CoSEP
COLLECTIVE for SOCIO-SPATIAL
& ENVIRONMENTAL PRAXIS
UC DAVIS
NEWS
• Upcoming: Field walk in South Stockton. Dec 17, 2025, with Little Manila Rising (LMR) and the Central Valley Air Quality(CVAQ) Coalition
• CoSEP PI, Akshita Sivakumar, receives the UC Davis Hellman Fellowship
RESEARCH TRACKS AND THEMES
ABOUT
Established in Dec 2023, CoSEP undertakes transdisciplinary, research-driven projects to address the socio-spatial and political nature of designing and governing the built environment to facilitate the fullness of life. CoSEP's projects lie at the intersection of design, technology, governance, and social justice. We are committed to praxis, or the reflective manner of combining theory and practice to achieve and sustain just futures. CoSEP is housed at the University of California, Davis, on the land of the home of the Patwin people.
© Akshita Sivakumar 2023 - 2026
RESEARCH TRACK: Technoscience of Environmental Governance
THEME #2: Technologies of Accountability and Solidarity
i.
Canary in the Coal Mine: Design for Environmental Governance
Canary in the Coal Mine presents and responds to a provocation: Can STS-informed design meaningfully mediate environmental governance and environmental justice?
Governance refers to the processes and institutions through which decisions about environmental policies and regulations are made and implemented. Environmental Justice is the social movement interested in clean and healthy environments in marginalized communities. In the United States, air pollution governance relies on quantitative data collection using pollution monitors and sensors. Data from these devices is presented as both the problem and the solution, leading to a moving goalpost to capture hyperlocal data. On the other hand, environmental justice community members know and experience their environments in hyperlocal ways through sensorial and political attunements that are far more telling than the noisy data of portable monitors. Within the dominant procedural apparatuses of environmental governance, embodied and place-based knowledge that lies in excess of quantitative measurement is usually expressed through public comments and testimonies. However, these testimonies rarely have legal and political standing to effect drastic changes by state agencies. Despite this, marginalized participants participate in procedural governance spaces to fight for environmental justice, navigating their double bind of participation and refusal. This project posits that design can hold the tensions of their dilemma in impactful ways.
Canary in the Coal Mine is a design intervention based on years of ethnographic work in California on issues of air pollution mitigation and decarbonization. It presents a possibility of turning data collection processes into practices that deepen a sense of reciprocity and accountability amongst social groups involved in participatory governance.
Canary #1 intervenes in the acts of presenting public comments.
Canary #2 intervenes in the area of qualitative data.
Design tools and technologies such as sensors and monitors are often used to collect evidentiary data about air pollution. Not long ago, canaries, the birds, were used to provide early warnings for carbon monoxide in coal mines due to their heightened sensitivity. Electronic laser particle sensors have since replaced the birds to measure and collect data about pollutants in real-time. What hasn’t changed, however, is the impetus to collect data about early warnings. Merely collecting data about the toxic gases in the air is rarely effective for environmental justice. Design can and should do more than collect data.
Canary #1: CC#1 is a device that brings attention to public comments as a vital part of the repertoire of environmental justice action. Public comments, written or verbal, are a form of political action through which people affected and implicated in decision-making in various domains of governance, such as environmental, urban, forest, etc. voice their opinions. The canary is a companion that anchors conversations about how public comments. It does so by outputting, in audio and print, the themes that have emerged in California air pollution and decarbonization legislation over the past 10 years. It also serves as a tool to help train newcomers in what goes into crafting effective public comments.
Canary #2: CC#2 is a device that not only senses particulate matter PM2.5 and PM10, some of the most harmful pollutants, but also mobilizes action. It documents other forms of embodied knowledge through recordings of in-situ observations of community members which maintain momentum in the environmental justice movement. Visitors can interact with the canaries, observe how they sense pollutants, and listen to recordings of past sensing exercises.