In this cross-national comparison, I examine the value shifts associated with conservation projects from the perspectives and experiences of the people most affected by these projects. Using Fletcher’s (2010) environmentalities typology, I compare two approaches to Irrawaddy dolphin conservation: one in Myanmar focused on community enrichment and preservation of traditional human-dolphin relationships; the other in Cambodia focused on individual monetary wealth and neoliberal economic development. I argue that the dominant governing rationalities in each country influenced the execution of neoliberal environmentality and the ways in which it articulated with other types of environmentality. I then show how these unique articulations led to starkly different subjectivities by reinforcing socioecological values in Myanmar while restructuring them in Cambodia to align with neoliberal rationalities. I do this by contrasting findings in the two projects to trace the alteration of values in Cambodia from dolphins to other socioecological relations. I conclude by suggesting that dominant governing rationalities that foreground community and reciprocity in socioecological relations may serve to temper neoliberalism and thus provide a path toward alternative socioecologies and sustainabilities.
Conservationists around the world advocate for “data-driven” environmental governance, expecting data infrastructures to make all relevant and actionable information readily available. But how exactly is data to be infrastructured and to what political effect? I show how putting together and maintaining environmental data for decision-making is not a straightforward technical task, but a practice shaped by and shaping politico-economic context. Drawing from the US state of Louisiana’s coastal restoration planning process, I detail two ways ecosystem modelers manage fiscal and institutional “frictions” to “infrastructuring” data as a resource for decision-making. First, these experts work with the data they have. They leverage, tweak, and maintain existing datasets and tools, spending time and money to gather additional data only to the extent it fits existing goals. The assumption is that these goals will continue to be important, but building coastal data infrastructure around current research needs, plans, and austerity arguably limits what can be said in and done with the future. Second, modelers acquire the data they made to need. Coastal communities have protested the state’s primary restoration tool: diversions of sediment from the Mississippi River. Planners reacted by relaxing institutional constraints and modelers brought together new data to highlight possible winners and losers from ecological restoration. Fishers and other coastal residents leveraged greater dissent in the planning process. Political ecologists show that technocentric environmental governance tends to foreclose dissent from hegemonic socioecological futures. I argue we can clarify the conditions in which this tends to happen by following how experts manage data frictions. As some conservationists and planners double down on driving with data in a “post-truth” world, I find that data’s politicizing effects stem from what is asked of it, not whether it is “big” or “drives.”
The commodification of nature, through privatization, marketization, monetary valuation and other associated processes, has become a central topic in social sciences to examine the conditions and effects of the economic approaches for supporting conservation policies all around the world. The aim of this contribution is to delineate the current state of knowledge, within and beyond ecological economics, and to see, with some historical perspective, how commodification has been systematized in the literature. The results are as follows: (i) studies of commodification processes remain essentially critical, with a central role played by economists, political ecologists and geographers; (ii) over the past 15 years, we have seen more fragmentation than consolidation of the field; (iii) researchers avoid analytical shortcuts, but do not always well define what they mean by commodification. The construction of visual representations – we propose a ‘commodification chain’ – and the identification of decommodification opportunities are future lines of research that would be promising, particularly for the community of ecological economists.
This article investigates assertions that new philanthropic web 2.0 initiatives can empower Internet users to further social and environmental change. It focuses on two ostensibly "free" web 2.0 initiatives aimed at nature conservation: "Greenvolved" and "Safari Challenge Zoo Adventure." With Greenvolved, clicking on one's favorite projects is supposed to support conservation initiatives whereas in Safari Challenge users interact through gaming on the virtual African savannahs to conserve online nature, thereby supporting various offline humanitarian projects. Drawing on discussions of "philanthrocapitalism" and "nature 2.0," our analysis demonstrates that such "popular philanthrocapitalist" initiatives do not support empowering collective action but instead depoliticize and commodify environmental activism. Such initiatives thereby allow neoliberal capitalism to further extend its reach under the pretense of empowering those whom it marginalizes.
Environmental governance has the potential to be significantly transformed by Smart Earth technologies, which deploy enhanced environmental monitoring via combinations of information and communication technologies (ICT), conventional monitoring technologies (e.g. remote sensing), and Internet of Things (IoT) applications (e.g. Environmental Sensor Networks (ESNs)). This paper presents a systematic meta-review of Smart Earth scholarship, focusing our analysis on the potential implications and pitfalls of Smart Earth technologies for environmental governance. We present a meta-review of academic research on Smart Earth, covering 3187 across the full range of academic disciplines from 1997 to 2017, ranging from ecological informatics to the digital humanities. We then offer a critical perspective on potential pathways for evolution in environmental governance frameworks, exploring five key Smart Earth issues relevant to environmental governance: data; real-time regulation; predictive management; open source; and citizen sensing. We conclude by offering suggestions for future research directions and trans-disciplinary conversations about environmental governance in a Smart Earth world.
