Abstract
This paper contributes to the growing literature on ‘making and doing’ in Science and Technology Studies (STS) by describing and theorizing the teaching of making and doing. We describe a collaborative do-it-yourself (DIY) technology project taught simultaneously in Canada and the United States, in sociology and public health, to undergraduates with no prior electronics experience. Students built thermal flashlights – low cost digital tools for making thermal images – and employed them to research their surrounding environments. By making and using the thermal flashlights, learners investigated power in two senses: identifying social power relationships embedded within normally unquestioned infrastructures, and exploring these infrastructures’ connection to industrial forms of power, such as heat and electricity. Students and instructors came to understand how the control of power, light and temperature is vital to human-made infrastructure and environmental health threats that characterize the 21st century. Through this project, students went from being passive consumers of such power to become active investigators of their socio-technical systems by producing unique knowledge that enabled them to imagine how they might make and inhabit their environments differently. Breaking down the distinction between teaching and research, this article explores the promise of ‘making and doing’ in university courses to create new collaborative research platforms that could spread laterally and scale to transform social and technical infrastructures.
[After testing our Thermal Flashlight at the power plant], we saw a man next to Indian Pond. Andrea asked if he ever fished [near the effluent]. The man told us he fished there because there are sea-going trout there. He mentioned the chemicals that were in the water, and seemed skeptical about their regulation. He noted that ‘they’ check it from time to time and say it’s acceptable, but then he asked, ‘Acceptable to who?’
A thermal flashlight is a do-it-yourself (DIY), open-source technology with an infrared sensor and an LED light that ‘paints’ an object’s temperature on its surface: blue for relatively cold, red for relatively hot (Public Lab, 2015b, Figure 1). In the project described here, students could see not only differences in temperature, but could also recognize, appreciate, challenge and even make interventions into uneven power relations in local infrastructures. Along with maker-theorists such as Ratto (2011) and Ackerman (2000), we argue that using ‘material forms of engagement with technologies to supplement and extend critical reflection … reconnect[s] our lived experiences with technologies to [a] social and conceptual critique’ of power in complex sociotechnical systems (Ratto, 2011: 253). By making and using a thermal flashlight, students and instructors could ‘see’ and investigate power relations within technical systems of which they may not have been previously very aware. This also supported them in moving from being consumers of energy systems to becoming producers of new questions and knowledge about the technical infrastructures vital to their lives. Regardless of whether the data was used for public environmental advocacy (and sometimes it was), the practice of making and doing research oriented students to their daily lives in a new way.
Thermal Flashlight image of a heat vent.
This article describes how students in two undergraduate classes in two different countries in two different disciplines used the thermal flashlight to shed light on social, economic and cultural systems implicated within local energy infrastructures. At Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, an upper-level sociology undergraduate class in feminist technologies, led by Liboiron, focused on social justice issues. One of the students from this class, Kenny, is the lead author on this paper. At Northeastern University in Boston, United States, an undergraduate introduction to public health course, led by Wylie, provided a broad overview of public health, from infectious disease and health care infrastructure to social and environmental determinants of health. None of the students in either class had technical expertise in digital projects or coding before the course. We worked collaboratively to build the open-source thermal flashlights based on freely available hardware and software plans. Students then used the thermal flashlights to answer their own research questions about local energy environments. While energy, heat, electricity and social power are different things, students ‘saw’ relationships between them by creating research questions and tools that started as questions about heat. Across the two classes, these questions included: whether milk was kept at healthy temperatures in student residence refrigerators, whether air intake systems in the university were properly maintained, how uneven classroom temperatures might affect learning, whether and to what degree a local power plant was causing thermal pollution, and how heat leaks in cold public places might support a public commons for northern citizens.
The striking feature of the student projects that impressed instructors is that, despite different course aims and disciplines, this form of collaborative and interactive project enabled many students to arrive at nuanced critiques of the social relations inherent in an array of institutions and energy infrastructures that are otherwise taken for granted. These investigations clustered into three categories that demonstrated: (1) how ‘normal’ practices in homes and universities are constructed, rather than natural, enabling the reorientation of students from consumers of these spaces to producers of new, critical knowledge about them, (2) how personal consumption of energy connects to social-environmental dynamics of resource extraction by investigating regional power infrastructures, and (3) how to re-imagine energy infrastructures as more equitable access to infrastructures or sustainable practices. The thermal flashlight classroom project is a case of ‘making and doing politics’ in Science and Technology Studies (STS), a confluence of practice-based theory, and theory-informed practice that comes to bear on everyday life and infrastructure (Downey and Zuiderent-Jerak, 2016). By building and using thermal flashlights, students could ‘recover and explore the aspects of societies that have been suppressed, unarticulated, or denied’ in their communities (Wilson, 1993: 343). For students, power relations became manifest through lived experiences stemming from their use of these thermal flashlights.
