Notes

1. See Nitesh Dhanjani, Abusing the Internet of Things: Blackouts, Freakouts, and Stakeouts (Beijing: O’Reilly, 2015).

2. A vast range of texts provide resources for social organizing and participation, from the straightforward handbook of Matthew Bolton, How to Resist: Turn Protest to Power (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), to detailed considerations of how participation is not evenly available—and how to change the conditions of political engagement through guides that take the form of the syllabus, as in Matt Chrisler, Jaskiran Dhillon, and Audra Simpson, “The Standing Rock Syllabus Project,” October 21, 2016, http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/10/nodapl-syllabus-project/#.WEiq1KIrIxG. For a related critique of discourses of participation, see Jaskiran Dhillon’s Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

3. Sara Ahmed outlines strategies for surviving in a world with which one is at odds, as well as ways to build other worlds, in Living a Feminist Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).

4. For just a few examples of these projects, see El Recetario (The cookbook), http://el-recetario.net/; Makea Tu Vida, http://www.makeatuvida.net/; and “What You’ll Need to Escape New York,” New York Times, January 25, 2013, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/27/nyregion/preppers-bug-out-bag.html.

5. See Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (1972; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013); Michel Daniek, Do It Yourself 12 Volt Solar Power (East Meon, U.K.: Permanent Publications, 2007); Eliot Wigginton and His Students, The Foxfire Handbook (New York: Anchor Books, 1972).

6. The Whole Earth Catalog might be the usual reference here, as discussed in Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The “Whole Earth Catalog” and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), and Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). During the early 1970s in Italy, a parallel and radical approach to technology developed with the Global Tools project, documented in the collection edited by Valerio Borgonuovo and Silvia Franceschini, Global Tools: 1973–1975 (İstanbul: SALT/Garanti Kültür, 2015), http://saltonline.org/media/files/globaltools_scrd.pdf.

7. For an example of the serendipity that can emerge through tool kits in the form of Fluxus projects, see Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

8. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, eds., Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008); Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

9. The Feel Kit is a speculative project from Feel Tank Chicago, described at http://feeltankchicago.net/. Sara Ahmed describes the Killjoy Survival Kit in Living a Feminist Life, 235–49. The art and research program How to Work Together is an example of a multiplatform collaborative project investigating alternative modes of community organization and collaboration, available at http://howtoworktogether.org/.

10. For instance, see the U.K. government’s Open Policy Making Toolkit, https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-policy-making-toolkit.

11. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove (1958; repr., Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal, 2017). Much more could be written about Simondon’s specific discussion of instrumentality and the master–slave dynamic within technology, a topic that has also been discussed at length by scholars of race and technology, including Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2015) (thanks to Louis Henderson for this reference).

12. John Dewey, “The Development of American Pragmatism,” in The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 2, 1925–1927, 3–21 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).

13. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

14. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.

15. This discussion picks up where my related earlier text, Program Earth, left off in thinking about propositions for open technology (which are somewhat different expressions of “openness” than those that call for open hardware, software, and data—as this openness requires an attention to the milieus that inform technology as an expanded field of relations). See Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensors and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

1. For instance, see Ruha Benjamin, ed., Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019). Benjamin’s collection captures the “carceral techniques” that have been implemented in policing, prisons, surveillance, and profiling and yet are also critically engaged with to forge potential sites of retooling and liberation.

2. For examples of these guides, see Andrew Tarantola, “How to Erase Yourself from the Internet,” Gizmodo, November 2, 2013, https://gizmodo.com/how-to-erase-yourself-from-the-internet-1456270634; LA Crypto Crew, “How to Become Anonymous Online,” Hyperallergic (blog), December 2, 2016, https://hyperallergic.com/342262/a-guide-to-becoming-anonymous-online; Tactical Tech, “Data Detox Kit,” produced for the Glass Room, London, November 2017, https://datadetox.myshadow.org/en/detox; Kim Zetter, “How to Make Your Own NSA Bulk Surveillance System,” Wired, January 27, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/01/how-to-make-your-own-nsa-bulk-surveillance-system. This is a short list that could be significantly expanded. For instance, see also Bell¿ngcat’s multiple how-to guides, including Nathan Ruser, “How to Scrape Interactive Geospatial Data,” September 5, 2018, https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2018/09/05/scrape-interactive-geospatial-data.

3. For an expanded discussion and critique of these reductive and expedient sorts of instrumentalization, see Jennifer Gabrys, “Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City,” Environment and Planning D 32, no. 1 (2014): 30–48.