Landscapes are shaped over time by the changing imaginaries that result from new representations of nature and the value associated with it. This paper discusses the evolving discourses which have shaped the perception of the landscape in two socially and ecologically significant contexts in Chile. The first is the central-southern region of the country, a large portion of which is now devoted to commercial forestry plantations. The second is the Patagonia-Aysén region, where since the 1990s, colonization of a land defined by a tradition of livestock rearing has evolved into a process epitomized by the slogan “Aysén, Life Reserve.” The representation that was made of central-southern Chile in the 50' and 60' as a deforested and degraded land was the justification for promoting a new form of land occupation: the monoculture forest, designed and executed by a specific law. Forty years on from the passing of this law, the plantations of central-southern Chile have undergone a process of naturalization. In this case, the exaltation of nature has been permanent (before and after the changes doing by this law). The only thing that changes is the definition of nature, which ended up including forest plantations. That is, discourses influence perceptions and these lead to new practices in the study area and beyond. In Patagonia-Aysén, by the other side, there has been a marked shift in the rhetoric surrounding land. This has been particularly noticeable in the case of government bodies and private ecotourism companies, which have constructed an imaginary in line with a new model of economic development for the area. In a break with tradition, both the public and private sectors are beginning to shift their investment away from agricultural and livestock exploitation and toward ecotourism and conservation projects. In both cases, we analyse the manner in which transformations in perceptions and representations of landscape bring about new forms of land use, and how new focuses of value and social interest, forged within wider environmental discourses, have brought with them unexpected social consequences, like depopulation, economic transformations, cultural changes, etc. Thus, the aim of this work is to expose and discuss the reality and scope of new green discourses and their influence on the perception of natural landscapes in the Chilean neoliberal context.
This article intends to contribute to the existing body of critical scholarly work on the sharing economies of tourism. Focussing on the Airbnb platform, it investigates the biopolitical spatialities that emerge from its qualification and quantification of bodily performances of hospitality. Drawing on the work of Roberto Esposito, the article challenges the notion of “community” pervading the rhetoric of the platform and crucially influencing the ways in which travel, hospitality and home are reconceptualized. It does so by analysing some of the key technologies and calculative rationalities that drive the making of these global “communities”, and give rise to the champion of the Airbnb world of hospitality: the Superhost. We reflect on how ideas of community and hospitality translate into a metrics of care, “localness” and belonging, and on how specific practices related to the “spatialities of the home” are central to the qualification/quantification of life and of living spaces generated by the platform. We conclude by suggesting that, by exploring these sites and concepts, it is perhaps possible to unravel how these new geographies of hospitality are operationalized through the giving of “what is proper” – the intimate spatialities of the home – on the part of the hosts in order to become members of a greater Self, the Airbnb global community.
This contribution addresses the growing global trend to promote ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA) in support of environmental conservation. NCA seeks to harness the economic value of conserved nature to incentivize local resource users to forgo the opportunity costs of extractive activities. We suggest that this represents a form of neoliberal biopower/biopolitics seeking to defend life by demonstrating its ‘profitability’ and hence right to exist. While little finance actually reaches communities through this strategy, substantial funding still flows into the idea of ‘natural capital’ as the basis of improving rural livelihoods. Drawing on two cases in Southeast Asia, we show that NCA initiatives may compel some local people to value ecosystem services in financial terms, yet in most cases this perspective remains partial and fragmented in communities where such initiatives produce a range of unintended outcomes. When the envisioned environmental markets fail to develop and benefits remain largely intangible, NCA fails to meet the growing material aspirations of farmers while also offering little if any bulwark against their using forests more intensively and/or enrolling in lucrative extractive enterprise. We thus conclude that NCA in practice may become the antithesis of conservation by actually encouraging the resource extraction it intends to combat.
The wide range of wildlife tracking and surveillance technologies (radio and satellite tracking, cameras, and audio) that are being deployed in conservation have important implications for a geographical understanding of care for non-human nature. This report explores four dimensions of their influence. First, their detailed view of spatial dimensions of non-human lives affects conservation’s demarcation and control of space. Second, the application of surveillance technologies to people is central to the rise of coercive conservation strategies. Third, such technologies enable the creation and commoditization of spectacular nature. Fourth, spatial digital data enables the automation of conservation decisions, a trend described here as ‘conservation by algorithm’.
