Max Ritts
Biographic Data
| ID | 184031 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Max Ritts |
| GIVEN NAMES | Max |
| FAMILY NAME | Ritts |
| SIGNATURE | RITTS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Clark University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8825-5312 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 117 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Geographies of Environmental Data 1
Massive changes to the physical environment over the last decade have been understood by geographers in relation to new social, economic, and institutional imperatives to collect and circulate data. This review, the first of three on “environmental data,” diverts from common approaches to the concept to consider the distinctive ‘environments’ that result from data's geographical, material, and spatial entailments. Examples are drawn from economic…
Preamble: Sensing elementality
This article introduces ‘sensing elementality’ as an analytic orientation meant to evoke the overlapping potentials of eco-critique and experimental thinking. We highlight the importance of sensing and elementality both as theoretical frameworks and emerging debates within a number of academic fields, including geography, media studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Finally, we overview some of the contributions of the articles featur…
The environmentality of digital acoustic monitoring: Emerging formations of spatial power in forests
The rise of digital acoustic monitoring is having transformative effects within forest conservation geographies and practices. By featuring divergent acoustic signals (a gunshot, a bird call) as its evidentiary basis for targeted acts of spatial intervention, digital acoustic monitoring promises to address myriad forest crises, from escalating poaching threats to biodiversity loss. More than a conservation tool, we assert that digital acoustic mo…
Unsettling Participation by Foregrounding More-than-Human Relations in Digital Forests
The question of who participates in making forest environments usually refers to human stakeholders. Yet forests are constituted through the participation of many other entities. At the same time, digital technologies are increasingly used in participatory projects to measure and monitor forest environments globally. However, such participatory initiatives are often limited to human involvement and overlook how more-than-human entities and relati…
Growing up sustainable? Politics of race and youth in Urbanplan, Copenhagen
This paper considers how racialized youth in Denmark negotiate sustainability amid contexts marked by intersecting forms of economic restructuring, progressive neoliberalism, white ethno-nationalism, and green urban planning. Urbanplan is a low-income, notoriously “troubled” Copenhagen neighborhood where we conducted fieldwork for 7 months (2019-2020) with fifteen male youth, aged 17-21. Using ethnography, policy reviews, and interviews with city…
Smart oceans governance: Reconfiguring capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations
How does the digitisation of the ocean reconfigure capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations? What analytic tools allow us to trace their intersecting dynamics? These are the central questions that we take up through an examination of smart oceans governance along the west coast of Canada, where the state is developing new institutional partnerships to manage the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure across unceded Indigenous lands and …
Reworking the political in digital forests: The cosmopolitics of socio-technical worlds
Forests are increasingly central to policies and initiatives to address global environmental change. Digital technologies have become crucial components of these projects as the tools and systems that would monitor and manage forests for storing carbon, preserving biodiversity, and providing ecosystem services. Historically, technologies have been instrumental in forming forests as spaces of conservation, extraction, and inhabitation. Digital tec…
New forms: Anthropocene Festivals and experimental environmental governance
This paper is about the "Anthropocene Festival," a concept we develop to explore proliferating and multi-faceted arts-based events, happenings, unconferences, and workshops which collectively model novel forms of environmental governance. The Anthropocene Festival mobilizes disruptive and creative possibilities at the juncture of digital and ecological life, while simultaneously embodying developments in the institutional form of green capitalism…
Conservation acoustics: Animal sounds, audible natures, cheap nature
The story of Wānanalua: Stranded whales and contested marine sovereignties in Hawai'i
This paper considers how systems of interspecies knowing and care in Hawai'i push against state-supported frameworks of liberal biopolitical governance. In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a citation two Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) women under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, for unlawfully "tak[ing] and/or or transporting" a stranded melon-headed whale ("Wānanalua"). In the lawsuit, prosecutors delibera…
Canoes, Modernity, and the Colonial Imagining of Progress
This article, part photo-essay and part treatise, explores the interplays of history, photographic representation, and archival circulation at work in colonial imaginings of coastal canoes. Inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, we analyze the archival photographic record in British Columbia to challenge narratives of progress; instead, we insist that Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious” provides a method for reading canoe photos agai…
Smart Earth: A meta-review and implications for environmental governance
Environmental governance has the potential to be significantly transformed by Smart Earth technologies, which deploy enhanced environmental monitoring via combinations of information and communication technologies (ICT), conventional monitoring technologies (e.g. remote sensing), and Internet of Things (IoT) applications (e.g. Environmental Sensor Networks (ESNs)). This paper presents a systematic meta-review of Smart Earth scholarship, focusing …
Amplifying Environmental Politics: Ocean Noise
Scientific evidence suggests that rising levels of anthropogenic underwater sound (“ocean noise”) produced by industrial activities are causing a range of injuries to marine animals—in particular, whales. These developments have forced states and development proponents into acknowledging ocean noise as a threat to marine economic activity. This paper delivers a Gramsci‐inspired critique of the modernizations of ocean noise regulation being wrough…
Environmentalists abide: Listening to whale music - 1965-1985
