Abstract:
The article conceptualizes the relationship between human action and material reality by interpreting the commons in the light of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s theorization. It approaches Arendt as a new materialist thinker of science and technology and completes her view of the dynamic of the world and the earth with critical posthumanist perspectives. This leads to the theoretical basis for understanding the interrelationship between human and non-human agency in the construction of the commons at the time when technologies are increasingly intervened in biological and social processes. Arendtian vantage point of the commons emphasizes humans’ conditionality on their environment and, thus, on the fabricated technology, which, in turn, becomes part of the environment. This interpretation puts forth a perspective for the discussions that seek to approach the commons from less anthropocentric perspectives, without forgetting the responsibility that comes with the unique human action.

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Abstract:
This article considers tensions between the meanings in discourses that promote Community Networks (CNs), or locally owned, managed and operated telecommunications networks, and meanings in rural communities in the Global South that the CNs intend to serve. My analysis reflects observing international advocacy for CNs, multiple case research in Argentina, Mexico, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Uganda, and my participation in the African CN movement including setting up a Namibian CN. I propose advocacy for CNs tends to puts “commoning”, or practices that produce, reproduce and use the commons, at the periphery. My analysis shows that advocates for CNs tend to reify relations and bound resources in CNs and omit the way that the fabric of a CN is embedded in the ongoing trajectories of inhabitants’ lives. Secondly, in promoting monetary metrics over more nuanced evaluations of the benefit and costs of human connectivity, they prioritise the visibility of certain achievements and ascribe more value to technical resources than to social co-ordination. These emphases contribute to inequalities within CNs, reinforce interdependence with capitalism and may unsettle cohesion in communities, and thus, I suggest, foreclose the opportunity for CNs to be sustainable alternatives to concentrations of telecommunications power.

Keywords:
Community Networks; CNs; Commoning; WiFi; spectrum regulation

Abstract:
Approaching the commons as a practice, as commoning, brings to the fore the concrete, historically, socially, and culturally situated mobilization of commoners around the resources they rely on or hold dear. However, the extent to which commoners are known, addressed, or even framed in relation to their engagement with and commitment to commoning still remains limited. This paper argues for the need to approach commoning through an ethos of care, which spurs us reconsidering the ‘neglected things’ and the things taken for granted in the discourses about commoners and commoning. In order to do so, this paper engages with the question how can our understanding of commoning and commoners be enriched by considering the affective dimension of engaging with such practice? As such, it focuses on the entanglement of affect, commoners, and commoning and it foregrounds commoners as subjects with their situated needs, expectations, and desires. A Spinozian-Deleuzian understanding of affect is adopted here which conceives it as a relational force that moves among bodies and enhances or diminishes their ability to act. Empirically, the paper builds on a two-year research that investigated the long-term sustainability of commoning and on the semi-structured interviews conducted therein with long-term commoners from three different practices: urban, digital, and knowledge commons. By identifying traces of affect in commoners’ narrations, the paper shows affect as a force mediating the tensions between continuing or interrupting the personal involvement in commoning; and as the indigenous’ awareness of something that keeps commoners and commoning together.

Keywords:
commoners, affect, long-term commoning, caring, labour

Abstract:
In recent decades, Science and Technology Studies (STS) have developed several conceptual tools for understanding the role of things in the political composition of the world. This paper proposes to study the production of a commons and its related infrastructure. We therefore analyse the redesign practices of a tent belonging to the Uruguayan Solidarity Economy Network (USEN), which brings together different ventures and collectives to practise Solidarity and Social Economy (SSE). The notion of the ‘cosmogram’ – as defined by John Tresch and revisited by Bruno Latour – accounts for the compositional character of life in common, emphasising the relational plot where humans and non-human roles and functions are distributed. Taking composition in the Deleuzian sense as a key concept, we consider the USEN tent as infrastructure constantly undergoing construction. From our methodological approach, actor-network theory (ANT) is relevant because of its ability to broaden the meaning of a collective, including non-human actors in the compositional exercise. In agreement with USEN, one of the authors began to develop a multi-situated ethnography – carried out between September 2017 and August 2018 – emphasising collaborative and experimental practices). From this experience of infrastructuring the tent as a commons, we conclude that the tent is not a simple good, but it is an opportunity to infrastructure, in an affective and relational field, a common world.