Our article demonstrates and theorizes how to ‘make and do’ – how to theorize through the creation of something – as part of STS learning-research methods in a classroom by: contextualizing the thermal flashlight project through literature on civic and feminist technologies, outlining a critical social history of thermal imaging, and illustrating how students’ research transformed their engagement with embedded infrastructural power dynamics through a brief analysis of five student projects. We conclude by discussing the pedagogical promise of engaged making and doing STS projects like the thermal flashlight for enabling collaborative research, to critique, and even to change, sociotechnical systems.
Background traditions of technoscientific critique
Theorists and practitioners of critical making, speculative design and tactical media (e.g. Chidgey, 2014; DiSalvo, 2014; Eubanks, 2011; Ratto et al., 2014; Sengers et al., 2005) have developed forms of technological creation and pedagogy aimed to increase reflection about the political and social implications of technological design (e.g. Ratto, 2011: 253). While theorizing is always already embedded in infrastructures from libraries to search engines, building and using technologies can make latent or under-explored aspects of society explicit and visible, and thus available to students and the public for discussion. Artists and engineers have developed performative technologies described as Tactical Media to unsettle and question embedded power relationships: from Protest Drones to Air Quality Monitoring Pigeons, some of which make data and visualizations and some of which do not (Boler, 2008; Da Costa and Philip, 2008; Thompson and Sholette, 2004; Yoquinto, 2005).
Likewise, feminist STS scholars have extensively theorized how gender and power relations are embedded and naturalized in scientific research structures, procedures and technologies. As such, feminist theorists of technology have proposed new ways of building technology and doing science, because technologies are ways of life, social orders, practices of visualization. Technologies are skilled practices. How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinded? Who wears blinders? Who interprets the visual field? (Haraway, 1988: 587)
Visualizing technologies makes some things visible and others invisible. ‘[G]iven a particular measuring apparatus, certain properties become determinate, while others are specifically excluded. Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus’ (Barad, 2007: 17; also Crary, 1992; Murphy, 2006). At the same time, these questions about seeing can also be asked in terms of scientific observation and participation, and as such about who gets to ask research questions (Colborn et al., 1997; Liboiron and Molloy, 2017; O’Brien, 1993; Subramaniam, 2014).
Changing who asks scientific and technical questions influences ‘what to see for’ and ‘whom to see with’, and as such are central to participatory citizen science. Citizen science includes non-accredited researchers in scientific practices, yet the term encompasses a range of practices that can have participants acting merely as voiceless human sensors gathering data or fleshy algorithms recognizing objects in photographs. In participatory citizen science, on the other hand, non-accredited scientists are full researchers and collaborators, with or without accredited scientists, and create research questions, design experiments, collect and analyze data, and disseminate findings that may or may not look like ‘capital S’ science (CLEAR, 2018; McQuillan, 2014). Sometimes this process also involves designing and using open science, do-it-yourself or do-it-with-others hardware to gather data without the need for grants or institutional support. As such, participatory citizen science and technology creation are approaches ‘to critical technological [and scientific] citizenships [grounded in] the insights of broadly participatory, democratic methods of knowledge generation’ (Eubanks, 2011: 104), as they can include a broader range of users and researchers than is usually found in accredited science (Liboiron and Molloy, 2017).
Although participatory citizen science can offer a critique-through-practice of power relations in technoscience, questions posed from this perspective may still leave epistemological hierarchies unchallenged. For example, author Liboiron’s participatory citizen science project with fishermen and fisherwomen in Fogo Island, Newfoundland (CLEAR, 2015) leverages ocean temperatures to answer local research questions. But it does not question the hierarchy that has long privileged scientific data over local knowledge so much as create local capacity to use the ‘tools of the master’ (Lorde, 2003) to differently articulate what is already known. Civic science, by contrast, is ‘a science that questions the state of things, rather than a science that simply serves the state’ (Fortun and Fortun, 2005: 44, 50). When paired with participatory citizen science, civic science can ‘leverage tactics seen in critical making communities to question and transform how and who can make credible and actionable knowledge’ (Wylie et al., 2014: 116) in ways that can simultaneously question power relations and produce new knowledge. This is the goal of the thermal flashlight project.
Un-accredited community members, including but not limited to undergraduate students, are often mistaken as non-experts and excluded from active participation in examining environmental health issues, such as toxic contamination. Civic technoscience can be useful in environmental health and justice struggles by encouraging the development of research tools that require local participation in making new questions, technologies and knowledge institutions (Wylie et al., 2014). This strain of research and practice has expanded who can build, use, and ask questions with environmental monitoring devices. Examples range from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade (2018), which uses tools like five-gallon buckets and the iWitness Pollution Map to help fence-line communities make polluting industries accountable to health concerns, to Public Lab (2018) for Open Technology and Science, an NGO co-founded by author Wylie that creates and tests do-it-yourself environmental monitoring tools and provides an open forum so anyone in any community (with Internet access and interest) can add to, tweak or use these tools. In cases like these, people make technologies and collect systematic knowledge about local environments to challenge environmental damage that is unevenly distributed along lines of race, class and geography (Berdik, 2015; Erbentraut, 2015; Pierre-Louis, 2014). While many of these communities are assumed to be ‘out there’, separate from academia’s ivory tower, many of our students and colleagues live in these places, and there are also uneven harms distributed within university communities. Indeed, one of the goals of the thermal flashlight project was to bring students into their own community infrastructures in a way that showed these uneven distributions.
