As the drone flies: Configuring a vertical politics of contestation within forest conservation

Indigenous-led responsible innovation: lessons from co-developed protocols to guide the use of drones to monitor a biocultural landscape in Kakadu National Park, Australia

“…This includes experimentations that Indigenous people around the world are leading and engaging in, exploring the use of monitoring technologies to tackle increasingly complex environmental management problems like weeds and feral animals, and to care for important species and habitats (Paneque-Gálvez et al 2014Arts, van Der Wal, and Adams 2015). However, despite the uptake of technology to monitor and manage Indigenous estates, there is scant published literature on ethical protocols to guide research collaborators in the negotiation and use of technology and the data it procures and produces so that the risks of emerging science and technologies can be mitigated and the principles of responsible innovation can be co-designed and co-developed with Indigenous people (but see Millner 2020).…”

Aerial visibilities: towards a visual sociology of the sky

“…2 Is the sky at risk of colonisation, and should we begin to think about the atmosphere above us as a volumetric resource that requires safeguarding from extensive militarisation and privatisation in the same way nationstates protect Antarctica? Thus, the constantly evolving question of who owns the sky relates to the limits of visibility as a relational quality (Brighenti 2007) and the politics of oversight and everyday vigilantism (Amoore 2007) as well as increasingly of vertical biopolitics related to contestation in conservation areas, specifically with the use of drones (Millner 2020). The increased use of drones in conservation projects implies a shift towards the vertically-assisted ordering of people and natural resources.…”

Geographies of science and technology 1: Boundaries and crossings

“…Edgerton, 2019) would move beyond the innovation paradigm, with its tendencies towards technological determinism and its tacit support for a political economy that privileges new frontiers of capital accumulation to the direct detriment of the labours of maintenance and care through which social, material and technoscientific worlds are continuously remade (Vinsel and Russell, 2020). Similarly to how geographies of science have emphasised diverse spaces of practise, geographers are showing a greater interest in the spaces of technology use, including how technologies reshape situated lifeworlds, and how users in turn shape or ‘re-script’ technological artefacts (Millner, 2020; Rose et al, 2018). Additionally, geographers have drawn on STS work on the sociology of expectations as well as insights from political economy to critically engage with the rhetoric and discursive practices of technological innovation, and their role in the production of space at local, regional and planetary scales (Bellamy and Palmer, 2019; Porter and Randalls, 2014; Vitale, 2017).…”