This article describes their biopolitical implications for design from psychological, cultural, legal, functional and aesthetic/perceptive ways, in the framework of Hyperconnectivity: the condition according to which person-to-person, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communication progressively shift to networked and digital means.
A definition is given for the terms of "interface biopolitics" and "data biopolitics", as well as evidence supporting these definitions and a description of the technological, theoretical and practice-based innovations bringing them into meaningful existence.
Interfaces, algorithms, artificial intelligences of various types, the tendency in quantified self and the concept of "information bubbles" will be examined in terms of interface and data biopolitics, from the point of view of design, and for their implications in terms of freedoms, transparency, justice and accessibility to human rights.
A working hypothesis is described for technologically relevant design practices and education processes, in order to confront with these issues in critical, ethical and inclusive ways.
This paper explores territorial struggles around ecotourism in community-based conservation in wildlife rich Northern Tanzania. At the centre of analysis are two emblematic and distinctly different ecotourism business models that rely on a particular territorialization of property relations and resource control: one model is based on land sharing with local communities and villages, while the other relies on the appropriation of large parts of village land for exclusive access and control. Conceptually engaging critical geography debates on internal territorialization with a poststructuralist political ecology inspired by the framework of multiple environmentalities, the paper shows how ecotourism companies employ different techniques of government to secure business-friendly environments and territories in neoliberal conservation. Different business models underpin different processes of territorialization that in turn produce different modes of engagements and regimes of rule and authority. While the case of ecotourism through land sharing reinforces village land rights through a neoliberal environmentality, ecotourism through land appropriation illustrates how neoliberal, sovereign and truth environmentalities are put to work to facilitate the re-territorialization of property relations and resource control to undermine land rights of an entire village or an ethnic minority.
The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of national and global lists of threatened and endangered species. This article draws on interviews with prominent list managers and observations of their assessments to explore the scientific practices of list-making in the context of species conservation. Delving into the complex calculations of risk and threat that take place in the process of ranking non-human species based on their probability of extinction, the article explores the threatened species list as a biopolitical technology of catastrophe governance. My focus on two prominent lists—the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and NatureServe’s assessment system—illuminates various characteristics of futuristic governance through the threatened species list, including its properties as a list–database hybrid and as a barometer of life. I also explore the biopolitical regime of ranking life and its focus on species, its governing of direct (human) threats and the nature–culture binary that this promotes, its status as scientific and apolitical and its aspiration for global reach, and the “species experts” versus “threat experts” divide that underpins its operations. The article concludes with a discussion on the effects of the lists’ increasing automation and algorithmization, as seen from the perspective of the lists’ managers. The lists’ “threat calculator” in particular quantifies and projects present and future threats to non-human species, using fuzzy numbers, ordinal scales, and open standards to anticipate and prevent the forthcoming Sixth Extinction.
This essay draws on interviews with conservation biologists to reflect on two interrelated aspects of the in situ - ex situ divide and its increasing integration: database systems and population management models. Specifically, I highlight those databases and software programs used by zoos in ex situ conservation settings, and the parallel, traditionally distinct, in situ databases and risk assessment models. I then explore the evolving technologies that integrate wild-captive databases and population models and, in particular, emerging metapopulation and meta-model approaches to small population management. My central argument is that, while still viewed by many as separate, the in situ and ex situ projects-and their respective elaborate administrative structures and models of calculation- are, in practice, increasingly bleeding into one another. The stories I tell here about the efforts to save the red wolf from extinction reveal the complexities of this integration. I also document how-in this process-a tiny group of experts translates data into algorithmic formats to generate standardized risk calculations that are meant to apply both universally and objectively. Applying Foucauldian and STS insights to the field of conservation biology, I argue, finally, that surveillance and biopolitics work hand-in-hand in this context to enable a comprehensive, effective, and unitary management of nonhuman population life, or "viability".
The growing body of work on the 'neoliberalisation of nature' does not as yet pay adequate attention to conservation policy and its impacts. Similarly, studies of conservation have much to learn by placing conservation policies in the context of broader social and economic changes that define neoliberalism. In this introduction, we outline and analyse the ways in which viewing conservation through a neoliberal lens adds value (if you will excuse the metaphor) to the collection of critiques we offer, placing quite different geographical areas and case studies in a comparative context. We argue that neoliberalisation involves the reregulation of nature through forms of commodification. This, in turn, entails new types of territorialisation: the partitioning of resources and landscapes in ways that control, and often exclude, local people. Territorialisation is a starkly visible form of reregulation, which frequently creates new types of values and makes those values available to national and transnational elites. Finally, neoliberalisation has also coincided with the emergence of new networks that cut across traditional divides of state, non-governmental organisation (NGO), and for-profit enterprise. These networks are rhetorically united by neoliberal ideologies and are combining in ways that profoundly alter the lives of rural people in areas targeted for biodiversity conservation. The studies this collection brings together, which are all rooted in place-based detailed research, are united by their experience of these processes. We argue that the disparate collection of critiques on the neoliberalisation of nature needs more grounded studies like these. We conclude this introduction with some tentative recommendations for future research and policy on neoliberal conservation.
