<b>Engaging the Underground: An STS Field in Formation</b>

Abstract

Rather than existing a priori, the underground comes to be through interlinked political, economic, cultural, and technoscientific practices and processes. Underlying each of these are issues of knowledge, expertise and power that STS is uniquely positioned to explore. In this thematic collection, our focus on the underground draws attention to the work, knowledge, and placemaking activities of those engaged in mining and energy development. We focus on how questions about extraction and burial are posed and deliberated through maps and models. More generally, we highlight the contributions of STS Underground, a network that in its nascent stage is helping to connect the many STS scholars who seek to use the underground as a source, site, and symbol for thinking of the future of the field, as well as their personal interventions as engaged scholars.

When data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice

“…An extractive logic considers data and other materials as existing in an underground of resources, including but not limited to the earth's underground from where resources such as petroleum, minerals, and coal are extracted (Kinchy et al, 2018). We expand on this concept to consider the 'data underground,' which can take many forms, e.g.…”

“…In other words, rather than considering data as raw and extracted from an underground that has existed a priori, we see the underground as a politically, economically, culturally, and technoscientifically produced space from where data are extracted. We follow Abby Kinchy et al (2018) and see the data underground as a proxy for structurally produced sets of often invisibilized labour, practices, and relations that make taking possible.…”

“…Whether extraction is aimed at the earth or human activity, the extractive view involves a politics of visibilitywho gets to see the 'underground' of the earth or, in the case of data, the infrastructures, life supports, and relations that digital practices excavate. Seeing the underground is not just a matter of looking but requires specialized tools and knowledges in order to turn matter and relations into value-making products (Kinchy et al, 2018). Some of these sensing technologies travel between earthly and digital extraction practices.…”

“…As we continue our action-focused projects, which both create participatory civic technologies and new environmental data infrastructures, we look to existing examples of feminist data visualization (D'Ignazio & Klein, 2016) and critical data design practices (Costanza-Chock, 2018;Fortun et al, 2016) in order to consider how we can deepen our critique of extractive logic, even as it exists in our own practices, through material engagements. Some of these engagements include counter mapping (Kinchy et al, 2018) and community use of satellite and drone technologies to represent local, trans-generational knowledge. These exemplify environmental data practices that challenge the matrix of domination by offering a submerged perspective, which perceives local terrains as the site of knowledge, vitality, and livability (Gómez-Barris, 2017).…”

Disturbed Earth: Conceptions of the Deep Underground in Shale Extraction Deliberations in the US and UK

“…Analytical interest in the ethical and socio-technical dimensions of different forms of underground development contributes to a growing field of social science research and work in science, technology and society (STS) which addresses how the underground is studied, engaged with, known, and evaluated (Birkenholtz, 2018;Kinchy et al, 2018). This work draws on Williams (2008) to reconsider the physical world encountered below the Earth's surface, studying for example how 'the underground' becomes a metaphor for highly technological environments (Kinchy et al, 2018) or operates as a site where human activities typify projects of modernity (Disco, 2010). Such projects involve the transformation of nature into resources, the colonisation of territories and the ideological rendering of the natural world as manipulable matter to meet politico-economic imperatives (Merchant, 1990;Bauman, 1993).…”