Music can enrich geographical efforts to understand ideology as a lived experience. This paper explores the history of whale music - instrumental music that samples or thematizes whale sound. For environmentalists who came of age in the late 1960s, whale music fostered new interrogations about the identity of nature and the nature of identity, interrogations that reflected structural changes in North American society. To understand whale music's …
Military Cetology
Throughout the Cold War, the US Navy aggressively explored the sound-making and sound-detecting capacities of cetaceans to help it retain its supremacy in marine battle space. Whales, dolphins, and porpoises were engaged as animals that "see with sound," that produce sophisticated echolocation "clicks," and that harness the ocean's complex acoustic waveguide to detect signals thousands of miles away. Other scholars have touched on the navy's lega…
Smart Earth: A meta-review and implications for environmental governance
Environmental governance has the potential to be significantly transformed by Smart Earth technologies, which deploy enhanced environmental monitoring via combinations of information and communication technologies (ICT), conventional monitoring technologies (e.g. remote sensing), and Internet of Things (IoT) applications (e.g. Environmental Sensor Networks (ESNs)). This paper presents a systematic meta-review of Smart Earth scholarship, focusing …
Reworking the political in digital forests: The cosmopolitics of socio-technical worlds
Forests are increasingly central to policies and initiatives to address global environmental change. Digital technologies have become crucial components of these projects as the tools and systems that would monitor and manage forests for storing carbon, preserving biodiversity, and providing ecosystem services. Historically, technologies have been instrumental in forming forests as spaces of conservation, extraction, and inhabitation. Digital tec…
Military Cetology
Throughout the Cold War, the US Navy aggressively explored the sound-making and sound-detecting capacities of cetaceans to help it retain its supremacy in marine battle space. Whales, dolphins, and porpoises were engaged as animals that "see with sound," that produce sophisticated echolocation "clicks," and that harness the ocean's complex acoustic waveguide to detect signals thousands of miles away. Other scholars have touched on the navy's lega…
The environmentality of digital acoustic monitoring: Emerging formations of spatial power in forests
The rise of digital acoustic monitoring is having transformative effects within forest conservation geographies and practices. By featuring divergent acoustic signals (a gunshot, a bird call) as its evidentiary basis for targeted acts of spatial intervention, digital acoustic monitoring promises to address myriad forest crises, from escalating poaching threats to biodiversity loss. More than a conservation tool, we assert that digital acoustic mo…
Conservation acoustics: Animal sounds, audible natures, cheap nature
New forms: Anthropocene Festivals and experimental environmental governance
This paper is about the "Anthropocene Festival," a concept we develop to explore proliferating and multi-faceted arts-based events, happenings, unconferences, and workshops which collectively model novel forms of environmental governance. The Anthropocene Festival mobilizes disruptive and creative possibilities at the juncture of digital and ecological life, while simultaneously embodying developments in the institutional form of green capitalism…
Amplifying Environmental Politics: Ocean Noise
Scientific evidence suggests that rising levels of anthropogenic underwater sound (“ocean noise”) produced by industrial activities are causing a range of injuries to marine animals—in particular, whales. These developments have forced states and development proponents into acknowledging ocean noise as a threat to marine economic activity. This paper delivers a Gramsci‐inspired critique of the modernizations of ocean noise regulation being wrough…
Environmentalists abide: Listening to whale music - 1965-1985
Music can enrich geographical efforts to understand ideology as a lived experience. This paper explores the history of whale music - instrumental music that samples or thematizes whale sound. For environmentalists who came of age in the late 1960s, whale music fostered new interrogations about the identity of nature and the nature of identity, interrogations that reflected structural changes in North American society. To understand whale music's …
Smart oceans governance: Reconfiguring capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations
How does the digitisation of the ocean reconfigure capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations? What analytic tools allow us to trace their intersecting dynamics? These are the central questions that we take up through an examination of smart oceans governance along the west coast of Canada, where the state is developing new institutional partnerships to manage the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure across unceded Indigenous lands and …
Geographies of Environmental Data 1
Massive changes to the physical environment over the last decade have been understood by geographers in relation to new social, economic, and institutional imperatives to collect and circulate data. This review, the first of three on “environmental data,” diverts from common approaches to the concept to consider the distinctive ‘environments’ that result from data's geographical, material, and spatial entailments. Examples are drawn from economic…
The story of Wānanalua: Stranded whales and contested marine sovereignties in Hawai'i
This paper considers how systems of interspecies knowing and care in Hawai'i push against state-supported frameworks of liberal biopolitical governance. In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a citation two Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) women under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, for unlawfully "tak[ing] and/or or transporting" a stranded melon-headed whale ("Wānanalua"). In the lawsuit, prosecutors delibera…
Military Cetology
Throughout the Cold War, the US Navy aggressively explored the sound-making and sound-detecting capacities of cetaceans to help it retain its supremacy in marine battle space. Whales, dolphins, and porpoises were engaged as animals that "see with sound," that produce sophisticated echolocation "clicks," and that harness the ocean's complex acoustic waveguide to detect signals thousands of miles away. Other scholars have touched on the navy's lega…
Amplifying Environmental Politics: Ocean Noise
