Ecologies in Focus
Asynchronous Session
Greenlining and Cultural Displacement View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Zabala
Overtime, the cleaning up of brownsites have increased local property values by attracting wealthier residents, causing a social impact that has displaced native residents. As the culture of places are expected to evolve, the question is how much of the community culture should be respectfully preserved and how much of it should be discarded for environmental sustainability projects? This review of the literature will focus on urban initiatives that have turned brownsites into beautiful green landscapes within the last 10 years. The findings improve our understanding of the physical cultural changes that occur with environmental sustainability projects that do not include native residents during the integrative process. The literature indicates an absence of cultural awareness and inclusivity when implementing an environmental sustainability project. This linkage between environmental sustainability projects and cultural displacement matters because reduction of brownsites increases economic growth.
Featured Conservation of Waterbodies In Delhi View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vanshika Kirar
India is endowed with extraordinarily diverse and distinctive traditional water bodies found in different parts of the country, commonly known as ponds, tanks, lakes, vayalgam, well, step-wells and others. They play an important role in maintaining and restoring the ecological balance. They act as sources of drinking water, recharge groundwater, control floods, support biodiversity, and provide livelihood opportunities to a large number of people. Currently, a major water crisis is being faced by Delhi, where 10 million people are on the frontlines of a nationwide water crisis, and many major cities facing an acute water shortage. One of the reasons is our increasing negligence and lack of conservation of water bodies. Experts say that cities may not run out of water if urban planning engages more critically with the city’s terrain, along with propagation of knowledge about the local history of lakes, meaningful community engagement, and ownership of water bodies. Many cities are working towards the conservation of waterbodies like the steps initiated in the capital city of Delhi for instance. The success of the lakes should be tested on all three fronts namely Economic, Environmental, Social. Many studies point out that a deliberate effort has to be made on the social front for which better publicity of the environmental benefits of the project and enhancing environmental awareness of its time to invest in governance, capacitating our institutions, strong regulations, and enforcement, or else we will fall back.
Aquatic Sacred Natural Sites View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Celeste Ray
Aquatic Sacred Natural Sites and their associated traditions have many striking similarities around the world. As sites of biocultural diversity, sacred springs and holy wells are places where cultural beliefs and practices are both shaped by local biota and also help protect and maintain stocks of particular flora and fauna (because these are perceived as curative, numinous, or as totems). Rituals at watery sites that encode Local Ecological Knowledge and perpetuate biodiversity conservation deserve our attention. This paper identifies patterns in panhuman hydrolatry and asks how cultural perceptions of water’s sacrality can be employed to foster resilient human-environmental relationships in the growing water crises of the twenty-first century.
Hyper-charged Citizenry as the Impediment to Resilience Planning: Negative Governance as a Barrier to Sustainable Energy Projects View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Haris Alibašić
This paper spotlights the adverse effects of hyper-charged citizenry and efforts to influence local government officials to change existing ordinances and influence policy decisions to accommodate the development of sustainable energy projects that would ultimately lead to better societal resilience. Resilience is the ability to sustain and recover communities and organizations in preparation for, during, and after the disasters stemming from climate and other threats. The same dynamic of the relationship between the local government units and the citizens seeking to influence the policy may be more unique to the United States for the lack of national energy policies and the disintegrated structure of energy markets. Most importantly, such hyper-active negative engagement against sustainable energy act as a counter to the economic and public health benefits of such projects and the process of democratic governance, acting against the societal positive interest and progress. The resilience through sustainable energy development is stifled by the hyper-active citizenry and professional interactions between the local government staff and concerned citizens. However, the general inclusive nature of the process gives rise to a dynamic in the otherwise tricky nature of the development and implementation of the projects. Utilizing a multi-level qualitative perspective of the select media reports on wind and solar projects rejected due to neighborhood or community engagement and opposition, in combination with grounded theory, the paper offers the apprehension of the key factors contributing to the apparent lack of governance in implementing such projects.
Werturteilsstreit and Its Legacies for Ecology of Practice for/within Ethical Artificial Intelligence View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pavle Pavlovic
This paper is created on the wave of the ubiquitous and already saturated topic of ethics in the field of artificial intelligence. We were provoked by the proliferation of standards, rules, and regulations within this field and with posthumanism critique of this topic. We attempt to nurture a new framework for a social science analysis of How of ethics issues by providing argumentation for the study of algorithms and ethical issues by expanding the usability of the concept of niche construction and environmental perspective in ethnographic studies. From a design perspective, this means expanding the quest on the ethical matter by intensifying the inquiry perspective in a design that includes not just the design process — designer — but also a more comprehensive environment. Inspired by current trends in evolutionary science, biology, and anthropology, we are in line with those approaches that reaffirm ethical issues from standpoint theory. The goals are three-fold. Firstly, a direct answer to the program of developing research ethics based on ethnography that engages with the mundane emergent context where data are made, interpreted, analyzed, and mobilized in everyday practices. Secondly, we develop a different research framework from the “utilitarian perspective.” And third, to escape from the value neutrality „trap“ by restating our position and research framework in a post-humanistic research perspective on the issue of artificial intelligence.
