Sensing Under Fire
Stavros Papavassiliou
Current
Sensing Under Fire examines the politics of fire management in Europe's southeastern periphery through a critical reconfiguration of remote sensing techniques. In contemporary Greece, increasingly violent 'wild'fires are either stripped of their political character – as simply a problem for territorial management – or blamed on any convenient Other: migrants, 'foreign agents', irresponsible farmers. In either case, remote sensing technologies are presented as key elements of a command and control architecture that claims to deliver on environmental and security concerns. Not too long ago, ecological knowledge began to recognise the mutually productive relationship within which fire and human environments are bound. By positioning fire as an agent rather than an effect, the research focus shifts from identifying the causes of a single fire event towards mapping the agencies that engage in the co-production of a fire regime. To this end, contemporary conflagrations are situated within an expanded spatial, spectral, and temporal frame of sensing. This modified remote sensing is aimed at detecting traces of the drives, ideas, policies and technologies of political ecologies involved in the long history of transformations of fire regimes in the region.
SENSS Scholarship
SENSS Scholarship