Akshita Sivakumar | University of California, San Diego (original) (raw)
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Papers by Akshita Sivakumar
Catalyst, Apr 5, 2023
Data-driven environmental governance within the standard regulatory regime routinely relies on un... more 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.
Public Culture
Sustainable" urban development projects are realized not despite but rather through the instituti... more Sustainable" urban development projects are realized not despite but rather through the institutionalized organization of differences. There are so many different actors involved, so many entrenched interests, so many different genres of expertise and perspectives about what sustainability is or should be, of what should or should not be built and how, that it is a rather curious political accomplishment when a new urban form gets built, promoted, and recognized by many as admirably "green." Understanding how these differences are mobilized and coordinated in practice is thus key to understanding how the politics of sustainability is made concrete in particular ways and not others.1 In this essay, we take a pragmatic approach to the question of how sustainability in the built form gets established materially. Rather than starting with science, the state, or another presumed ultimate arbiter of whether a project is actually green, we examine the construction of sustainability in the messy middle of the design process. The design process, we maintain, is a key site where the politics of sustainability play out, where different perspectives on sustainability are revealed, developed, struggled over, and settled pragmatically. By interrogating how designers mobilize and manage these differences, we aim to shed light on sustainability in the making, that is, as a process of doing politics by other means.2
This thesis contends that basic architectural design training requires malleable aesthetic and sp... more This thesis contends that basic architectural design training requires malleable aesthetic and spatial sensibilities which in turn can cultivate a pliable and multiple sense of self. "A sense of self" here draws on William James's and Ulric Neisser's plural ways of conceiving and knowing oneself through self-knowledge, selfconsciousness and self-agency, all of which combine to motivate our actions in the world. "Aesthetic", borrows from Mark Johnson's definition of constituting the patterns, images, feelings, qualities, and emotions by which meaning is possible for us in every aspect of our lives. "Spatial" captures the ways in which we situate and orient self in the world. How we are trained to perceive, apprehend, cogitate, examine, reflect, record, and practice these sensibilities guides how we piece together our experiences in the world as a series of aesthetic and spatial fragments. I argue that 1. The cultivation of multiple and pliabl...
Catalyst, Apr 5, 2023
Data-driven environmental governance within the standard regulatory regime routinely relies on un... more 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.
Public Culture
Sustainable" urban development projects are realized not despite but rather through the instituti... more Sustainable" urban development projects are realized not despite but rather through the institutionalized organization of differences. There are so many different actors involved, so many entrenched interests, so many different genres of expertise and perspectives about what sustainability is or should be, of what should or should not be built and how, that it is a rather curious political accomplishment when a new urban form gets built, promoted, and recognized by many as admirably "green." Understanding how these differences are mobilized and coordinated in practice is thus key to understanding how the politics of sustainability is made concrete in particular ways and not others.1 In this essay, we take a pragmatic approach to the question of how sustainability in the built form gets established materially. Rather than starting with science, the state, or another presumed ultimate arbiter of whether a project is actually green, we examine the construction of sustainability in the messy middle of the design process. The design process, we maintain, is a key site where the politics of sustainability play out, where different perspectives on sustainability are revealed, developed, struggled over, and settled pragmatically. By interrogating how designers mobilize and manage these differences, we aim to shed light on sustainability in the making, that is, as a process of doing politics by other means.2
This thesis contends that basic architectural design training requires malleable aesthetic and sp... more This thesis contends that basic architectural design training requires malleable aesthetic and spatial sensibilities which in turn can cultivate a pliable and multiple sense of self. "A sense of self" here draws on William James's and Ulric Neisser's plural ways of conceiving and knowing oneself through self-knowledge, selfconsciousness and self-agency, all of which combine to motivate our actions in the world. "Aesthetic", borrows from Mark Johnson's definition of constituting the patterns, images, feelings, qualities, and emotions by which meaning is possible for us in every aspect of our lives. "Spatial" captures the ways in which we situate and orient self in the world. How we are trained to perceive, apprehend, cogitate, examine, reflect, record, and practice these sensibilities guides how we piece together our experiences in the world as a series of aesthetic and spatial fragments. I argue that 1. The cultivation of multiple and pliabl...