Taken together, these traditions answer the call of Eubanks (2011) for ‘an approach to critical technological citizenships education based on the insights of broadly participatory, democratic methods of knowledge generation’ that supports ‘the goal of creating collective knowledge, the practice of peoples science, and the exercise of power in political movement’ (p. 104). STS researchers are bringing these modes of action-based inquiry from perspectives of making, feminism and civic/citizen science. Increasingly, STS scholars are moving from writing about the activities of scientists and engineers, particularly concerning environmental justice (Allen, 2003; Brown and Mikkelson, 1997; Ottinger and Cohen, 2011; TallBear, 2013), and analyzing the ‘activist’ or non-traditional scientists who work with them (Allen, 2004; Brown et al., 2006; Murphy, 2006), to participating in and collaborating with community based organizations (CBOs) and non-profits (NGOs) on the ground (Dillon et al., 2017; Fortun, 2009; Jalbert et al., 2017; Martin, 2016; Sellers et al., 2017).
This paper extends this growing literature and set of practices by demonstrating and theorizing how to bring these traditions into the classroom. By making do-it-yourself, open-source environmental monitoring tools like the thermal flashlight, students have routes into understanding and questioning their participation in the power relationships endemic to technical infrastructures by generating their own knowledge about their environments through experience. What can their technologies ‘see’, especially since heat maps are not automatically power maps? Why are some things visible and others not? What is missing? Why are some sites more or less visible, more or less accessible, more or less feasible for environmental monitoring even within their home institutions and communities? How did other people see students when they were engaged in technological creation and use? What were students’ roles and responsibilities as creators and wielders of thermal flashlights, and how was this different from their usual classroom and technology user experiences? Such questions and experiences transform students from consumers of their environments to researchers of systematic power relationships in those environments. Importantly, we sought to use making and doing STS in the classroom to break down perceived boundaries and hierarchical relationships between pedagogy and research, community and ivory tower, practice and theory.
History of thermal imaging and the thermal flashlight
FLIR grants forces the ability to maneuver under the cloak of darkness, giving soldiers the power to ‘own the night’. … They can peer through dust storms, see enemies in hiding and get high-resolution pictures without giving away their positions. (Raytheon, 2015)
Before we discuss student projects, we will report what the instructors told students: The instruments we are about to use are already implicated in politics (Crary, 1992; Murphy, 2006; Winner, 1980). Thermal imaging such as the kind produced by the thermal flashlight is embroiled in power relations, due to its history, costs, normal uses, and the groups who tend to design and use it. The following short history of thermal imaging illustrates how the do-it-yourself version of the thermal flashlight challenges many of the values and politics that are part of traditional thermal imaging technologies.
Infrared radiation is invisible radiant energy from heat that has longer wavelengths than the light visible to the human eye. Thermal imaging picks up these wavelengths with sensors and translates them into human-readable colors. The technology was developed in 1929 for anti-aircraft defense in Britain (Naughton, 2004), and has since been primarily used in military technology. Forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras, the most common type of thermal cameras used today, were first developed in 1958 by the company FLIR Systems. Their cameras allowed military personnel to detect heat differences in objects more than half a mile away (Pas, 2014). ‘[P]ersonnel, equipment and other objects can be separated from cluttered backgrounds and foliage’, allowing easy and efficient detection of military targets (Nielsen, 2004: 56).
Although the company has recently attempted to reduce the cost of thermal imaging technology, these cameras remain centrally affiliated with the promotion and development of offensive military tactics. Thermal cameras ‘cost less than a tenth of what they cost a decade ago’ and various companies continue to make them cheaper and more accessible to a variety of consumers (Nielsen, 2004: 48). In 2014, FLIR (2014) Systems introduced a thermal imaging device for smartphones, which have developed into a range of produce of varying sophistication, with the most basic model retailing for approximately US $200 in 2018 (FLIR, 2018a). Thermal imaging is now used in firefighting, home inspections, search and rescue, and intruder detection services, where it retains ties to surveillance (Dennis et al., 2003). Despite new uses for thermal camera technology, such as night vision capabilities in automobiles and ‘do-it-yourself security systems’, in 2017 approximately 35% of FLIR’s revenue came from work within the government and defense operating portfolio (including border surveillance and ‘unmanned solutions’) (FLIR, 2018b).
The thermal flashlight created by students, by contrast, is open source and costs around $50USD for parts. It was first conceptualized by a research group at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) led by two of Public Lab’s co-founders, Jeff Warren and Sara Wylie (Figure 2). Designs and test results were uploaded onto the Public Lab (2015a, Warren, 2011) website, an online collaborative environment where input, questions, changes, and additions to research are shared, including insights by students in the classes discussed here. The thermal flashlight emerged from RISD’s Environmental Justice Research Cluster’s interest in ‘data-rich images’ that can make research more immediately legible and comprehensible to non-technical audiences. In data-rich images, color changes in an image are visually correlated with the phenomenon investigated. The first data-rich images produced by the group were made using a Roomba vacuum cleaner hacked to sense alcohol. The beauty of the Roomba’s room-cleaning geometric algorithm had already been captured by long exposure photographs taken by artists. Wylie and Warren hacked the Roomba with a low-cost alcohol sensor to test whether it could detect alcohol. These successful investigations produced the group’s first ‘data-rich images’.
