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

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The distinction-between sensor and collaborator-is critical in oceanic environments distant from human centres, where fewer human collaboratorsexist to communicate when and how things are going wrong. Designating these environments as 'remote', and albatrosses as the superlative exampleof remote existence, can reproduce a conviction that they are far removed from or inconsequential to human activities. Tracking infrastructures have thepotential to challenge this in novel ways, by demonstrating that environmental change, rather than abstractly 'happening', is happening to and affectingsomething, 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 mightallow thinking differently about these spaces. To date, there has been little sustained enquiry in to the modes of governance tracking infrastructuresenact. This warrants attention to how these infrastructures shape social and political responses to the phenomena they render visible. In collaboration withscientists, I will explore whether these responses could be redirected to better address the interests of the human and nonhuman actors that co-habit thesespaces. 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 soin these environments, where such questions are equally pressing.