Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy - A special double issue featuring the essays: Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy by Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey and Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces by Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko.

Advocacy is the act of arguing on behalf of a particular issue, idea or person, and addresses issues including self-advocacy, environmental protection, the rights of women, youth and minorities, social justice, the re-structured digital divide and political reform. In this special double issue — the result of an open call for submissions — we have invited contributions from two pairs of authors considering how Situated Technologies have been mobilized to change and/or influence social or political policies, practices, and beliefs. In our call for submissions, we asked: What new forms of advocacy are enabled by contemporary location-based or context-aware media and information systems? How might they lend tactical support to the process of managing information flows and disseminating strategic knowledge that influences individual behavior or opinion, corporate conduct or public policy and law?

“Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces,” by Benjamin H. Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko, explores the theoretical implications of new forms of environmental monitoring enabled by pervasive computing. Asking what, if anything, current trends in the visualization of environmental data tell us, they introduce the notion of the “political image” as a foil by which to explore how networked assemblages of human and non-human actors might, when considered on a global scale, initiate a rethinking of how political institutions might work in environmental governance. Bratton and Jeremijenko suggest that their contribution can be read as both a design challenge as well as an experimental political theory for a social ecology configured through prevasive computational media.

In their contribution, “Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy,” Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey trace an ethnography of community wireless networks (cwns) beginning in the late 1990s. They illustrate, through a series of specific examples drawn from their experience as activists and field researchers, the terrain vague that exists between purely local, bottom-up, community-based networks and more centrally organized ones supported by local municipalities. Ultimately, they suggest that despite shared beliefs and values, these groups vary considerably in size, membership and activities from country to country based on political, economic, legal, and socio-cultural factors, highlighting the ways in which the identities and activities of cwns are linked with global causes and concerns while at the same time situated in their local communities.

Download a free PDF here, or buy a printed copy from Lulu.com.