Christian Nold (University College London); Royal Geographical Society with IBG, 28th-30th August 2013, London. Deadline for abstracts 23rd February 2013.

Addressing the conference theme of ‘new geographical frontiers’, this is one of three RGS-IBG sessions, dedicated to participatory science, to be held at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre. Entrance to these sessions is free.



Sponsored by HGRG, SCGRG, PyGyRG and GIScRG (research groups of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG) in association with London’s Science Museum and UCL's Extreme Citizen Science Research Group.

Currently, in the fields of Citizen Science, Participatory Sensing and the Internet of Things, people are being encouraged to use technical systems to record and measure the external environment. Innovatively, this session adopts a 'more-than-human' framework (Latour 2004, Bennett 2010), to draw attention to the agency and activities of non-human actors such as living animals and plants, technical devices, concepts and places. This session aims to explore the often surprising consequences of research where technologies gain their own agency, and the environment starts to speak back: what happens when researchers try to turn citizens into sensors (Goodchild 2007) and sensor assemblages start to becoming citizens? This session asks for papers that examine  Citizen Science, Participatory Sensing or the Internet of Things, with a focus on the activities of more-than-human actors and addresses these questions:

- What kinds of new knowledge emerge when we pay attention to the participation of more-than-human actors?

- What kinds of power relationships emerge when institutional actors have to deal with more-than-humans?

- How can we co-design for the participation of more-than-human collaborators?

Please send all abstracts (max. 300 words including title, name, contact details, abstract) and/or questions to Christian Nold (christian@softhook.com). Please submit abstracts by Saturday 23rd February.