Environmental data justice (EDJ) emerges from conversations between data justice and environmental justice while identifying the limits and tensions of these lenses. Through a reflexive process of querying our entanglement in non-innocent relations, this paper develops and engages EDJ by examining how it informs the work of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), a distributed, consensus-based organization that formed in response to the 2016 US presidential election. Through grassroots archiving of data sets, monitoring federal environmental and energy agency websites, and writing rapid-response reports about how federal agencies are being undermined, EDGI mobilises EDJ to challenge the 'extractive logic' of current federal environmental policy and data infrastructures. 'Extractive logic' disconnects data from
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. As a distributed, consensus‐based organisation, EDGI has worked to document, contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practices in the US. One project EDGI has undertaken is the grassroots archiving of government environmental data sets through our involvement with the DataRescue movement. However, over the past year, our focus has shifted from saving environmental data to a broader project of rethinking the infrastructures required for community stewardship of data: Data Together. Through this project, EDGI seeks to make data more accessible and environmental decision‐making more accountable through new social and technical infrastructures. The shift from DataRescue to Data Together exemplifies EDGI's ongoing attempts to put an “environmental data justice” prioritising community self‐determination into practice. By drawing on environmental justice, critical GIS, critical data studies, and emerging data justice scholarship, EDGI hopes to inform our ongoing engagement in projects that seek to enact alternative futures for data stewardship.
Abstract-The prevalence of urban agriculture groups mobilizing to create change in cities provides a rich opportunity to understand how these communities use and can design ICTs to support sustainability. In particular, organizations are using 'green maps' to make visible local projects, initiatives, and features, in order to reduce entrance barriers and increase participation. This paper reflects on the role of ICTs in these communities as well as the role of design in addressing sustainability concerns. It reports on a design project that developed a green mapping platform to ameliorate the challenges that individuals face in discovering and participating in community-based 'green' initiatives. In order to do so, the project adopted sustainability design principles and a participatory approach. While preliminary evaluation concluded the project did not achieve its original objectives, it provided a valuable exploration of practises to address and evaluate sustainability in design projects. It highlighted the value of participation in processes rather than creation of technology products and pointed to lacking support for sustainability in current methods and techniques for systems design. The paper ends with reflections on sustainability design opportunities for community mapping and identifies future areas for exploration.
The CSCW community has long discussed the ethics and politics of sociotechnical systems and how they become embedded in society and public policy [5,11,13,20,30]. In light of the Black Lives Matter protests and Hong Kong protests, technologies such as facial recognition and contact tracing have re-invigorated conversations about the ethical and social responsibility of tech corporations,
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