4. Jennifer Gabrys, “Citizen Sensing: Recasting Digital Ontologies through Proliferating Practices,” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, March 24, 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/citizen-sensing-recasting-digital-ontologies-through-proliferating-practices.

5. Create Lab, “CATTfish,” http://www.cmucreatelab.org/projects/Water_Quality_Monitoring/pages/CATTfish and https://www.cattfish.com/; “Flood Network,” https://flood.network/.

6. Radiation Watch, “Pocket Geiger,” http://www.radiation-watch.org/ and https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14209.

7. sspence, “Earthquake/Vibration Sensor,” Instructables, April 28, 2016, http://www.instructables.com/id/Earthquake-Vibration-Sensor.

8. Seeed Studio, “Grove Smart Plant Care Kit for Aduino,” https://www.seeedstudio.com/Grove-Smart-Plant-Care-Kit-for-Arduino-p-2528.html.

9. OSBeehives, “BuzzBox,” https://www.osbeehives.com/; Dave Veith, “AWS IoT and Beehives,” https://www.hackster.io/bees/aws-iot-and-beehives-c59fff.

10. For one extensive example of how to build an air quality sensor, see rawrdong, “How to Build a Portable, Accurate, Low Cost, Open Source Air Particle Counter,” http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Build-a-Portable-Accurate-Low-Cost-Open-Sou.

11. For a commentary on how diverse forms of citizen science can align with different political (or apolitical) objectives, see Olga Kuchinskaya, “Environmental Data Collection and Citizen Science after Chernobyl and Fukushima,” Science, Technology, and Human Values (forthcoming in the special issue “Sensors and Sensing Practices,” edited by Jennifer Gabrys, Helen Pritchard, and Lara Houston).

12. For more on the Citizen Sense project, see http://www.citizensense.net/.

13. For a more extensive discussion of electronics and obsolescence, see Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

14. On cosmology, see Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929; repr., New York: Free Press, 1985).

15. See Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Women, Climate Change Impacts, and Collective Action,” Hypatia 29, no. 3 (2014): 599–616. Within indigenous cosmology, distributions of spirituality can inform not just what Whyte calls the “instrumental value” of entities like water but also the “intrinsic value” of these entities because of their connection and agency within cosmologies.

16. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (1997; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Stengers, Cosmopolitics II (1997; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

17. In part, I draw here on an argument made by Paul Dourish and W. Keith Edwards, who discuss how “prepackaged expectations of usage patterns” might characterize software components in tool kits, yet tool kits also need to be “designed to accommodate the wide range of potential applications and situations in use.” See Dourish and Edwards, “A Tale of Two Toolkits: Relating Infrastructure and Use in Flexible CSCW Toolkits,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work 9 (2000): 33–51.

18. For example, see Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project, “Citizen Science Toolkit,” 2017, http://www.environmentalhealthproject.org/citizen-science-toolkit.

19. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.

20. For an extended discussion on the topic of work-arounds, see Lara Houston, Jennifer Gabrys, and Helen Pritchard, “Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban Sensing Practices and Technology,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, advance online publication, May 26, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243919852677.

21. One very thorough and informative guidebook that does not gloss over the many points of consideration of air quality monitoring is a citizen-sensing guidebook published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. See R. Williams, Vasu Kilaru, E. Snyder, A. Kaufman, T. Dye, A. Rutter, A. Russell, and H. Hafner, Air Sensor Guidebook, EPA/600/R-14/159, NTIS PB2015-100610 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2014). The guidebook is also available online at https://www.epa.gov/air-sensor-toolbox/how-use-air-sensors-air-sensor-guidebook.

1. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). See also Helen Pritchard, Jennifer Gabrys, and Lara Houston, “Re-calibrating DIY: Testing Digital Participation across Dust Sensors, Fry Pans, and Environmental Pollution,” New Media and Society 20, no. 12 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818777473.

2. Elizabeth Povinelli, “The Toxic Earth and the Collapse of Political Concepts,” keynote lecture at Critical Ecologies, Goldsmiths, University of London, March 17, 2018.

3. See Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Helen Pritchard, “The Animal Hacker” (doctoral thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2018).

4. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 6.

5. See Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase (2002; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).

6. Kimmo Karvinen and Tero Karvinen, Getting Started with Sensors (Sebastopol, Calif.: Maker Media, 2014), xi.

7. Karvinen and Karvinen, 2.

8. Karvinen and Karvinen, 9.

9. Karvinen and Karvinen, 4.

10. Matthew Ratto and Megan Boler, eds., DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 5.

11. For a critique of the master–servant relationship in technology, see Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. For more on a discussion of decolonizing mastery, see Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018).

12. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).

13. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), and Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).

14. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).

15. Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert, Being Digital Citizens (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).

16. For example, see Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997).

17. See Jennifer Gabrys, “Sensing Air and Creaturing Data,” in Program Earth, 157–81.

18. “Air Quality Eggs,” https://airqualityegg.wickeddevice.com/portal.

19. For a related discussion of atmospheric science practices that attempt to generate legible data, see Emma Garnett, “Developing a Feeling for Error: Practices of Monitoring and Modeling Air Pollution Data,” Big Data and Society 3, no. 2 (2016): 1–12.

20. For a discussion of these inscrutable aspects of the Air Quality Egg, see Christian Nold, “Device Studies of Participatory Sensing: Ontological Politics and Design Interventions” (doctoral thesis, University College London, 2017).

21. For an in-depth ethnography of the communities involved with making and testing the Air Quality Egg, see Dorien Zandbergen, “‘We Are Sensemakers’: The (Anti-)Politics of Smart City Co-creation,” Public Culture 29, no. 3 (2017): 539–62.

22. This process might align with what Suchman and others, drawing on Garfinkel, have discussed as co-constituted courses of “instructed action” in relation to the prototype. With the prototype, the “configuring” of devices and actions, working practices and sociomaterial relations, is one that relays “across sites of technology development and use.” See Lucy Suchman, Randall Trigg, and Jeanette Blomberg, “Working Artefacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype,” British Journal of Sociology 53, no. 2 (2002): 168.

23. Lucy Suchman, Human–Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8–9.

24. Suchman, 22.

25. Wicked Device, “Air Quality Egg,” https://shop.wickeddevice.com/product-category/air-quality-egg.

26. Dirk Swart, “Egg Version One End of Life,” May 19, 2017, https://shop.wickeddevice.com/2017/05/19/egg-version-one-end-of-life.

27. Latour demonstrates the ways in which the how-to, as a form of instruction, can proliferate through scientific infrastructures that travel along with artifacts to ensure that they are suitably encountered. For instance, in relation to a natural history museum collection, he writes, “Even those elements which can withstand the trip, like fossils, rocks or skeletons, may become meaningless once in the basement of the few museums that are being built in the centres, because not enough context is attached to them. Thus, many inventions have to be made to enhance the mobility, stability and combinability of collected items. Many instructions are to be given to those sent around the world on how to stuff animals, how to dry up plants, how to label all specimens, how to name them, how to pin down butterflies, how to paint drawings of the animals and trees no one can yet bring back or domesticate.” See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 225.

28. Jennifer Gabrys, “Air Walk: Monitoring Pollution and Experimenting with Forms of Participation,” in Walking through Social Research, ed. Charlotte Bates and Alex Rhys-Taylor, 144–61 (London: Routledge, 2017).

29. For a more extended discussion of the “Pollution Sensing” project area of Citizen Sense, see Helen Pritchard and Jennifer Gabrys, “From Citizen Sensing to Collective Monitoring: Working through the Perceptive and Affective Problematics of Environmental Pollution,” Geohumanities 2, no. 2 (2016): 354–71, and Jennifer Gabrys, Helen Pritchard, Nerea Calvillo, Tom Keene, and Nick Shapiro, “Becoming Civic: Fracking, Air Pollution and Environmental Sensing Technologies,” in Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice, edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), 435–40.

30. Citizen Sense, “Citizen Sense Kit,” https://citizensense.net/kits/citizensense-kit.

31. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt), 78.

1. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 11

2. Whitehead.

3. Ruha Benjamin, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013).

4. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).

5. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 23–45.

6. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Related Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (1637; London: Penguin, 2003).

7. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.

8. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Ian Hacking, “Canguilhem amid the Cyborgs,” Economy and Society 27, no. 2–3 (1998): 202–16.

9. For example, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Zone Books, 2007); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Cyrus Mody, Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011); Liba Taub, “Introduction: Reengaging with Instruments,” Isis 102, no. 4 (2011): 689–96.

10. Bruno Latour, “Tarde’s Idea of Quantification,” in The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments, ed. Matei Candea, 145–62 (London: Routledge, 2009).

11. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, xii–xiii.

12. Simondon, 16.

13. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 11.

14. Whitehead.

15. I discuss the environments needed to sustain facts in a related register in Gabrys, “Sensing Air and Creaturing Data,” 157–81.