How the Thermal Flashlight works (Image by Jeff Warren, CC).
Based on these successes, group member Kyah Shim developed the thermal flashlight after an advocacy group in Brooklyn expressed an interest in visualizing practices of landlords systematically under-heating homes. Sharing the tool on Public Lab allowed it to spread in an open source fashion beyond RISD (Public Lab, 2016).
Following Shim’s basic design, which the online Public Lab community has since improved, students in both undergraduate classes made thermal flashlights using the open-source electronics platform Arduino (Figure 3). They programmed their flashlights based upon the expected temperature ranges of their research sites so that the red-green-blue LED light changed color according to temperature readings. The thermal flashlight, while deriving from military interests in remote detection of enemies in the field, is ‘exceedingly unfaithful to [its] origins’ (Haraway, 1991: 152); here, it is used locally rather than remotely, enables non-experts to both build and employ its imaging technology, and seeks to disrupt hierarchical power relationships rather than enforce them.
A completed thermal flashlight in the Memorial University of Newfoundland classroom after students spent one seventy-five minute class period building it. Photo permissions were obtained from students.
Like a FLIR camera, a thermal flashlight measures heat differences using a non-contact infrared sensor. However, unlike its military counterpart, it uses a red-green-blue LED light to ‘paint’ surface temperatures directly onto the materials under examination, attaching the user to the technology and bringing the user into the environment being explored. The user’s visibility while making the data-rich pictures within the environment under study potentially makes her more accountable for her actions than remote sensing provides, since she is attached to the technology and is often in the images (Offenhuber, 2014; Wylie et al., 2014). Moreover, field work provides opportunities that armchair theorizing cannot; for example, engaging in conversations with residents of their research sites helped guide student research trajectories, pointed out areas for data collection, and made students more aware of power imbalances that may have remained hidden without local interaction.
The excerpt at the beginning of this paper is one such example, where the group’s research focus shifted to examining the relationships between the local power plant, the natural environment, and the fishing community because of a happenstance conversation with a local fisherman. In another example, an all-women group of sociology students (Poole, Young and Greeley) wrote: We also found that during our building process we experienced feelings of skepticism from outsiders regarding our ability to actually build our technology. Fathers, boyfriends, brothers and [male] hardware salesmen all assumed that we needed more help than was necessary. This common, gendered stereotype illustrates ‘the taken-for-granted association of men and machines’.
Most women in the class had similar experiences, and we spent considerable time discussing this with the whole class, with one student indicating that now she ‘got’ feminism. While students indicated that they certainly believed the feminist STS readings done in class, to have man after man express skepticism about their ability to build and use a technology brought the readings into a new register of understanding. As such, the politics of visibility is not only about what data is made visible, but who is made visible through technology creation and data collection.
Conducting research with the thermal flashlight and becoming technoscientist citizens
The main lessons the instructors sought to teach our students is that technological artifacts have politics (Winner, 1980), and that students can participate in these politics (Eubanks, 2011), even if the data are never taken up in formal processes like long-term monitoring or government legislation. Following two classes on how to make the thermal flashlights, students were instructed to create original research questions concerning temperature, and then explore, document and analyze the process of answering that question. These questions were about power in two forms. First, they examined power in the practical sense of electricity generation and heating/cooling systems. Secondly, they investigated power as a social relation and tool that normalizes certain infrastructures, while making other infrastructures relatively inaccessible to users. Following Bowker and Star (2000: 35), a defining feature of infrastructures is how they are ‘sunk into, inside of other structures, social arrangements, and technologies’. The following four student investigations ‘surfaced’ infrastructure to make these structures, arrangements, and technologies visible and open to debate and even action. More importantly, they made students into researchers, into ‘seers’ of uneven power relations. The following case studies include some of the technical and scientific details necessary for teaching a similar class.
Case 1: Milk and refrigerators: Josef Judas, Hana Saydek, and Valerie O’Rourke, Northeastern University
STS research has demonstrated that mundane technical artifacts frequently carry politics that are often uninvestigated (Cowan, 1983). As everyday consumers of technologies, users with are frequently ill-equipped to investigate or fix things like refrigerators and dishwashers. Many student groups used their flashlights to investigate their lived spaces. One group interested in food safety compared three different refrigerators in three university dorms to determine the consistency of temperatures (Figure 4). The students hypothesized that ‘[r]efrigerators in older buildings will have poorer insulation and cooling systems; [sic] therefore creating a greater range of temperatures within the fridge’. Because the class was structured to teach the students basic scientific methods, they defined a method to promote consistent results:
To test their hypothesis, they took thermal images of three different refrigerators in three separate locations.
Each fridge was kept shut until the moment the camera began to film.
Each fridge was kept closed 15 minutes prior to filming.
All fridges were set to their ‘standard’ temperature (middle-range on the dial).
