CoSEP: Collective for Socio-Spatial and Environmental Praxis

Sep 2023 - current

CoSEP is housed at the University of California, Davis, lead by Akshita Sivakumar, Ph.D.

We undertake transdisciplinary, research-driven projects and practices to address the spatial and political nature of designing and governing the built environment to facilitate the fullness of life. We are committed to analyzing how praxis, the reflective manner of combining theory and practice for emancipatory futures, can lend insight into and shape socio-spatial and environmental relationships. The projects of CoSEP lie at the intersection of spatial design x technology x social movements x  governance. 

The lab currently has 3 flagship projects:

1. Model Governance, Model Solidarities
2. Socio-Material Palette for a Just Transition
3. Technologies of Solidarity 

The Precarity of Solidarities via Technologies of Control: The Case of Chrome Plating in California

Abstract:

The labor and environmental social movements have routinely been drawn into governance relationships under the dominant regulatory regime of command and control in the United States since the 1960s (Kazis & Grossman 1983; Obach 1999). From scrubbers in smokestacks to computer models, these technologies have mediated regulatory compliance, decision-making, participation, representation, enforcement, and resistance to conditions of production. However, when state agencies take up the gambit of environmental justice (EJ), how, why, and to what effect do these technologies mediate the relationships between the two social movements? What happens when workers face the dissolution of their industries as a result? Through the case of the proposed ban of Hexavalent Chromium in California, this paper yokes together technology-driven mediations between labor and governance agencies and the interests of workers and environmental justice activists. Through participant observation, I find that state-driven technologies splinter solidaristic relationships between workers and the environmental justice movement. When these solidarities are weakened, an accelerated impetus for alternative control technologies promises to buttress worker precarity, obscuring empirically emergent and embodied best practices to live in toxic worlds while minimizing risks to workers and EJ communities. These findings problematize the longstanding jobs vs. environment stalemate, which has presented working-class jobs and environmental health as antagonistic goals. Contributing to how STS might inform governance structures that aim at a just transition, this paper suggests ways to think about the conditions of the precarity of the relationship between workers, environmental justice activists, and regulatory technologies.

Data Surrogates as Hosts: Politics of Environmental Governance

Abstract

Data-driven environmental governance within the standard regulatory regime routinely relies on unmeasurable, missing, or abjected data. Technocrats typically use data surrogates to alleviate this pervasive problem. By combining feminist technoscience and critical environmental justice approaches, this article argues that data surrogates are far more than fungible substitutes and rely on more than scientific rationality and transcendent objectivity. Through a case of intersecting environmental governance and justice work in the Portside Community in San Diego, this article exposits a broader conceptualization of data surrogates by developing a partial typology of operations they perform: calibrating, weighting, and validating. The politics and labors of these operations are crucial to analyze how data acquire material and discursive power in environmental governance. I propose an analytical shift from examining the work of data surrogates in terms of substituting to one of hosting. This shift reveals and better explains how data surrogates negotiate relationships between body, place, and property across state, market, and civil society actors. Moreover, it demonstrates how data surrogates interrupt the dominant regulatory regime by resisting fungibility through acts of social reproduction. Far from being subordinate to technocratic tools, the work of social reproduction makes governing with scientific and technical instruments both possible and contestable.

MUNDANE + AGONISTIC  BUREAUCRACIES

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ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ADVISORY COMMITTEE / COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT REPORT