Scientific evidence suggests that rising levels of anthropogenic underwater sound (“ocean noise”) produced by industrial activities are causing a range of injuries to marine animals—in particular, whales. These developments have forced states and development proponents into acknowledging ocean noise as a threat to marine economic activity. This paper delivers a Gramsci‐inspired critique of the modernizations of ocean noise regulation being wrough…
Environmentalists abide: Listening to whale music - 1965-1985
Music can enrich geographical efforts to understand ideology as a lived experience. This paper explores the history of whale music - instrumental music that samples or thematizes whale sound. For environmentalists who came of age in the late 1960s, whale music fostered new interrogations about the identity of nature and the nature of identity, interrogations that reflected structural changes in North American society. To understand whale music's …
Canoes, Modernity, and the Colonial Imagining of Progress
This article, part photo-essay and part treatise, explores the interplays of history, photographic representation, and archival circulation at work in colonial imaginings of coastal canoes. Inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, we analyze the archival photographic record in British Columbia to challenge narratives of progress; instead, we insist that Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious” provides a method for reading canoe photos agai…
Smart Earth: A meta-review and implications for environmental governance
Environmental governance has the potential to be significantly transformed by Smart Earth technologies, which deploy enhanced environmental monitoring via combinations of information and communication technologies (ICT), conventional monitoring technologies (e.g. remote sensing), and Internet of Things (IoT) applications (e.g. Environmental Sensor Networks (ESNs)). This paper presents a systematic meta-review of Smart Earth scholarship, focusing …
Conservation acoustics: Animal sounds, audible natures, cheap nature
The story of Wānanalua: Stranded whales and contested marine sovereignties in Hawai'i
This paper considers how systems of interspecies knowing and care in Hawai'i push against state-supported frameworks of liberal biopolitical governance. In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a citation two Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) women under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, for unlawfully "tak[ing] and/or or transporting" a stranded melon-headed whale ("Wānanalua"). In the lawsuit, prosecutors delibera…
Smart oceans governance: Reconfiguring capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations
How does the digitisation of the ocean reconfigure capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations? What analytic tools allow us to trace their intersecting dynamics? These are the central questions that we take up through an examination of smart oceans governance along the west coast of Canada, where the state is developing new institutional partnerships to manage the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure across unceded Indigenous lands and …
Reworking the political in digital forests: The cosmopolitics of socio-technical worlds
Forests are increasingly central to policies and initiatives to address global environmental change. Digital technologies have become crucial components of these projects as the tools and systems that would monitor and manage forests for storing carbon, preserving biodiversity, and providing ecosystem services. Historically, technologies have been instrumental in forming forests as spaces of conservation, extraction, and inhabitation. Digital tec…
New forms: Anthropocene Festivals and experimental environmental governance
This paper is about the "Anthropocene Festival," a concept we develop to explore proliferating and multi-faceted arts-based events, happenings, unconferences, and workshops which collectively model novel forms of environmental governance. The Anthropocene Festival mobilizes disruptive and creative possibilities at the juncture of digital and ecological life, while simultaneously embodying developments in the institutional form of green capitalism…
Unsettling Participation by Foregrounding More-than-Human Relations in Digital Forests
The question of who participates in making forest environments usually refers to human stakeholders. Yet forests are constituted through the participation of many other entities. At the same time, digital technologies are increasingly used in participatory projects to measure and monitor forest environments globally. However, such participatory initiatives are often limited to human involvement and overlook how more-than-human entities and relati…
Growing up sustainable? Politics of race and youth in Urbanplan, Copenhagen
This paper considers how racialized youth in Denmark negotiate sustainability amid contexts marked by intersecting forms of economic restructuring, progressive neoliberalism, white ethno-nationalism, and green urban planning. Urbanplan is a low-income, notoriously “troubled” Copenhagen neighborhood where we conducted fieldwork for 7 months (2019-2020) with fifteen male youth, aged 17-21. Using ethnography, policy reviews, and interviews with city…
Preamble: Sensing elementality
This article introduces ‘sensing elementality’ as an analytic orientation meant to evoke the overlapping potentials of eco-critique and experimental thinking. We highlight the importance of sensing and elementality both as theoretical frameworks and emerging debates within a number of academic fields, including geography, media studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Finally, we overview some of the contributions of the articles featur…
The environmentality of digital acoustic monitoring: Emerging formations of spatial power in forests
The rise of digital acoustic monitoring is having transformative effects within forest conservation geographies and practices. By featuring divergent acoustic signals (a gunshot, a bird call) as its evidentiary basis for targeted acts of spatial intervention, digital acoustic monitoring promises to address myriad forest crises, from escalating poaching threats to biodiversity loss. More than a conservation tool, we assert that digital acoustic mo…
Geographies of Environmental Data 1
Massive changes to the physical environment over the last decade have been understood by geographers in relation to new social, economic, and institutional imperatives to collect and circulate data. This review, the first of three on “environmental data,” diverts from common approaches to the concept to consider the distinctive ‘environments’ that result from data's geographical, material, and spatial entailments. Examples are drawn from economic…
Political science (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Environmental ethics (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works) · Business (4 works)