Map, Territory, and Everything in Between: environmental data and territorialisation

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that in order to get to grips with emergent forms of environmental governance and politics, the de-spatialised and un-situated claims of open data initiatives need to be interrogated. Drawing on ethnographic work with an international scientific project in the Brazilian Amazon, the article explores the everyday collection of environmental data in the field as a way of making space, through simultaneous processes of re-territorialisation and de-territorialisation. It brings to light the ongoing labour and complex layering and folding of these territorial formations, as well as their capacity to foster ambivalently differentiated social and affective worlds. These worlds emerge from technologies of territorialisation but are not subsumed by them. The article then turns to a contrasting case, that of the apparently virtual data infrastructures and portals of open data initiatives, asking what forms of territorialisation they might constitute. The paper ends with the tentative suggestion that ‘openness’ is not a spatial form that the world is assumed to take, but is the apparatus itself of extension, the social and political machinery of de- and re-territorialisation.