Recent insights from critical social theory suggest that consumption and production co-constitute each other; a phenomenon referred to as prosumption'. It is further suggested that contemporary prosumption dynamics could alter the form of capitalism. In this article, we argue that recent literature and research on the intersection between capitalism and nature conservation are highly relevant in engaging these claims. Predominantly but not solely through interactive web 2.0 applications, conservation organisations are increasingly drawing consumers into the production of conservation, thereby enabling them to prosume' and co-create (narratives about and images of) nature' as well as their own identities as environmentally conscious citizens. We argue that prosumption is an intensification of earlier capitalist attempts at generating value-producing labour' from commodity-sign values. Ethnographic engagements with nature conservation in eastern and southern Africa, in turn, show that this value-producing labour is inherently material through its concealed connections with contradictory conservation realities in the context of late capitalism.
Following the financial crisis and its aftermath, it is clear that the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation have become even more intense and plunged the global economy into unprecedented turmoil and urgency. Governments, business leaders and other elite agents are frantically searching for a new, more
stable mode of accumulation. Arguably the most promising is what we call ‘Accumulation by Conservation’ (AbC): a mode of accumulation that takes the negative environmental contradictions of contemporary capitalism as its departure for a newfound ‘sustainable’ model of accumulation for the future. Under slogans
such as payments for environmental services, the Green Economy, and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, public, private and non-governmental sectors seek ways to turn the non-material use of nature into capital that can simultaneously ‘save’ the environment and establish long-term modes of capital
accumulation. In the paper, we conceptualise and interrogate the grand claim of AbC and argue that it should be seen as a denial of the negative environmental impacts of ‘business as usual’ capitalism. We evaluate AbC’s attempt to compel nature to pay for itself and conclude by speculating whether this dynamic signals the impending end of the current global cycle of accumulation altogether.
Digital technologies increasingly mediate relations between humans and nonhumans in a range of contexts including environmental governance, surveillance, and entertainment. Combining approaches from more-than-human and digital geographies, we proffer ‘digital ecologies’ as an analytical framework for examining digitally-mediated human–nonhuman entanglement. We identify entanglement as a compelling basis from which to articulate and critique digitally-mediated relations in diverse situated contexts. Three questions guide this approach: What digital technologies and infrastructures give rise to digital entanglement, and with what material consequences? What is at stake socially, politically, and economically when encounters with nonhumans are digitised? And how are digital technologies enrolled in programmes of environmental governance? We develop our digital ecologies framework across three core conceptual themes of wider interest to environmental geographers: (i) materialities, considering the infrastructures which enable digitally-mediated more-than-human connections and their socioenvironmental impacts; (ii) encounters, examining the political economic consequences and convivial potentials of digitising contact zones; (iii) governance, questioning how digital technologies produce novel forms of more-than-human governance. We affirm that digital mediations of more-than-human worlds can potentially cultivate environmentally progressive communities, convivial human–nonhuman encounters, and just forms of environmental governance, and as such note the urgency of these conversations.
In this article, we bring together understandings of the spectacle of nature and spectacle 2.0 to show how people are invited to participate in the spectacular production of nature. Recent work has expanded on the Debordian notion of spectacle, interrogating the ways people do not just consume images, but help to produce and enact spectacle: spectacle 2.0. Building on this, we argue that in conservation, consumers increasingly interact with the spectacle through digital and real-life means, thereby reinforcing and reproducing the nature that is being transformed. We term this process the spectacle of nature 2.0. We present the case of Valle Chacabuco in southern Chile, which has been transformed into Patagonia National Park. This process has been welcomed by the international conservation community, but has incited tension and conflict with local residents who have their own very different sense of Valle Chacabuco. Through the production of spectacle, park discourses highlight the heroic role of Northern conservationists, obscuring the underlying capitalist logics of the project and the social tensions it has created. We argue that it was possible to unmake/remake Valle Chacabuco from once a place of livelihoods, ranching, and production to a place of unspoiled nature through the recruitment of digital and material interaction. In the process, environmental politics and activism are channeled back into the dominant underlying capitalist ideology. Patagonia National Park is now a place that the park promoters claim belongs to the world, its nature and culture to be consumed and reproduced by environmentalists and tourists.