A 30-second-long exposure photo was taken as the thermal flashlight was moved through the entirety of each fridge (Figure 5).
Calibrating their flashlight with a thermometer allowed them to know what specific temperature each color indicated.
Student design of thermal camera casing with a diffuser. Because of the diffuser they added to the flashlight, their long-exposure photographs were of particularly high quality.
Fridge 1: ‘1. Green areas indicate warmth. 2. Large range of temperature. 3. Coolest nearing cooling vent.’ Fridge 2: ‘1. Predominantly blue fridge correlates with cooler temperature. 2. More even color throughout picture indicates less range in temperature.’ Fridge 3: ‘1. Teal color indicates a medium level of warmth between the coldest fridge 1 and 2. 2. More even range of temperatures.’
They concluded that their hypothesis was correct: ‘[O]lder fridges display a greater range of temperature in their thermal imaging photos.’ They also determined that ‘the overall temperature of older refrigerators was warmer than that of newer refrigerators’. Upon seeing the relative warmth of Fridge 1, the group discovered that the particular model had been discontinued due to problems with maintaining temperature. This finding raised new questions for students about the university’s dormitory health and safety standards. Moreover, the flashlight provided them with ‘charismatic data’ (Liboiron, 2016; Pine and Liboiron, 2015) that was readily legible and clearly illustrated the discovery to the university administration.
Everyday technologies are frequently dismissed as apolitical, and environmental politics are often considered to be happening elsewhere, on distant ice-caps or rain-forests or outside communities (Cronon, 1995). Yet, as this student case study shows, familiar, urban, lived spaces and their technologies have connections to legal frameworks, economics and institutional relations that affect the lived experiences of students.
Case 2: Heat in classrooms: Kathryn Tomase, Evan Jacobson, Elikem Tettey-Tamaklo, Northeastern University
Another Northeastern case study examined energy use in classrooms during off hours to further explore the connection between our internal and external environments. Northeastern has been described as the ‘greenest’ campus in the USA by GreenMetric UI, largely because of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified campus buildings (Kornwitz, 2014). An active undergraduate student effort on campus exists to encourage the university to divest from fossil fuels. In this political context, students investigated energy use in classrooms after school hours ‘to observe possible wastefulness, for example [through] unnecessary heating/lighting’. The group attached their hardware to a tennis racket that increased their physical reach in large rooms (Figure 6). Among their findings, they discovered that walls closer to windows were cooler than the rest of the room. They argued this temperature differential was likely due to poor insulation by the windows and resulted in wasteful heat loss. They also found significant differences in temperature in campus rooms, ranging from 60
Thermal Flashlight mounted on a tennis racket to increase the reach of students conducting research on classroom temperatures.
Some students in the class were members of the undergraduate environmental organization HEAT (Husky Environmental Action Team). At the time of this writing, HEAT subsequently its their own thermal flashlight workshops on campus and participated in making a water-borne version of the thermal flashlight to study emissions from the Mystic River power plant (see Hanley, 2016).
Case 3: Holyrood power plant: Catherine Kenny, Andrea Cnudde, and Simba Chiripanhura, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Sociology student projects at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, were geared towards social justice issues. One student group trekked off campus to the local power plant. The following case study is written in first-person by group member and first author of this article, Catherine Kenny.
The Holyrood Thermal Generating Station in Holyrood, Newfoundland generates 15
Our first visit to the power plant was relatively unsuccessful. We asked the security guards at the Holyrood plant if we could visit the effluent site and were told we would need to call the environmental department. We left. We assumed the effluent was located on the plant’s private land and that we would not be able to get close enough to the discharge point to capture meaningful data, so for a few weeks we did not even attempt to contact anyone about accessing the site. We were later surprised to learn that the effluent is located on public land, is a common fishing spot for local members of the community, and is accessible by foot. Our own assumptions about the exclusionary nature of state sites of energy production (not for average consumers!) actively hindered our research process. Through this series of exchanges, we became interested in determining the accessibility of energy production sites (and potential sites of thermal pollution) to everyday citizens, as these infrastructures are typically ‘private and invisible’ to most consumers and began researching literature on the issue (Shove and Warde, 2002: 239).
Now we knew we had a right to be at the effluent site. Using our newly waterproofed thermal flashlight (Figure 8), we accessed the plant’s effluent site on foot to calibrate our technology and test for thermal pollution. We took a control temperature reading away from the effluent site and compared this to seven temperature readings at various points around the site, including where the two discharge areas released effluent into the water (Figure 9). The surface water temperature of the effluent ranged from 11
Aerial image via Google Maps of the Holyrood Thermal Generating Station and the testing locations of the outflow to Conception Bay. The colored area indicates the temperature findings: the effluent runs down the left-hand side of the outflow area (from numbers 3 to 7 in the image above), resulting in warmer water in that area.
The waterproofed thermal flashlight. The yellow light indicates a mid-range air temperature.
Using the Thermal Flashlight to measure the temperature of effluent. The light is glowing red, indicating warm temperatures.
