Feminist digital natures

Abstract

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.

Digital geographies and ecologies

“…This burgeoning body of research examines the role of digital technologies in mediating naturecultures (e.g. Blue, 2016;Davies, 2000;Nelson et al, 2022;Stinson, 2017;von Essen et al, 2021). Specifically, it advocates an analytical framework to researching human-non-human relations across three core conceptual strands: materiality, encounters, and governance.…”

“…Castree, 2012;Whatmore, 2006). A wide range of research strands from across the social sciences and humanities already spans these shared interests and is attentive to their difference, which informs digital ecologies as an analytical framework (for example, Büscher, 2016;Nelson et al, 2022;Parrika, 2015a;van der Wal and Arts, 2015;Verma, 2021).…”

Where are rooted networks in digital political ecologies?

“…Rooted networks and FPE more broadly offer many insights of relevance to digital political ecologists. We argue elsewhere for a feminist digital natures (FDN) approach that "combines feminist epistemologies and practices with an understanding that digital technologies mediate and co-produce many natures" (see Nelson et al, 2022). Here, we focus on writing as a key Consider using or adapting the app-walk through method (Light et al, ) to guide a closer reflection on using and experiencing various technologies.…”

“…This may happen more often in work that does not present the experiences of the individual producers and users of the technologies under exploration or that fails to situate researchers in their work. We notice that conclusions drawn in digital political ecology research lean into 'universal' explanations and tend toward techno-dystopic conclusions where technology reproduces already existing power relations (e.g., capitalist exploitation) (Leszczynski, 2020;Elwood, 2021;Nelson et al, There are e orts to ground digital political ecology in material environments, often through a focus on the energy involved in digital processes (for example, see Lally et al ( ) on the material impacts of Bitcoin mining in Chelan County, Washington).…”

“…Assumptions about the digital can also reinforce political ecology research as principally about large-scale conservation, energy production, agricultural technologies or environmental governance, while in our experience, other more mundane and intimate topics receive little attention, such as digital birding communities in neighborhood parks or the use of body-monitoring apps (Nelson et al, 2022). Along these lines, an abstract, written account of the digital runs the risk of portraying technology as neutral or apolitical (Nost, 2022).…”