In this paper, we mobilise a multiple environmentalities framework that captures overlapping rationalities of governing nature to engage and identify the role of maps and mapping practices in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile, a peripheral region where government and institutional actors have embraced (eco)tourism as a conservation strategy in protected areas. Through interviews with key stakeholders situated in conservation and tourism institutions in both the public and private sector, we identify two dominant environmentalities at play in the relationship between protected area management and tourism development in Patagonia-Aysén: a neoliberal environmentality, which seeks to promote conservation through the commodification of nature as a tourism product, and an environmentality of truth predicated on a singular, pristine and beautiful nature as an object of conservation and advantage for tourism. Through an analysis of conservation maps and mapping rationalities specific to the Cerro Castillo protected area in Patagonia-Aysén, we trace how these multiple environmentalities are consolidated, rendered real and actionable through geovisualisations and cartographic practices. We argue that conservation maps and mapping emerge as an ‘encounter point’ wherein multiple environmentality strategies and rationalities converge, producing a form of governing the spaces of conservation – what we term a spatial environmentality – rooted in neoliberal and aesthetic logics. Spatial environmentality, we contend, constitutes a form of governing conservation spaces by inscribing and assigning (in)appropiate uses to nature that operationalises institutional interests in conditioning the active engagement of ‘environment subjects’ to control, administer, and take care of the spaces of conservation while in turn making environmental stewardship profitable.
This paper interrogates the role that spatial media such as maps and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) play in the construction and mobilisation of representations of nature. Drawing on poststructural political ecology, critical cartography, and GIScience, this article engages maps and VGI as discursive mechanisms that solidify and convey meanings and representations of nature tied to broader strategies of commodification. Particularly, we explore how spatial media reproduces and legitimises discursive strategies that rationalise the reconciliation of economic development and conservation through nature-based tourism by producing new ways of nature commodification. Drawing on evidence from Patagonia-Aysén, Chile, this paper examines the intersections between the discourse of nature encoded within institutional tourist maps and advertisements, and within the VGI platform for travellers, TripAdvisor. This illustrative case shows, firstly, how tourist maps and advertisements have contributed to normalising a discursive construction of nature as pristine, grandiose, sublime and wild that has not only secured aesthetics as ontological qualities of nature, but also as embedded values that protect ‘nature’ as a commodity to consume. Secondly, our findings evidence that TripAdvisor emerges out of this context as content that mobilises individual perceptions of and narratives about Patagonian nature that is already mediated by this dominant discourse. This dynamic suggests that VGI constitutes a new form of discursive power that digitally reproduces and mobilises a dominant discourse of nature, (re)producing what we term ‘discursive digital nature’.
By mediating everyday activities, social interactions, and economic transactions, digital platforms play an increasingly dominant role in contemporary capitalism. These platforms have excelled at extracting value from assets and labour that have been deemed un(der)productive. While the burgeoning literature on platform capitalism and digital labour has focused on these systems of value extraction, there has been much less attention on how platforms have also undertaken a project of subject formation and thereby capital development. By theorising empirical research with people who work as food delivery workers for Deliveroo, we show how platforms, specifically those that provide services in urban places, encourage, even require, workers to develop a form of human capital based on three perverse virtues that make them more productive, more desirable workers: flexibility, vitality, and legibility. We then analyse the operations and implications of biopolitical platforms—by which we mean platforms that create and administer a biopolitical governance regime in order to cultivate and accumulate capital, both human and data.
Airbnb is emblematic of a set of business practices commonly known as ‘the sharing economy’. It is a disruptive business model of homestay accommodation that has exploited conditions of growing precarity of work since 2008. Work precarity is particularly evident in regional tourist areas in New Zealand, which historically experience seasonal, part-time work and low wages. Airbnb draws specifically on the rhetoric of micro-entrepreneurism, with focus on individual freedom and choice: appealing concepts for those experiencing precarity. This article challenges the rhetoric of Airbnb and investigates notions of home, authenticity and hospitality that are reconceptualized under a specific regime of digital biopolitics. Drawing on research conducted in four regional tourist towns in New Zealand this article analyses the biopolitical interpellations that impact hosts’ subjectivities as entities in motion and considers the ways that the rationalities of Airbnb’s algorithms modulate the embodied behaviours of its hosts.