On our second visit to the plant, we ran into a local fisherman. This was a turning point in our project, as we saw how our readings of government reports, measurements, and STS literature enabled us to understand everyday conversations differently – as political statements, rather than merely complaints, data or stories. The fisherman spoke with some skepticism about the health of the aquatic environment around the plant, noting that the effluent contains harmful chemicals, although he was unsure which ones. He also stated that the presence of such chemicals is widely known and accepted among locals, many of whom fish in the area despite this knowledge. We told him about our thermal readings. In this context, the man spoke about the seemingly arbitrary nature of the government’s environmental assessments. He said he knows environmental officials monitor and test the water and say the levels of chemicals are acceptable, but then asked: ‘Acceptable to whom?’ The fisherman’s incisive question about who and what define ‘acceptable effluents’, and his implicit alienation from the decision-making process despite its direct impacts on his health and livelihood, are symptomatic of Newfoundland’s historical and continuing struggles over self-determination in the face of modernization (Sengers et al., 2016). This resonated with our own assumed alienation from the effluent site when we began the project. The conversation was more telling than any map we could have produced, but it was only in producing the map that we came to the conversation.
Natural resource destruction, access to resources, and human-induced environmental degradation are core issues in Newfoundland’s history and culture, which is strongly tied to aquatic resource governance. Though climate change and air pollution are issues here, fish and fishing have been at the forefront of local environmental management debates for decades. For hundreds of years, the cod fishery had a central role in Newfoundland economy and culture; the socioeconomic structure of the province, the geographical locations in which people lived, and people’s ability to sustain themselves all depended on the fishery and the ability to access marine natural resources (Ommer, 2002). However, in the early 1990s, the federal government declared a moratorium on the cod fishery due to overfishing caused by the prioritization of industrial fishing methods (Bavington, 2011). An estimated 9,000
Participating in the research process made us more aware of our own role in sociotechnical systems of unsustainable energy and resource consumption. It also made us consider how electrical generation affects a community’s ability to access natural resources (i.e. by fishing) and the health of those natural resources. While making the technology and its heat map were important goals, doing the research, accessing the land and talking to local people were more valuable activities, as they allowed us to ‘see’ connections between electricity, heat and power in a more concrete and nuanced way than before. For me personally, the research process offered many consciousness-raising and surprising moments, such as successfully maneuvering the plant’s bureaucratic structure and experiencing pollution that is typically ‘invisible’ in a more material way. For instance, while I expected the plant would increase the water temperature around the effluent site, I was surprised by the degree of temperature variation in such a small area and at the heat I could feel emanating from the discharge points. I was used to thinking of pollution as something that was invisible and subtle, if pervasive. Finally, although our conversation with the fisherman was brief, the political nature of our research and his personal experiences with the effluent site showed us how our project links to Newfoundland’s wider, ongoing issues of power and authority over natural resources. Even though we chose a research question based on heat, all roads led back to access and control over natural resources, historically and currently two key struggles in the province.
Case 4: Strip mall commons: Grace Akese, Juls Mack and David Mandville, Memorial University of Newfoundland
A distinct characteristic of outport [rural] Newfoundland communities is common space. Rooted in the medieval open-field system, the Commons is shared public resources open for anyone to use. Our project aims to unveil the potential for the Commons within the outdoor urban infrastructure of Churchill Square [a local strip mall] by locating relative heat differences – that is, we wanted to find out which areas in the Square provided a bit of warmth during the long, cold winter. Locating these ‘hot spots’ lets us imagine the possibility of public congregation or reclaimed community space.
While more than half of Newfoundland’s population lives in or near St. John’s, the province’s capital city, the rest of the population lives in small, often isolated, villages and hamlets – locally known as outports – that rely on fishing and ‘making do’ as a way of life. These communities have been in a long fight over their right to government-funded infrastructure such as wharfs and medical care (Sengers, 2011). This, tied to remoteness and the island’s characteristic extreme and unpredictable weather, has resulted in a strong culture of coming together, ‘making do’, sharing, and ‘watching out’ for neighbors. During the winter of 2014, every student in the class lived through #DarkNL, nearly a week of rolling electrical blackouts across the province. As temperatures dropped, many people lost electricity, and, as a result, heat; water pipes burst and homes were evacuated across St. John’s. As in many disasters, people came together to share heat and other resources. Students experienced energy insecurity, and the communal organization of social space common in outport Newfoundland identity and practice was suddenly evident in the capital.
A student group named the Firelog Collective (named after their casing (Figure 10) and in reference to how many urban homes had to turn to wood stove heating during #DarkNL) re-imagined a new power infrastructure they called a ‘heat commons’ for the equitable use of public space in the cold Newfoundland environment. Using their thermal flashlight, they created a map of areas where the temperature was noticeably above the outdoor temperature during the day and night (Figure 11). They then distributed the map publicly as a ’zine, sharing it with local businesses, student organizations, residents of an apartment building (including where their professor lived), and on Facebook. Using the flashlight, they re-imagined what was inhabited as a privatized space as a public commons by investigating and publicizing available but un-noted resources.
