Proliferating Citizenships

Citizen is a term that is easily attached to any number of digital technologies. From citizen sensing to digital citizens and internet citizens, numerous digital technologies promise to make more informed and active participants of us all. Citizen sensing could suggest the accessibility of these devices to everyday users, or it could signal a frivolous use of the term “citizen” to impart a democratic allure to these technologies. Indeed, at the very moment when digital technology companies are largely seen to be exercising anti-democratic influences, this packaging of democratic engagement is increasingly used as a strategy, and even smokescreen, to promote an increasing array of supposedly participatory digital products. The “digital citizen” can signal a transformation of political engagement through digital technologies, as well as a possible narrowing of democratic processes through increasing control over data and modes of participation.28

Any attempt to locate such a digital citizen within a genealogy inevitably forms a shaky project. The usual designation of the citizen as an ancient Greek conception bound to a city-state, which is now read through the nation, is a way of designating what Engin Isin refers to as an Occidental approach to citizenship. Such an approach to citizenship simultaneously generates specific alterities of citizenship.29 While it could be possible to analyze the exclusions of citizenship, or who might be designated as non-citizens, Isin’s provocation that citizenship is not only Occidental suggests that it might be more productive to consider the alterities that are constituted along with different citizenships, since such alterities do not precede the constitution of specific forms of citizenship. Co-constituted modes of citizenship and non-citizenship are also productive of inequality and struggles for recognition.30 Such an approach further orients attention to the possible alterities of digital citizenship, where technically oriented forms of political engagement begin to form non- or counter-citizenships to digital citizenships.

Moreover, abstract designations of citizenship differently manifest in everyday practice, and the rights that citizenship would guarantee do not equally extend to all of its members.31 Writing about the Black Panther Party in the context of the US in the 1960s and 1970s, Alondra Nelson has discussed how multiple forms of citizenship—across biological, economic, social, political, and multiple other modes of engagement—have not been equally accessible to all people notionally designated as citizens.32 Referring to this as a “citizenship contradiction,” Nelson demonstrates how, enduring the deprivations of these forms of citizenship, Black people sought to expand and claim the full designations of citizenship through political action. They specifically countered these dispossessions through community support programs, health screenings, educational initiatives, and political rallies.33 Within the context of the civil rights movement, “health rights activism” and radical DIY health initiatives and institutions became a way to “push for equal liberties” and “bridge the stubborn gap that separated civic and social citizenship.”34 As Nelson’s work demonstrates, the category of the citizen can be productive of gradated and restricted access to social and political institutions and practices. Struggles for fuller expressions of citizenship often emerge at these junctures, along with attendant anxieties about not being able to inhabit or exercise the modes of citizenship to which one is meant to have access. Yet these struggles can also form other modalities of citizenship that exceed the problem of inclusion in a one-world world to generate other worlds of political possibility.

The practices and proliferations of citizenship, then, destabilize the figure of the universal citizen, demonstrating how it is a discriminatory figure, as well as one that can exclude other possibilities for political engagement. In this sense, and drawing on Wynter’s critique of the universal human as an excluding and racializing figure, it might be possible to engage with other and multiple designations of citizenship, especially as projects of citizens and worlds in the making.35 These subjects exceed the human in its different declensions to include more-than-human exposures and contributions to the breathability of worlds. Such a move, I suggest, generates citizens of worlds that indicate how other political subjects and exchanges might become possible, especially as they contend with environmental pollution and destruction.

Citizens of worlds is a concept and practice that engages with more than recognition and inclusion within a one-world world, since as a concept it searches for how different ways of being political subjects and making and inhabiting worlds might constitute practices of citizenship. The proliferation of modes of citizenship suggests that there are many ways in which subjects become political. Marisol de la Cadena refers to the multiplications of worlds and ways of being in worlds as the “uncommons,” where different worlds exist and come into contact, but also diverge and are not always reconcilable.36 Plurality generates conditions of possibility; yet it is not merely a celebration of the additional. Instead, it can form conditions of struggle with and across multiple worlds that might be incommensurable but that also can spark encounters and negotiations.37 Practices that investigate the co-constitutive aspects of citizens and worlds offer a way to recast the hardened origin story of citizenship toward multiple worldings that generate diverse political subjects and engagements.

