Avian Sentinels: Albatrosses, Tracking Technologies and Human-Animal Relations in the Anthropocene

The distinction-between sensor and collaborator-is critical in oceanic environments distant from human centres, where fewer human collaborators
exist to communicate when and how things are going wrong. Designating these environments as 'remote', and albatrosses as the superlative example
of remote existence, can reproduce a conviction that they are far removed from or inconsequential to human activities. Tracking infrastructures have the
potential to challenge this in novel ways, by demonstrating that environmental change, rather than abstractly 'happening', is happening to and affecting
something, or someone, in a position to communicate.
I aim to investigate how these oceanic spaces and human-animal relations are newly configured and made visible through tracking, and how this might
allow thinking differently about these spaces. To date, there has been little sustained enquiry in to the modes of governance tracking infrastructures
enact. This warrants attention to how these infrastructures shape social and political responses to the phenomena they render visible. In collaboration with
scientists, I will explore whether these responses could be redirected to better address the interests of the human and nonhuman actors that co-habit these
spaces. The geographical literature has dealt eloquently with questions of multispecies cohabitation, or conviviality, in urban (Ginn, 2014; Hinchliffe &
Whatmore, 2006; Kirksey et al., 2018) and rural or seminatural (Buller, 2008; Crowley, Hinchliffe, & McDonald, 2017; Srinivasan, 2014) spaces, but less so
in these environments, where such questions are equally pressing.