STS-Hub 2025: Diffracting the Critical

Chair(s): Sezai Ozan Zeybek (TU Berlin)

This panel brings together diverse research perspectives on urban, multi-species health, and mobility to explore the interconnections between humans, animals, and broader ecological systems in urban environments. Each presentation investigates how power, health, and urban planning intersect to shape multi-species coexistence. The concept of multi-species health emerges as a central theme, encompassing both the physical well-being of different species and the socio-political structures that define their existence. The panelists collectively examine the impact of urban design, colonial legacies, public health measures, and movements on the shared spaces inhabited by both humans and non-humans. the discussions aim to illuminate the intertwined fates of species in urban contexts. By questioning established approaches to urban development and envisioning alternative, just socio-ecological futures, this panel seeks to politicize urban space and challenge existing boundaries—both conceptual and physical—that separate humans from the more-than-human world.

Chair(s): Michaela Büsse (TU Dresden), Sandra Jasper (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)

Discussant(s): Jonathon Turnbull (University of Oxford)

This panel explores diverse artistic-scientific projects that critically investigate the materiality and politics of environmental data. Through interdisciplinary approaches, these contributions examine the layered histories, ecological interactions, and sensory experiences embedded in datafied environments ranging from cityscapes, weather and air to lichens and soil. Central to the projects is an inquiry into the ways in which digital tools, sensing technologies, and data infrastructures reconfigure our perceptions and interactions with environmental phenomena and urban infrastructures (Turnbull et al. 2024). Collectively, they ask: How do different forms of environmental data shape our understanding and perception of cities and landscapes. In their artistic-scientific approaches, the contributions offer innovative frameworks for understanding how environmental data — and the infrastructures that produce such data — mediate or even govern our engagement with different spaces, but also might help reveal the multi-layered, contested nature of these spaces and their digitally entangled futures.

Paper presentation: Blasted Landscapes

Authors: Michaela Büsse (TU Dresden), Sandra Jasper (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), Jona Möller (independent researcher)

The Blasted Landscapes artistic-scientific research project explores the complex history and contentious afterlife of former military training areas in Brandenburg, Germany. Utilizing remote sensing data collected by researchers at GFZ Potsdam, the project investigates how the toxic legacies of military occupation are made (in)visible and repurposed within scientific knowledge production. These landscapes, shaped by decades of intense destruction and contamination, now function as unique living laboratories, offering rare conditions for studying species evolution and testing innovative approaches in nature conservation. As emerging practices and technologies are trialed in these extraordinary environments to support biodiversity goals, we excavate the histories embedded within the data itself and consider how they influence contemporary uses of the sites. Just as the physical grounds of former training sites hold traces of violent exploitation, the datasets derived from them carry the specters of the past, projecting their legacies into future applications (Blackman 2019).

Chair(s): Charlotte Adelina (FU Berlin), Elisabeth Luggauer (HU Berlin)

Discussant(s): Sandra Jasper (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)

With the accelerating climate crisis, plants are increasingly enrolled in interventions furthering multispecies health and livability. Urban greening is intertwined with the many anthropocentric, colonial, racial-capitalist, gendered, and casteist power dynamics inscribed in the planning and inhabiting of cities and the ordering of ‘green spaces’, often re-asserting techno-scientific and colonial tropes of ‘inert’ greenery. Thus, critical approaches toward urban greenery as symbolic interactions and species collectives demand diffracting perspectives across scales, temporalities and epistemic divides. Mobilizing ‘diffraction’ with Donna Haraway and Karen Barad as the critical mapping out of how differences matter and as a technique of thinking one through a different other, this panel aims to diffract perspectives on urban greening beyond ‘nature’, ‘landscape’, ‘ecology’, and ‘infrastructure’. For example, how do perspectives on cities, futures in climate crisis, etc., alter when thinking greenery through multispecies collectives and the effects they pose to urban cohabitation? Or, how do more than human justice and health change when re-thinking ‘greening’ through situated forms of power and socio-cultural engagements in urban spaces? We invite critical and experimental contributions from STS, multispecies anthropology and geography, feminist and decolonial ecologies and situated political ecologies, as well as others, to diffract together perspectives on emergent practices of urban greening.