The “citizen” as it is operationalized through citizen-sensing technologies could at first be a seemingly universal subject and condition. But the expressive political capacities that citizen-sensing technologies are meant to enable do not so easily or evenly confer citizen-like status on everyone, where people with less economic and cultural capital, racialized communities, women, and many others outside the arenas of power and expertise, will find that their contributions are less audible or de-legitimated within arenas of evidence-making. Instead, questions arise about the proliferating political subjects and relations that take shape along with these citizen-sensing practices and technologies. Citizen sensing can be a practice to mobilize findings from citizen data, to appeal to policymakers, to hold polluters to account, to address environmental problems, and to make breathable worlds by computing otherwise. Yet these practices do not follow effortless or straightforward trajectories. Regulators often ignore citizen data collected with sensors. “Facts” about environmental pollution can be dismissed if they do not align with sedimented relations of power and privilege. Moreover, the uptake and use of sensors might not always follow the same protocols or patterns of use and observation—not because these are erroneous practices, but because they might tune in to different registers of experience and account for different worlds-in-the-making.38

Citizens of Worlds examines how such modes of citizenship are constituted along with or even against citizen-sensing technologies as they are used in practice. This is an approach that puts the citizenly aspects of these technologies to work to query the concrete political engagements that occur. As a concept and practice, citizens of worlds seeks to inhabit the proliferation of these digital and other citizenships, while also working toward more pluralistic accounts of how citizens form with and through worlds in the making. Digital devices, in this sense, do not merely enable alternative forms of political engagement, where the figure of the citizen and the collective to which it belongs are wired up but remain relatively unchanged. Instead, the conditions for being and becoming citizens, for sensing environments and making evidence claims, can transform and generate altered possibilities for breathability through these technoscientific re-configurations.

Through grappling with the formation and activation of the “citizen,” this research commits to an investigation of the political subjects, relations, and worlds that these technologies generate. Rather than dismissing or discarding the term “citizen” as overly contentious or loaded, and opting for a term such as “community,” “civic,” “participatory,” or other seemingly less charged phrase,39 I work with this complicated term exactly because it raises questions about the democratic dilemmas and potential of digital participation and environmental action. Once deployed, the term “citizen” opens up as many unforeseen detours, obstacles, opportunities, and necessary reworkings in the course of its implementation. Part of the impetus for attending to the “citizen” is to demonstrate how this figure is not, as is customarily assumed in the context of citizen sensing, one that simply expresses the “general public” or an amateur participant who is meant to operate in contrast or in complement to expert science. Instead, the “citizen” in citizen sensing can become an indeterminate entity that forms through struggles toward more breathable worlds.

Although this study undertakes an intensive discussion of citizen-sensing practices and technologies, it also queries and reworks the designations of citizenship and approaches to political engagement that might be mobilized through these practices. Rather than signal toward more abstract designations of citizenship, whether in relation to cities, nations, technical practices, or globes and planetary governance, Citizens of Worlds works through the practices by which world-making and world-binding activities such as environmental sensing also become citizen-making and citizen-binding practices.40 The conditions of stressed environments, of having to breathe polluted air, and of not being able to alter conditions of uninhabitability, can feel more constricting than expansive, where political subjects are bound to problems with which they are forced to grapple because they affect the very conditions of their breathability. Distinct figures of citizenship materialize through struggles that unfold within these stifling atmospheres.

Combat Breathing

Atmospheres are expressive of the inhalations and exhalations of everyday life. Frantz Fanon elaborated on this condition of atmospheres through his investigations into colonial violence. Writing in the context of colonial occupation in Algeria, he argues that colonialism is not only an “occupation of territory.” Rather, colonial occupation extends to a country’s “daily pulsation.” Within this pulsation, individuals undertake “occupied breathing” that Fanon suggests can become a form of “combat breathing,” as it simultaneously endures yet works against the occupation of daily pulsations.47 Combat breathing is a mode of respiration that contests its own occupation and suffocation.48 Fighting for breath could on one level be a practice of fighting for survival. Yet on another level it could also involve fighting for different relations and inhabitations that are not bound to colonial power dynamics infusing everyday life. Fighting for breath in this way involves fighting for worlds.49 Rather than referring to a more universal or biological rendering of breath, however, combat breathing marks out a struggle to transform the specific occupied atmospheres of everyday life and in so doing to cultivate more breathable worlds. Less an absolute envelope or sphere that conditions and terminates breathing,50 such an approach draws attention to modes of exchange as well as possibilities for breathing otherwise. Within this context, atmospheric citizens materialize as political subjects who come into being as they struggle toward the decolonization not only of land, but also of everyday pulsations and exchanges.

