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.
Multispecies entanglement has been a major research focus in environmental humanities, aiming to rethink ontological and ethical possibilities, especially in urban settings, by attending to speculative other-than-human futures. This article dwells on already existing entanglements of multiple species of animals in Los Angeles, using empirical data (conversations from the social media platform Nextdoor) to describe these entanglements according to a fourfold framework—spatial, emotional, behavioral, and political. Drawing on the political philosophy of nondomination, it argues that existing entanglements are primarily arbitrary in a political sense, and that moving beyond them will require reducing this arbitrariness, even it if it means restricting human freedom or introducing new forms of control over animals, for a more-than-human city to be just.
The last couple of years have seen an uptick of different technological forms presented as mediators of human/nonhuman interaction, and these developments have been accompanied by an increase in scholarly interest. Here, we engage with the human urge to enter into communicative exchanges that implicate “other” entities, but we also wonder what is at stake, analytically and ethically, in these mediated communicative acts. Following an approach informed by work in the environmental humanities as well as science and technology studies and media studies, we explore three sites of (ostensible) encounters between humans and nonhuman others—plants and animals—and argue that while certain technological mediations can facilitate human “noticing” by rendering nonhuman others sense-able, it does not follow that such interventions open up a space where participants can meaningfully respond to each other.
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