16. This is what Whitehead refers to as the “impossibility of tearing a proposition from its systematic context in the actual world.” See Process and Reality, 11.

17. Jenny Reardon, Jacob Metcalf, Martha Kenney, and Karen Barad, “Science and Justice: The Trouble and the Promise,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 1, no. 1 (2015): 13.

18. Reardon et al.

19. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 170.

20. For a discussion of critiques of instrumental reason and instrumental control through the works of Heidegger and Habermas, see Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 1999). Also extending the Heideggerian consideration of technology and instrumentality, Hannah Arendt takes up this topic in relation to her conception of “Homo Faber” in The Human Condition (1958; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

21. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

22. As Dewey further writes, “instrumentalism is an attempt to establish a precise logical theory of concepts, of judgments and inferences in their various forms, by considering primarily how thought functions in the experimental determinations of future consequences.” Writing also about the work of James, Dewey suggests that the “reconstructive or mediative function ascribed to reason” becomes a way to develop “a theory of the general forms of conception and reasoning.” This suggests that the experimental processes of instrumental concepts are then the means by which theories cohere into general forms rather than instrumental approaches proving a priori truths. Instrumentalism in this rendering is necessarily experimental and contingent. See Dewey, “Development of American Pragmatism,” 14.

23. See John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

24. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 5.

25. William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 27.

26. James.

27. James, 28–30.

28. Ian Hacking notes that instrumentalism came to suggest a certain “antirealism” within the philosophy of science. As West has pointed out, however, pragmatists such as a Dewey, James, and Peirce worked with realist ontologies, while evading the fundamental epistemological concerns of philosophies concerned with truth. This sidestepping of epistemologies of truth does not make pragmatism antirealist; rather, in West’s estimation, it contributes to the evasion of more Cartesian concerns with knowing how the real is really real through a preconceived division of subjects and objects. See Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and West, American Evasion of Philosophy.

29. For a related discussion on the “work” of political, collective, and democratic life, see Helen Pritchard and Jennifer Gabrys, “From Citizen Sensing to Collective Monitoring: Working through the Perceptive and Affective Problematics of Environmental Pollution,” Geohumanities 2, no. 2 (2016): 354–71.

30. For example, see Jason Corburn, Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), and Carla May Dhillon, “Using Citizen Science in Environmental Justice: Participation and Decision-Making in a Southern California Waste Facility Siting Conflict,” Local Environment 22, no. 12 (2017): 1479–96.

31. See Plume Labs, “Clean Air, Together—Flow by Plume Labs,” September 26, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJtahMBOn6g.

32. For analysis of these different ways of parsing the state, the community, and the citizen through or beyond the family, see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).

33. A popular reference for discussing air pollution and air control, Sloterdijk’s work nevertheless strikes an essentialist and deterministic note in its rendering of the air as a space of terror and control. This study deliberately sidesteps this more fixed reading of air as an “element” “essential” for life, not least of which because of the rigid political imaginaries that issue forth along with these atmospheric ontologies. See Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), and Jan-Werner Müller, “Behind the New German Right,” New York Review of Books, April 14, 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/04/14/behind-new-german-right-afd.

34. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 51.

35. Antonia Majaca and Luciana Parisi, “The Incomputable and Instrumental Possibility,” E-Flux Journal 77 (November 2016).

36. Majaca and Parisi, 1–3

37. Drawing on Dewey, Ana Delgado and Blanca Callén investigate DIY biology and electronic waste hacking experiments to consider how “hacks” as an “experimental mode of inquiry” open up new approaches to problems. See Delgado and Callén, “Do-It-Yourself Biology and Electronic Waste Hacking: A Politics of Demonstration in Precarious Times,” Public Understanding of Science 26, no. 2 (2017): 179–94. See also Javier Lezaun, Noortje Marres, and Manuel Tironi, “Experiments in Participation,” in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 4th ed., ed. Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouché, Clark A. Miller, and Laurel Smith-Doerr, 195–222 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016).

38. James, Pragmatism and Other Writings, 28 (emphasis original).

39. Dewey, “Development of American Pragmatism,” 20.

40. As West has pointed out, it is worth noting the specific ways in which experimentalism emerged in pragmatist thought, where the scientific method was seen to be a paragon of “critical intelligence” and experimentalism was very much a product of this practice—and where the “social base” for such pragmatism required a more elite professional class to engage in such practices. Nevertheless, West suggests a possibility for “creative democracy” might still persist in relation to experimentalism. See West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 62, 90, 97, 103. There are more and other expanded ways of engaging with experimentalism—and instrumentalism—that might also be developed beyond the registers of pragmatism and the scientific method, which are the topic of the expanded and forthcoming version of this work.