Combat breathing is a practice and analytic that connects struggles across bodies, politics, histories, and environments.51 Writers and theorists from Christina Sharpe to Alexis Gumbs have taken up Fanon’s discussion of combat breathing to discuss on the one hand how toxic atmospheres become a sort of “weather” in which Black people struggle to breathe, and on the other hand to convey the violence of being robbed of breath within actual conditions of pollution, assault, and deprivation. In explicating Fanon, Sharpe suggests that it is necessary to turn to “the totality of the environments in which we struggle; the machines in which we live” to grapple with the “weather” of un/breathability.52 Indeed, Sharpe proposes strategies for cultivating breathability—or for breathing otherwise—by “refusing nation, country, citizenship” as anti-black formations that contribute to unbreathability.53

In their discussions of breathability, both Gumbs and Sharpe refer to the well-known words of Eric Garner, who when being assaulted in 2014 by NYPD police officers repeated eleven times, “I can’t breathe.” His words, and his death from this restraint of breath, have become a central reference point within the Black Lives Matter movement. The repeated enunciation of “I can’t breathe” by activists struggling for social justice recalls the violent death of Garner and many others. It also calls out the confined, airless, and toxic atmospheres within which Black people find themselves struggling to breathe due to systemic racism. This phrase has gained renewed relevance in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, whom a Minneapolis police officer suffocated with a knee on his neck as Floyd repeated, “I can’t breathe.” This call to breathability has resounded throughout protests in the US and cities worldwide, as struggles for racial, social, and environmental justice amplify and gather force.

Writing in an earlier context, Fanon noted that revolutions emerge—here describing Indo-Chinese people rising up against French colonialism—“because ‘quite simply’ it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for [them] to breathe.”54 Cheah refers to Fanon’s discussion of revolution and struggles to breathe to show how decolonial efforts can lead to the formation of new subjects, along with new worlds in which they can breathe.55 Struggles to breathe are articulations of other ways to move and respire that demand an expansion of socio-political possibilities. These are struggles with and against power, inequality, and the diminishment of worlds that people inhabit, require, and seek to build. Such an approach diverges from an understanding of atmospheres and breathing as universal components of life, to instead demonstrate how atmospheres and breathing are formative and transformative in ways that express social-political, epistemic, and ontological injustices.56

The relationship between air pollution and violence, particulates and power, as Lindsey Dillon and Julie Sze point out, leads to conditions of “embodied insecurity through the everyday act of breathing,” especially for racialized and low-income communities. Not only does the phrase, “I can’t breathe” signal this insecurity, but it also, as they write, indicates the “racial health disparities” and environmental injustices that lead to higher rates of asthma for Black people in the US and elsewhere.57 Environmental injustice in the form of air pollution occupies and constricts breathing. Such inequalities sediment in environments, bodies, and relations, which people struggle to transform by making more breathable worlds.

The phrase, “I can’t breathe,” is, then, a call to breathability, which as Gumbs writes is “designed to help us remember how to breathe and how to invite our revolutionary ancestors into our bodies and our movement.”58 From these “how-to” practices for breathing, Gumbs outlines “a cosmology” that forms to connect multiple struggles for justice.59 The respiratory and inspiratory exchanges taking place here are a generative and revolutionary mixing of earthly relations and struggles, inheritances and embodiments, which work against conditions of unbreathability. Gumbs develops combat breathing toward “Black feminist breathing,” as a practice that attends to “a lineage of Black revolutionaries whose faith in freedom continues to inspire.”60 Inspire and respire are exchanges informed by combat breathing, where to carry on breathing is to find ways to make that breathing less onerous, and more expansive. Combat breathing troubles the divide between respiration and inspiration, not as a blindly hopeful project, but as one that reckons with injustices but refuses to be bowed down, drowned out, or suffocated by them.61

Breathing Collectives, Breathing Otherwise

Breath is, then, a topic that has received attention from multiple fields. From environmental justice scholars and practitioners outlining long-standing work on the impairments to breathing in the form of asthma, heart, and pulmonary conditions for racialized communities and those who are less economically privileged, through social studies of science and technology that investigate the expert devices and practices that test and regulate the conditions of breath, to Black studies scholars who scrutinize the colonial legacies of breathing to work toward less suffocating socio-political conditions, there is a rich if at times diverging set of analyses on this topic. I especially engage with literature that attends to how atmospheres and subjects, citizens and worlds, are mutually constituted. I build on and extend this work to consider how citizens are not simply in worlds but rather how they are constituted through exchanges with worlds that express and materialize differential social-political conditions of breathability.