Our project is largely informed by the idea that the city is something in the ‘making’ (Simone, 2011), and that urban spaces are constituted by the subjects and socialites of the people who live in it and as an assemblage of human and nonhuman interactions (Amin, 2008; Latour et al., 1998). That is, we can configure how the urban is experienced/done and we can ‘do’ public spaces in diverse ways. Using the flashlight to measure heat differences, we located and mapped hotspots in the Churchill square area of St John’s. These hotspots [have the potential to] expand the community use of the Churchill square area. More importantly and from a social justice perspective, it allows privately owned infrastructure to be used in diverse ways by a broader spectrum of people, particularly for shelter and warmth.
The Firedog Collective’s fire log; their thermal flashlight was mounted to a piece of firewood now commonly stockpiled in homes after #DarkNL disrupted electricity delivery in the province during the winter of 2014.
One side of the ’Zine, ‘Hotspots in Churchill Square’.
Like that of the group that visited the Holyrood power plant, one of the main learning outcomes was about how easy it is to traverse private and public spaces, because the lines are not as clear as assumed. The students would go to Churchill Square at night so that their visualization devices would work in the low light, and thus were crossing loading docks, garbage areas and empty storefronts that were mainly absent of employees and customers. Not only did they argue that ‘privately owned infrastructure [can] be used in diverse ways by a broader spectrum of people’ through a heat commons, but they also became that ‘broader spectrum of people’ as researchers. This outcome exceeded instructor’s intentions.
We conclude with the Firelog Collective’s case study because it offers an example of how the students used the thermal flashlight project to imagine and create new possibilities for inhabiting their local physical environments, the goal of critical making. At the same time, this exemplary student project also shows how learning about some aspects of power and infrastructure continues to naturalize other parts; the students’ appeal to the ‘commons’ as something inherently good and as a crucial part of outport culture continues an ongoing and all-too-prevalent erasure of the Indigenous Beothuk and Mi’kmaq land on which the Newfoundland ‘commons’ are built. Thus, while we want to highlight and celebrate how making and doing in classrooms allow students (and professors!) to change their relationships to infrastructure from one of consumption to one of technological citizenship, it is also crucial to stay with the flashlight metaphor, where the beam of light illuminates some things but not others, by design. This compromise is characteristic of all technological systems and research (Liboiron, 2017; Winner, 1980), but, given the political nature of technology, research, and design, is crucial to be aware of when engaging in pedagogical and technological activities.
Conclusion: Electricity, power, action
The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them. Michel Foucault (Chomsky and Foucault, 2006)
We learned about sociotechnical infrastructures of power with a flashlight. The thermal flashlight project links learning to research to action by making connections between artifacts, infrastructures and power, where power is both the theoretical framework that describes inequitable social processes and relationships, and the material combustive force behind industrialization. The stakes of this kind of practice-based-learning are high: In the Anthropocene (Todd, 2015; Whyte, 2017), the magnitude of industry-induced environmental change has become apparent to a broader swath of people globally, while many of these people simultaneously experience a philosophical, cultural and technical paralysis on an individual and community scale about how we might prevent or ameliorate problems as large as climate change and toxic contamination – though of course, some have been dealing with problems at this scale and severity for many generations (Todd, 2015; Whyte, 2017). As social movements such as Idle No More have taught us, to meet these problems at scale we need to develop techniques of learning, teaching, and research that can make lateral connections to other efforts that scale up to system-wide disruption. In this project, we see and share such promise.
In the classroom, students became producers of knowledge about the infrastructures they participate in as – usually uncritical – consumers. As consumers, they can do ‘ten small things to save the planet’, a mode of action that is disheartening in its lack of scalability and misplacement of politics. Instead, they encountered infrastructure, a collection organizational practices, technical parts, institutional jurisdictions and social norms that transcend and even direct local agency. Early in the course, students advocated for universal design and technological fixes. After they became makers, doers and researchers, they came to understand, in practice, that ‘correct’ technological designs are nonexistent, and that more or less appropriate designs exist for particular questions, groups and locations. They gained a sense of agency, but also became familiar with technological failure (so much technological failure!), the frustrations of trial and error, and the friction of field sites. The scientific and technological method proved to be a hot mess rather than the step-by-step process represented in their text books. These experiences are essential elements of agency and friction that are often left out of ‘empowerment’ models of classroom technology, where students merely create technology but never work to fix it or use it to answer questions, and where they often lack the opportunity to learn experientially about the larger socio-technical structures of which they and their technologies are already participants.
One of the most promising outcomes of the two classes was that all students, regardless of discipline, country or research question, had projects that started in their own lived experiences but scaled up to infrastructure and wider social relations. Students’ research questions can be categorized by whether they asked about individual artifacts, such as refrigerators or lights, whether they engaged in larger systems, such as university campuses or electricity grids and power stations, and whether they moved the critique into imagining different infrastructural systems. But they all ‘criticized the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent’ (Foucault, in Chomsky and Foucault, 2006). This happened regardless of whether and to what degree ‘useful’ or ‘valid’ data visualizations were created; in making and doing, it is the practice that teaches, not the product.