1. James, cited in Dewey, “Development of American Pragmatism,” 6.

2. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

3. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 37.

4. Charles Sanders Peirce is generally credited with having developed the notion of community of inquiry. Peirce’s notion was developed in relation to the pursuit of logic and science, but pragmatists have adapted the concept, especially Dewey in relation to democratic modes of inquiry. As Peirce writes, “unless we make ourselves hermits, we shall necessarily influence each other’s opinions; so that the problem becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community.” See Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays, 7–31 (1877; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

5. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems.

6. Working within a different context, Grant Wythoff describes how “communities of amateur tinkerers” experiment with technologies and gadgets to become the “engine of emerging media.” Experimental inquiry in this more hands-on sense becomes part of the process whereby technologies further develop and concretize. See Grant Wythoff, ed., The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 37.

7. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imperatives to Re-imagine the Planet (Vienna: Passagen, 1999).

8. As Simpson further writes, “engagement changes us because it constructs a different world within which we live.” See Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 19–20.

9. These questions also introduce what science and technology studies scholars have referred to as the “politics of how.” See Endre Dányi, “The Politics of ‘How,’” Does STS Have Problems? (blog), October 4, 2016, https://stsproblems.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-how, and John Law and Solveig Joks, “Indigeneity, Science, and Difference: Notes on the Politics of How,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 44, no. 3 (2018): 424–47.

10. Lilly Irani, “Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 40, no. 5 (2015): 807.

11. Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 23.

12. Simpson, 20.

13. While James works with the notion of the “pluralistic universe,” pluriverse is a term that other writers such as Latour have used in relation to James’s work. At the same time, writers such as Walter Mignolo take up the pluriverse as a concept but do not cite James as part of the development of this concept, but develop pluriverse as a term associated with postcolonial and decolonial theory. Marisol de la Cadena develops yet another reading of the pluriverse through the conservative political writings of Carl Schmitt. This study recognizes these multiple formations of the pluriverse (and somehow it is fitting that this term has a plurality of uses and affiliations) but especially emphasizes James’s discussion of the pluralistic universe. See William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 36; Walter Mignolo, “On Pluriversality,” Walter Mignolo (blog), October 20, 2013, http://waltermignolo.com/on-pluriversality; Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–70.

14. For a discussion of collective causation in relation to environmental protest, see Benedikte Zitouni, “Planetary Destruction, Ecofeminists, and Transformative Politics in the Early 1980s,” Interface 6, no. 2 (2014): 244–70.

1. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 23–45.

2. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 170.

3. John Dewey, “The Naturalization of Intelligence,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 4, 1929, 156–77 (1984; repr., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).

4. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 82.

5. For a discussion of how to decolonize methodologies, along with an extensive set of case studies and examples of community research, see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012).

6. Different versions of activism can also emerge in relation to distinct environmental and sociopolitical struggles. For instance, see Anna Lora-Wainwright, Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017).

7. For a discussion of this question, see Nicholas Gane and Donna Haraway, “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? Interview with Donna Haraway,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23, no. 7–8 (2006): 135–58.

8. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 3.

1. Isabelle Stengers, “Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora’s Box?,” in Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore, 3–34 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

2. For instance, see Anne Pollock and Banu Subramaniam, “Resisting Power, Retooling Justice: Promises of Feminist Postcolonial Technosciences,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 41, no. 6 (2016): 951–66, and Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life.

3. For a discussion of the limits of categories in relation to citizen science, see Alan Irwin, “Citizen Science and Scientific Citizenship: Same Words, Different Meanings?,” in Science Communication Today: Current Strategies and Means of Action, ed. Berhand Schiele, Joëlle Le Marec, and Patrick Baranger, 29–38 (Nancy, France: Nancy Université, 2015).

4. Center for Urban Pedagogy, “Making Policy Public,” http://welcometocup.org/Projects/MakingPolicyPublic.

5. Amber Hickey, ed., A Guidebook for Alternative Nows (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2012), https://joaap.org/press/alternativenows_hickey.htm.

6. Zach Blas, Gay Bombs: User’s Manual (Queer Technologies, 2008), http://www.zachblas.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GB_users-manual_web-version.pdf.

7. Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, eds., The 3D Additivist Cookbook (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2016), http://additivism.org/cookbook.

8. Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul.

9. Dewey, “Development of American Pragmatism,” 12.

10. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 21.