Keywords:
commons; infrastructure; cosmogram; collaborative design; social and solidarity economics; material politics.

Abstract:
In this paper we document and reflect on an ongoing co-design process of a new urban space, by the name L200, located in a very central and precious location in Zurich. L200 has the characteristics of an urban node at the confluence of many networks, a hub like railway stations provide these days but at a different spatial scale, acting as a much needed infrastructure for various commoning activities, among others. L200 is designed as a hybrid space, hosting a DIY digital platform, which is being co-created as a commons itself through a long-term participatory process and provides a building block for an alternative, bottom-up, vision to the “smart city”. In terms of participatory design, we experiment with, and advocate for, a structured laissez-faire methodology that frames both the physical and digital space as interconnected common infrastructures that the members of the association are free to use “as if it was their own” for limited periods of time. This participation through action approach allows for needs, ideas, and interventions to manifest naturally without any pressure or expectations. This means that the corresponding research for producing tools, methodologies, and designs need to advance in a slower than usual pace, and integrate many perspectives that use different languages and have different priorities. This slow design process allows for various forms of peer learning to occur. The paper lays out the overall L200 project in its full complexity through the dual role assumed by the authors, as researchers and activists, highlighting specific decisions, actions, and methodologies that contribute to the on-going research on infrastructuring the commons.

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This article discusses how China’s new era of air pollution control provoked groups of urban residents and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to adopt citizen science and strategies for disseminating technoscientific knowledge. Since 2008, their actions have included sharing photographic records, posting scientific evidence online, testing air purifiers and air pollution masks, and reporting data results from low-cost sensors. Interviews with the leaders of these initiatives show the changing patterns of pollution activism and engagement in the country, appealing to civic and resistance approaches to technoscientific knowledge and practices. Following and articulating recent works on STS about citizen science as resistance and Chinese studies on pollution activism, this article presents the civic adoption of scientific knowledge and technological devices as instrumental to activists but also problematic to navigate in the complex participative context of the country. The dynamism of the actions, first marked by the mistrust of official data and then expanding to other agendas, brings about a novel approach to resistance in the context of the environmental health crisis in China.

Keywords:
air pollution in China, resistance, pollution activism, citizen science, public participation

Abstract:

Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in a Milanese interaction design studio I describe how design work is being reimagined through the ambiguous notion of ‘"flexible skills" and I analyse how those "flexible" work practices open up unforeseen possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration between ethnographers and designers.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, interaction design work in Milan became increasingly precarious and stemming from occasional projects. Flexibility is configured both as a way of dealing with job uncertainty, and also as freedom, autonomy and mobility. The examples I discuss expose this ambiguity, providing insights into the tensions that this reconfiguration of the interaction designer through this figure of flexibility bring about, namely, a tension between older and newer models of action, in which an ethos of improvisation and continuous openness to transformation is sometimes hard to combine with the designers’ desire to keep their design-centred conceptions of action and creativity. Flexible skills, thus, are the instrument through which designers articulate an interesting anthropological tension: the tension between precarity and opportunity. Flexible skills challenge designers' modern and hubristic narrative of action (centred on the designer rather than users/people; centred on a cognitive notion of planning) and generates another one, which is based on a continuous openness to adaptation and unpredictability in relation to an (economic, social, professional, cultural) environment and a way of extracting potential from contingent encounters and situations - including my own ethnographic encounter with them. Performing "flexible skills" as a means for generating new opportunities from unpredictable situations, I argue, opens up the opportunity for turning the ethnographic encounter with design into a mode of speculatively (Wilkie et al 2017; Dunne & Raby 2013) and experimentally (Estalella & Criado 2018) researching together

Keywords:
interaction design, information economy, labour, post-Fordism, flexible skills, ethos of potency, speculative pragmatism, collaborative ethnography, (un)commoning