Seeing power with a flashlight: DIY thermal sensing technology in the classroom.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on 'making and doing' in Science and Technology Studies (STS) by describing and theorizing the teaching of making and doing. We describe a collaborative do-it-yourself (DIY) technology project taught simultaneously in Canada and the United States, in sociology and public health, to undergraduates with no prior electronics experience. Students built thermal flashlights - low cost digital tools for making thermal images - and employed them to research their surrounding environments. By making and using the thermal flashlights, learners investigated power in two senses: identifying social power relationships embedded within normally unquestioned infrastructures, and exploring these infrastructures' connection to industrial forms of power, such as heat and electricity. Students and instructors came to understand how the control of power, light and temperature is vital to human-made infrastructure and environmental health threats that characterize the 21st century. Through this project, students went from being passive consumers of such power to become active investigators of their socio-technical systems by producing unique knowledge that enabled them to imagine how they might make and inhabit their environments differently. Breaking down the distinction between teaching and research, this article explores the promise of 'making and doing' in university courses to create new collaborative research platforms that could spread laterally and scale to transform social and technical infrastructures.

Chemicals in the Creek: designing a situated data physicalization of open government data with the community.

Over the last decade growing amounts of government data have been made available in an attempt to increase transparency and civic participation, but it is unclear if this data serves non-expert communities due to gaps in access and the technical knowledge needed to interpret this "open" data. We conducted a two-year design study focused on the creation of a community-based data display using the United States Environmental Protection Agency data on water permit violations by oil storage facilities on the Chelsea Creek in Massachusetts to explore whether situated data physicalization and Participatory Action Research could support meaningful engagement with open data. We selected this data as it is of interest to local groups and available online, yet remains largely invisible and inaccessible to the Chelsea community. The resulting installation, Chemicals in the Creek, responds to the call for community-engaged visualization processes and provides an application of situated methods of data representation. It proposes event-centered and power-aware modes of engagement using contextual and embodied data representations. The design of Chemicals in the Creek is grounded in interactive workshops and we analyze it through event observation, interviews, and community outcomes. We reflect on the role of community engaged research in the Information Visualization community relative to recent conversations on new approaches to design studies and evaluation.

Learning in Crisis: Training students to monitor and address irresponsible knowledge construction by U.S. federal agencies under Trump.

Immediately after President Trump's inauguration, U.S. federal science agencies began deleting information about climate change from their websites, triggering alarm among scientists, environmental activists, and journalists about the administration's attempt to suppress information about climate change and promulgate climate denialism. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) was founded in late 2016 to build a multidisciplinary collaboration of scholars and volunteers who could monitor the Trump administration's dismantling of environmental regulations and science deemed harmful to its industrial and ideological interests. One of EDGI's main initiatives has been training activists and volunteers to monitor federal agency websites to identify how the climate-denialist ideology is affecting public debate and science policy. In this paper, we explain how EDGI's web-monitoring protocols are being incorporated into college curricula. Students are trained how to use the open-source online platforms that EDGI has created, but are also trained in how to analyze changes, determine whether they are significant, and contextualize them for a public audience. In this way, EDGI's work grows out of STS work on "critical making" and "making and doing." We propose that web-monitoring exemplifies an STS approach to responsive and responsible knowledge production that demands a more transparent and trustworthy relationship between the state and the public. EDGI's work shows how STS scholars can establish new modes of engagement with the state, and create spaces where the public can not only define and demand responsible knowledge practices, but also participate in the process of creating STS inspired forms of careful, collective and public knowledge construction.