As a process of daily pulsations, breathing is a mode of subjectification that is informed by environments and possibilities for collective engagement across registers of atmospheric exchange. In a similar way, Indigenous literature discusses how citizenship and breath are co-extensive, where breath is an articulation of what connects people, land, and organizations in mutual exchange.62 To be without breath is also to be without freedom, liberty, sovereignty, or citizenship. Breath in this way is not just an exchange; it is also a form of mutual benefit and governance. Writing about Canada’s First Nations, Leanne Simpson describes Nishnabeg “governance as breathing—a rhythm of contraction and release.”63 Such approaches to atmospheric governance are inclined toward reciprocity and flourishing that form through a mutual politics of breath. The daily pulsations identified by Fanon take on another register here, where governance requires sustaining and cultivating collective breathing, by passing through combat into worlds of exchange.

Breathing involves more than one person inhaling and exhaling. It involves environments and other entities as they respire and exchange atmospheric gases and pollutants, along with circulations of air and weather. Breathing is transformative, remaking bodies and environments through continual exchanges of substances that accumulate and sediment into new ecologies. Balibar has suggested that a citizen is necessarily constituted as a member of a political community along with “fellow” citizens, and is not a solitary entity.64 A citizen always belongs to a collective that is the site and process of the political. But “fellow” citizens in the context of breathing, and sensing, extend not just to other humans but also to other entities, environments, and atmospheres that are in process, informing the possibilities for citizens and collectives to take hold as a democratic project. Indeed, breathability is not only undertaken by individual humans but also depends upon multiple entities as they constitute and collectively create breathable worlds.

I have previously written in a parallel way about the co-constitution of subjects and worlds in Program Earth, which looked more broadly at the proliferation of environmental sensing technologies. I fold in this earlier work here to investigate how breathability is a process that forms subjects and environments through distinct conditions of exchange.65 Breathing, like sensing, is an exchange that forms subjects and milieus, and that establishes the ongoing relations that continue to sediment into worlds of experience. I return to these extended, world- and subject-forming conditions to consider in more detail how breathing and breathability are not universal properties of bodies, but rather are practices with differential possibilities and effects that inform the ability to be and become citizens of worlds. Citizens of Worlds expands on this earlier research by investigating how citizens, as political subjects, materialize across human and more-than-human relations and worlds of experience. Breathability signals exchanges with environments and other entities. It is a register of collective and changing experiences. Incorporating more-than-humans into registers of citizenship necessarily expands the breathability of those worlds, while also informing the conditions for being and becoming citizens of worlds.66

Atmospheric citizens, as citizens of worlds, are therefore constituted through distributed and social conditions that make breathing possible. The sociality of breathing and air, as Ashon T. Crawley notes, can generate different currents of air that involve mixing and exchanging, as well as openness. Through these dynamics, he refers to “otherwise air,” which searches toward other possibilities for breathing.67 Such characterizations of air, atmospheres and breathing engage with currents and worlds of exchange, transformation, and struggle.

I consider how struggles for breathability surface through environmental sensing practices for monitoring air quality. This research analyzes how such practices could transform, reinscribe or fail to address the daily pulsations of environmental pollution, injustice, constriction, and violence. Through these practices, I suggest, atmospheric citizens and forms of citizenship materialize that are differently shaped by struggles to build more breathable worlds. To experience the constriction of breath and the pollution of air is to experience the world-binding conditions of everyday life. But citizens and worlds in-the-making also materialize through struggling against these conditions of unbreathability.