Recent scholarship on smart cities and platform urbanism has explored the very wide range of data harvested from urban environments by digital devices of many kinds, analysing how not only efficiencies but also profits are sought through the extraction, circulation, transformation, commodification, integration and re‐use of data. Much of that data is generated by smartphone applications, and this paper looks at the design of a group of eight smartphone apps by a range of different actors in a smart UK city. The apps are understood as a co‐constitutive interface between data circulations and embodied users. The paper focusses specifically on the data that the apps generated and shared and on how the app designers anticipated that the data would create different kinds of value for embodied app users. While some data circulations were understood as ways of generating financial value, the paper argues that a number of other forms of value were assumed in the app design. The paper identifies two of these, which it terms normative values and interactive values. It examines how the data mobilised by the smart city apps enacts particular versions of these values, and how those values co‐constitute specific kinds of bodies, agencies and geographies in digitally‐mediated cities.
Self-defined as ‘an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature’, iNaturalist is a mobile application whose primary goal is ‘to connect people to nature’, closely followed by the secondary goal of ‘generating scientifically valuable biodiversity data from these personal encounters’, which the founders believe can be achieved simultaneously with the primary goal in a self-reinforcing logic. Following an approach informed by media studies on wildlife photography and film, and science and technology studies as well as insights from interviews with users and participant observation in the Los Angeles area, this article makes the case that mobile applications such as iNaturalist sit at a tension because while they can ignite interest in the natural environment, they also prescriptively describe and normalize a ‘nature’ and an epistemology that are particular to the natural sciences.
Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one’s disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook’s Instant Articles. In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies—disrupting markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democratic processes. The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government, and civil society—asking who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values and the common good in a platform society. Public values include, of course, privacy, accuracy, safety, and security; but they also pertain to broader societal effects, such as fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability. Such values are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. The Platform Society highlights how these struggles play out in four private and public sectors: news, urban transport, health, and education. Some of these conflicts highlight local dimensions, for instance, fights over regulation between individual platforms and city councils, while others address the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.
The influence of global digital platforms today has brought attention to their growing significance as critical infrastruc-tures of urban societies. This paper addresses the different ways that platforms are coming into focus, evidenced by growing literatures on platform capitalism, the platform society, platform surveillance, and platform urbanism. Navigating this platform pivot, I discuss the way platform influence is predominantly linked to processes of data-driven commodification and value extraction, as demonstrated by the global growth of major platforms such as Google, Facebook, Uber, and Amazon. But at the level of the everyday , platform influence also shapes socio-spatial experience through intentional design tactics designed to facilitate highly participatory ecosystems of interaction. I argue that by instituting relational dynamics between code, commerce, and corporeality, platforms remediate the "technological everyday" in powerful ways. This perspective points to the need for diverse epistemologies through which to critically reflect on the geographical implications of this pivot towards platforms. K E Y W O R D S digital cities, digital geography, sharing economy, platform urbanism, big data, platform capitalism, platform society
Feminist digital geographies are an important part of the digital turn currently underway in geographic scholarship. At the same time, feminist movements are taking advantage of, and emerging from, digital spaces. This article considers how the digital intersects with gender and what opportunities the digital affords feminist movements. We do so by drawing on a case study of feminist activism within Destroy the Joint (DTJ), an online social media activist group, and build a qualitative analysis of a dynamic, reflexive digital space. Qualitative studies of emotion, affect and the power of digital geographies, including social media spaces populated by groups like DTJ, demonstrate how cultural and social practices are changing along with technologies. This research does not draw on a techno-deterministic approach to digital geographies but forwards a feminist perspective that critically engages with the constraints and possibilities of the complex, paradoxical and contingent within the digital.
The politics of environmental conservation has long been a key concern for human and environmental geographers. Recently, geographers have begun to employ Foucauldian insights on biopower and biopolitics to understand conservation's changing agendas, techniques, and logics, focusing on the specific ways in which non-human nature is ordered, ranked, and promoted. This review examines how four domains of conservation—endangered species management, conservation breeding and genetics, protected areas, and rewilding—have been conceptualized as biopolitical. In each domain, different sets of scientific practices and understandings produce valuations of life that appear natural, universal, and technically derived even as they are particular and normative. Thus, we find that there is not a single “conservation biopolitics” but instead an entanglement of overlapping and contradictory logics and techniques. At its best, the Foucauldian biopolitical approach can help to parse the range of possible logics and techniques that constitute conservation and to expand who is authorized to take part in debates and decisions about what life should be protected, how, why, and for whom.