Crucially, classroom learning was linked to action. As professors, we teach students about structural power relations, injustice and long-term threats to human and ecological health on unprecedented scales. Our students can get depressed, and so can we. The thermal flashlight project, small and short-term as it is, puts action on the table. Even if it is ‘only’ research, we are already doing something about the problems in front of us, as we investigate them. Action-Based Research Methods (2018) are research methods that ‘do good’ during the process of problem formation and data collection rather than after the fact once findings are in hand.
Finally, the thermal flashlight project demonstrates the essential role of collaboration for STS teaching-research-action in places with environmental priorities. Collaborating across classes meant that projects from both classes came together to form a shared knowledge base, before, during and after the semester. Both professors relied on each other’s knowledge to create stronger lesson plans and resources, as well as to troubleshoot, and remained in constant communication with one another. Students listening to one another’s presentations within classes built on each other’s work, shifting teaching towards a peer-to-peer network through workshops and presentations. As students in the two classes described their projects to each other and wrote technical reports for each other and outside users on Public Lab, they learned how their own research can be used by individuals and communities outside of academia. Indeed, the student research notes on Public Lab have been read thousands of times, collectively amounting to over 10,000 views. Students within classes and groups co-generated ideas for both technical improvements and new research questions and constantly helped each other troubleshoot. These discussions, online and in the classroom, allow both students and teachers to form and experience learning communities. These kinds of learning communities are required if we are to think and make our way out of the infrastructural bounds deeply separating extraction, production, and consumption that characterize 21st century environmental crises.
Imagine the body of research STS could generate if classes across countries and disciplines picked up the student investigation of thermal pollution from their local power plants as in the Holyrood case study. We could build interconnected cases that explore the impacts of power plants on ecological and social environments; we could produce a set of questions that scaled. Similarly, the project on heat commons could be adapted to cities elsewhere, creating a library of local ’zines. The project could be inverted for cities facing heat waves to create and share knowledge of cooling centers (Kenner, 2017). This model of actionable knowledge commons is already in play: Lois Gibb’s Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (Center for Health, Environment & Justice, 2018) developed in response to the Love Canal chemical disaster; the Louisiana Bucket Brigade’s (2018) repository of eyewitness reports and photos of pollution in the Gulf Region; and the crowd-sourced Independent Media Center (2018) makes ‘grassroots, non-corporate’ news coverage possible by networking.
The environmental problems we face in the twenty-first century are dispersed, often difficult to see, and are part of both local and global infrastructural arrangements, making collaborations between disciplines, types of expertise, and geographical locations essential. Connecting such projects could begin to rework and rescale how we inhabit and study our environments, providing the field with new methods for collective learning, research, and action. To encourage this effort, we have uploaded our students’ reports (via Creative Commons), teaching tools, and how-to guides to the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR, 2015, 2018) and plans and notes are on the Public Lab (2018) site. We invite you to take up this or similar projects. Both students and instructors need to re-imagine ‘the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent,’ including how we teach, learn, and research so we are ‘making and doing’ politics rather than only speaking about them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to our collaborators in pedagogy, including students in MUN SOCI4107 (Feminist Technologies): Caitlin Adams, Grace Akese, Aylvia Amedior, Sheena Blanchard, Simba Chiripanhura, Andrea Cnudde, Megan Foresey, Juls Mack, David Mandville, Kora Liegh Russell, Kaitlind Spurrel, Krysta Tobin; students in Northeastern’s PHTH 2350 (Community and Public Health): Corie Asseo, Maeve Bell, Carol Brenner, John Berrigan, Tracy Buechele, Erik Hanley, Jee-Eun Heo, Noor Jandali, Josef Judas, William Manning, Courtney Mckenzie, Valerie O’Rourke, Christina Ransom, Hana Saydek, Catherine Weerts, and John Zhao; Dr. Monica Ramirez-Andreotta and her students in PHTH 2350: Henry Ca, Andrew Conner, Stefania Fernandez Amadiio, Melissa Giblin, Evan Jacobson, Alexa Kacin, Fanta Kamara, Jamie Kessler, Patrick Li, Keishi Nambara, Emily Polhemus, Kijiro So, Miriam Stats, Katherine Torres, Brian Wu, Mara Berganovsky;; and special thanks to Erik Hanley for the preparation of this manuscript. Special thanks to Public Laboratory for Open Technology for hosting projects and its ongoing commitment to open science and technologies. Thank you to the three anonymous reviewers who gave sharp, insightful, and generous comments on an earlier version of this text, as well as to editors for their editing labor and care.
We acknowledge that the Newfoundland case studies occurred on the ancestral Lands of the Mi’kmaq and Beothuk. We would also like to acknowledge the Inuit of Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut and the Innu of Nitassinan, and their ancestors, as the original peoples of Labrador. The Northeastern cases were carried out on the traditional land of the Massa-adchu-es-et and Wampanoag peoples.
Both Liboiron and Wylie have worked with Public Lab, which is used as a platform for research dissemination, in the piece. Wylie was an early member of Public Lab and is described here as a co-founder.
Funding
Funding came from Memorial University of Newfoundland Department of Sociology Undergraduate Research Fund.