How to Use this Book: A Chapter Guide

Citizens of Worlds takes the form of a how-to guide of sorts that presents the practice-based research of making tool kits and working with communities to sense air pollution. The chapters in this book each examine a mode or practice of citizens and citizenship. Each chapter also presents an exploration of different modalities of the “how to” as a way to more closely analyze how practices, citizens, and worlds materialize. How-to guides are now proliferating along with any number of DIY engagements, from kits for building sensors, guides for launching satellites, instructions for managing urban infrastructure, as well as campaigns for achieving political change. This study takes seriously the upsurge of the how-to guide as a literary genre and social movement that attempts to give voice and direction to political and environmental struggles. At the same time, the research works through the opportunities and limitations of the how-to guide in providing apparently clear instructions on how to address a world—or worlds—gone wrong. This investigation into how to make breathable worlds involves attending to citizenship and worlds in the making. “How to” involves putting technologies and practices to work, understanding their effects, and transforming conditions toward more breathable worlds.

The citizens, worlds, and how-to practices in the making that these chapters describe are far from definitive, and could proliferate as an endless list. Chapter One, “Instrumental Citizens: How to Retool Action,” is an unconventional methods chapter that examines more fully the format and orientation of the how-to guide, and the complex engagements with digital technology and politics that unfold through seemingly practical courses of action. This chapter introduces the how-to “cosmology” that informs this study’s approach to practice-based research. It is written as an extended deliberation on instruments and instrumentality, interrogating how citizen-sensing practices and technologies are meant to operate, as well as how they actually do perform when put to work in the open air, thereby generating what I call open-air instrumentalisms.

Chapters Two to Four narrate the fieldwork, installations, and collaborations undertaken with communities working with citizen-sensing technologies to monitor air pollution. The second chapter, “Speculative Citizens: How to Evidence Harm,” focuses on Citizen Sense’s first project for sensing air pollution in relation to the hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) industry in northeastern Pennsylvania. This chapter describes attempts by residents to document effects from pollution in response to corporate and state neglect. I situate this work within citizen-sensing practices that grapple with how to generate forms of evidence, while also building different infrastructures that could create more breathable worlds.

Chapter Three, “Data Citizens: How to Reinvent Rights,” details residents’ and workers’ use of air pollution sensing technologies in the context of rapid urban development in Southeast London. Citizen data becomes enrolled in ongoing projects that attempt to reshape and preserve the urban realm by articulating the right to breathe. Here, the right-to becomes aligned with the how-to through the collection and mobilization of citizen data. However, as Chapter Three suggests, data might even supplant a struggle for rights when citizens feel that rights do not provide an actionable or equitable basis for addressing environmental pollution.

Chapter Four, “Multiple Citizens: How to Cultivate Relations,” documents the construction of air pollution gardens in the financial center of London. This fourth chapter works through the conjugations of sensing subjects that occur across humans and more-than-humans in the development of gardens that include sensors and vegetation responsive to air pollution. Sensing organisms such as vegetation can offer a way to observe and mitigate problems of air pollution. Chapter Four describes efforts both to sense and rework air pollution by transforming urban infrastructures, and through incorporating multiple other entities into the project of making breathable worlds.

I conclude Citizens of Worlds by addressing the modalities of citizenship worked through in this book—the atmospheric, the instrumental, the speculative, the data-oriented, the multiple, among many others that travel along with these figures. The Conclusion, “Sensing Citizens: How to Collectivize Experience,” reconsiders how environmental collectives form and are engaged in ongoing if differing struggles to make breathable worlds. In between each of these chapters, there are citizen-sensing tool kit intervals that present different sensor configurations that the Citizen Sense research project has studied, tested, and installed, and which the adjacent chapters document and analyze as attempts to develop practices of computing otherwise.

Citizens of Worlds is a proposal to move into the open air when studying how citizens and worlds, technologies and practices, materialize through concrete environmental struggles. A turn toward the open air involves a turn toward concrete effects as well as practices—it is an orientation and an undertaking that might involve combat breathing, as well as many other struggles for reworking the pulsations of daily life. Air is more than a volumetric container, element, or essential unit of analysis. Instead, it is a differential process, material, exchange, and condition for being and becoming citizens of worlds. Such an approach considers how political subjects form with and through exchanges that sense and build more breathable worlds. The atmospheric citizen discussed here is an initial figure who signals how citizens and citizenships form in relation to atmospheres and injustice, air pollution and air-quality monitoring. Many more citizens and worlds materialize in the chapters that follow. This text is, then, written toward pluralistic practices and modes of citizenship—atmospheric and otherwise—that materialize through struggles to sense and act on air pollution as a way to realize more breathable worlds.