Sustainability+Abstract+EF


 * Abstract for Sustainability Poster**

Sustainability Citizenship and Technological Practice

This study will enhance understanding of how amateur technical practice can be organized to animate critical political insight and sustainability vision. Through observation and analysis of diverse sites of amateur technical practice, the study will characterize how different types of technical practice, skill sharing, and social interaction shape the way practioners think about broad social responsibilities and possibilities. The study will contribute to scholarly understanding of the ways civic values take shape in particular contexts. Results of the study can also help orient initiatives to create skill sharing spaces in museums, schools, neighborhoods and other public venues.

Friere

This study focuses on the possibilities for Critical-Making practices in the realm of civic science and environmental/science literacy toward a more civically-minded ‘Technological Citizenship’ (Frankenfeld, 1992). Through discourse analysis and other analytical techniques, it works to explore how critical-making, which is an iterative, reflective, “learning-through-doing” technique focused on making new interactive technology, may help lay people to better understand the efficacy of various civic science technologies focused on environmental concerns and sustainability, particularly GIS systems for mapping events and hazards and the development of sensing systems for environmental risks. As a myriad of different technologies further permeate day-to-day practices, it is important to understand or consider how their use and manipulation by lay experts may contribute to science and environmental literacy, and how to better utilize these techniques for positive outcomes. These practices may then lead citizens to further understand their rights and obligations in terms of technological innovation; how technology affects them and how they may, in turn, affect and transform technological innovation practices. By working on local issues with these technologies, lay-experts can pull from their own situated knowledges and signify their local expertise and concerns within a greater global context of the problems at hand, particularly in issues of contamination. It is the purpose of the research at the focus of this poster to further elucidate and display current technologies, sensing groups, and the possible future trajectories therein.