Digital interfaces, in the form of websites, mobile apps and other platforms, now mediate user experiences with a variety of economic, cultural and political services and products. To study these digital mediations, researchers have to date followed a range of methodological strategies including the modification of pre-existing qualitative research methods, such as content analysis, discourse analysis and semiotics, among many others, and an experimentation with new methods designed to make visible the operation of data aggregation, analytics and algorithms that are hidden from users. Building upon, while distinct from these strategies, the article sets out a post-phenomenological approach to studying interfaces, websites and apps that explicitly interrogates how they appear as objects. In doing so, the article provides a response to a problem that animates contemporary cultural geography: that new cultural objects are emerging which place in question the habits and practices of analysis that composed the ‘new’ cultural geography. To do this, the paper develops the concepts of unit, vibration and tone to unpack interfaces as sets of entities that work together to shape the experiences and responses of users. As such, the article provides a methodological vocabulary for the analysis of how interfaces operate to modulate user response and action on a series of habitual and un-reflected upon levels and thereby to create outcomes that suit their owners and operators.
This paper develops the idea of the sustainability episteme for the critical analysis of contemporary wildlife conservation. It takes forward recent work in conservation and more-than-human geographies that questions the biopolitical emphasis in conservation on protecting collectivities such as species. Drawing on empirical research on turtle conservation in India and on Foucault’s writings, it inspects how these animals and their wellbeing come to be conceptualized and pursued in contexts marked by tensions between human-centred socio-economic goals and concern for non-human life. Specifically, the paper theorizes the concept of the sustainability episteme to argue that biopolitical ontologies of the collectivity enable win-win conservation that addresses incompatible normative goals. Building on these arguments, it discusses the political function of dominant conservation ontologies with reference to the global trajectories of conservation. In problematizing the taken-for-granted dominance of ontologies of the collectivity, the aim is to open up opportunities for life-forms that otherwise remain outside the bounds of conservationist care.
This paper examines an iteration of debate about seal hunting in Canada wherein the politics of nature and celebrity culture intersected via Web 2.0 in an unanticipated way. Our analysis focuses on a spike in social media posting that took place after celebrity Ellen DeGeneres took a 'selfie' photo with a group of movie stars live during the 2014 Academy Awards. 'Nature 2.0' is a relevant framing for this case because, in the weeks and months after the 2014 Oscars, many seal hunters and other pro-hunt advocates took to Twitter and posted personal photos and/or accounts of seal hunting and its significance. In a play on DeGeneres' Oscars selfie, both types of posters often labelled their tweets with the following 'hashtag': #sealfie. Our analysis shows that, while important, the Oscars spectacle and the star-studded selfie did not alone the scene for #sealfies and their circulation. Moreover, we demonstrate that some #sealfie posters challenged the authority of anti-sealing organizations and employed Web 2.0 functionalities in ways that took debate about sealing beyond engrained moral and environmental binaries. We conclude that Web 2.0 not just enabled, but actually shaped, the form and function of #sealfies and the journalistic attention that the phenomenon received.
This study aims to bring card-based design into education. A mobile application called “English Practice” has been developed wherein a card-based interface named PACARD (Personalize Adaptive CARD-based interface) was implemented. This interface has a flexible design so as to be compatible with various types of mobile devices thus overcoming the small screen challenge. In this study, we use PACARD to evaluate the effectiveness of card-based design on personalized adaptive mobile learning. An empirical study was conducted among 2774 online users for three months to evaluate PACARD's effect on engaging active recall, thus, enhancing memory retention. We also observed how our adaptive mechanism meets user preference. In terms of memory retention and users' preference in PACARD, it results in better retention and it also enabled the learning items to be more appealing to the users as the users related to their own learning progress.
This article explores the role of digital (video and computer) games in the rise of what Büscher (2014) calls
‘‘nature 2.0”: new web-related media that allow users to move beyond passive voyeurism to actively
‘‘co-create” or ‘‘prosume” the images and processes promoted by organizations committed to biodiversity
conservation. Environmentalists have long expressed concern that increasing mediation of human–
nonhuman interactions by electronic technology is contributing to a growing ‘‘nature-deficit disorder”
(NDD) and thereby diminishing support for conservation. This concern would seem to implicate the
electronic media comprising nature 2.0 as well, yet digital games are increasingly promoted by environmental
organizations precisely for their potential to overcome this very problem. In this paper, I explore to
what extent this aspiration is warranted by analyzing digital games devoted to issues of tropical rainforest
conservation. In support of proponents’ aspirations and contra the NDD thesis, I suggest that the virtual
nature experiences digital games provide may at times actually inspire more affective commitment to
environmental causes than the direct experiences most conservationists advocate. On the other hand,
as critics of overarching new media assert, engagement with digital games can create a false sense of
agency in that belief in the efficacy of one’s virtual engagement may discourage more direct entanglement
in the complicated and contentious politics of ‘‘real” natural resource management. The result, I propose, is
a likelihood that digital games will increase the widely documented ‘‘environmental values-behavior gap”
between professed commitment to environmental causes and effective action in support of such causes.
