Citizen Sensing, Monitoring Air Pollution and Building the Frackbox

A number of environmental sensing technologies and practices are emerging that seek to enable citizens to use DIY and low-tech monitoring tools to understand and act upon environmental problems. Such “citizen sensing”... [ view full abstract ]

A number of environmental sensing technologies and practices are emerging that seek to enable citizens to use DIY and low-tech monitoring tools to understand and act upon environmental problems. Such “citizen sensing” projects intend to democratize the collection and use of environmental sensor data in order to facilitate expanded citizen engagement in environmental issues. But how effective are these practices of citizen sensing in not just providing “crowd-sourced” data sets, but also in giving rise to new modes of environmental awareness and practice? The Citizen Sense project investigates these questions by attending to the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing with citizen engagement. This presentation will discuss Citizen Sense project work on participatory engagements with “pollution sensing” in relation to monitoring air quality near infrastructure of unconventional natural gas extraction in the form of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) in northeastern Pennsylvania, USA. This presentation will outline citizen-sensing practices that monitor fracking-related pollution that are already underway, and it will discuss our attempts to contribute to monitoring processes through further participatory and practice-based citizen-sensing initiatives, including the developing of a monitoring device, the “frackbox.”