This site documents a selection of Jennifer Gabrys’s research, writings and practice-based projects at the intersection of digital media, environments, and social research.
Jennifer is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies, which launched the research platform Smart Forests Atlas in 2022. She also leads the Citizen Sense and AirKit projects, which investigate the use of environmental sensors for new modes of citizen involvement in environmental issues. Both of these projects have received funding from the European Research Council.
She co-edits the “Planetarities” book series published through Goldsmiths Press; and is managing editor with Big Data & Society. She has co-edited a special issue on “Sensors and Sensing Practices,” with Science, Technology & Human Values (2019); and a special issue on “Environmental Data,” with Big Data & Society (2016). She is also co-editor of Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic (Routledge, 2013).
Her most recent book on the Citizen Sense project, Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle, was published November 2022 by the University of Minnesota Press, and is available as an open-access publication on Manifold. She is also the author of How to Do Things with Sensors (2019); Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016); and Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (2011).
She occasionally tweets through @citizen_sense and @PlanetaryPraxis.
Browse Citizen Sense work on GitHub and Vimeo, and Planetary Praxis on GitHub and Vimeo.