Elephants rarely breed in captivity and are not considered domesticated, yet they interact with people regularly and adapt to various environments. Too social and sagacious to be objects, too strange to be human, too captive to truly be wild, but too wild to be domesticated-where do elephants fall in our understanding of nature? In Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. But life goes on. Wildlife inhabits everywhere and is on the move; Lorimer proposes the concept of wildlife as a replacement for nature. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene-an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet- Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation. Wildlife in the Anthropocene examines rewilding, the impacts of wildlife films, human relationships with charismatic species, and urban wildlife. Analyzing scientific papers, policy documents, and popular media, as well as a decade of fieldwork, Lorimer explores the new interconnections between science, politics, and neoliberal capitalism that the Anthropocene demands of wildlife conservation. Imagining conservation in a world where humans are geological actors entangled within and responsible for powerful, unstable, and unpredictable planetary forces, this work nurtures a future environmentalism that is more hopeful and democratic. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
This paper draws on the Foucauldian notion of biopower to renarrate the development of conservation science in the US as a form of liberal biopolitical rule. With its emphasis on making nature live, conservation marks a shift away from a sovereign form of rule that emphasized subduing and controlling nature; today, nature is ruled not by the sword but by science. Through a discussion of key concepts in conservation biology-populations in crisis; evolution and its future orientation; extinction as death that is necessary for life; and diversity as purity-we illustrate the truth discourses, underlying logics, and calculative technologies by which distinctions within nonhuman life are made and made meaningful. We argue that conservation is biopolitical not just in that it moves from controlling individuals to statistically managing populations and species, but also in that it extends the racialized logic of abnormality in its core notions of biological diversity and purity. In the logics of conservation and race, life produces diversity, conceived as variety of biological kinds; within that diversity exist kinds that foster ongoing life, which should be maximized, and kinds that are threats, which should be let die in the name of life in general.
Web 2.0 and social media applications that allow people to share, co-create and rate online content are crucial new ways for conservation organizations to reach audiences and for concerned individuals and organizations to be (seen as) ‘green’. These dynamics are rapidly changing the politics and political economy of nature conservation. By developing the concept of ‘nature 2.0’ and building on empirical insights, the article explores and theorizes these changes. It argues that online activities stimulate and complicate the commodification of biodiversity and help to reimagine ideas, ideals and experiences of (‘pristine’) nature. By exploring the implications of these arguments in relation to several key themes in new media studies, the article aims to provide building blocks for further investigations into the world of nature 2.0 and the effects of new media on human–nature dynamics more broadly.
The paper analyses the concept of the smart city in critical perspective, focusing on the power/knowledge implications for the contemporary city. On the one hand, smart city policies support new ways of imagining, organising and managing the city and its flows; on the other, they impress a new moral order on the city by introducing specific technical parameters in order to distinguish between the 'good' and 'bad' city. The smart city discourse may therefore be a powerful tool for the production of docile subjects and mechanisms of political legitimisation. The paper is largely based on theoretical reflections and uses smart city politics in Italy as a case study. The paper analyses how the smart city discourse proposed by the European Union has been reclassified to produce new visions of the 'good city' and the role of private actors and citizens in the management of urban development.
This article proposes a Foucaultian, yet more-than-human, conceptual framework for scholars of both international development and biopolitics in our current historical–geographical conjuncture: the ostensibly nascent Anthropocene. Under these conditions, it is argued that biopower operates across three primary axes: first, between differently ‘racialized’ populations of humans; second, between asymmetrically valued populations of humans and nonhumans; and, third, between humans, our vital support systems, and various types of emergent biosecurity threats. Indeed, one can observe biopower at work in governmental programmes to encourage specific forms of environmental citizenship, or, alternatively, to ensure the conservation of certain ‘charismatic megafauna’ at the expense of marginal human communities. In addition, emerging campaigns to identify and contain both harmful pathogens and their vector species constitute a third axis of human–nonhuman–nonhuman biopolitics, wherein the international community increasingly seeks to eliminate or contain life-forms that threaten both human communities and the ecological systems from which we derive our prosperity. In short, each of these sets of interventions proposes a governmental vision for the forms of life that states and development institutions can and should support, while implicitly approving that others may be ‘let die’. Suggesting that these are the parameters of the empirical problematic with which a properly (bio)political approach to development studies must engage, the article concludes with a further elucidation of these arguments in relation to four ‘sectoral impacts’ of environmental change that the World Bank has recently identified: (i) agriculture, (ii) water resources, (iii) ecosystem services, and (iv) emerging infectious diseases.