C Ojani
Biographic Data
| ID | 53352 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Ojani |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Ojani |
| SIGNATURE | OJANI C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9273-5642 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Un-Earthing STS: The Topological Quality of Cosmic Relations
Contemporary social inquiry into outer space often focuses on the extraterrestrial’s embeddedness in earthbound categories, politics, and socio-material relations. Space—and whatever is done to, in, or with it—is a figure that cannot but have recourse to Earth-as-ground. While this focus productively highlights the cultural tropes and sociopolitical processes by which human engagements with space are inevitably informed, emergent extraplanetary r…
“The project doesn’t exist!”: An ecology of non-projects in coastal Peru
In this article, I focus on how the members of a Peruvian NGO – specializing in the implementation of fog catchers – mobilized the notion of “the project” to pursue their goals. While the fog catchers were presented by the NGO workers as a water supply system for vulnerable populations on the urban periphery, they were often redirected by their beneficiaries as tools for informal urbanization. The fog catchers captured not only fog, but also prop…
In the Shadows of the New Space Economy
Space agencies and private companies around the world are taking various measures to tap into the new space economy. In Sweden, this is reflected in the construction of a spaceport for launching small satellites into Earth orbit. While these endeavors are sometimes justified by the potential of space infrastructure to address climate change, the Swedish case also highlights how space exploration, commercialization, and militarization can perpetua…
The Enemy of Kinship & Kinship with the Enemy
This Special Issue, The Enemy of Kinship & Kinship with the Enemy, examines anti-anthropocentric ideas of kinship through the lens of the “enemy.” It asks how animals conceptualized as “enemies” challenge expanded definitions of kinship. The introduction explores how figures such as parasites, pests, and invasive species disrupt ethical imperatives for kinship and compassion with nonhuman others. These beings often seek contact with humans, who f…
Against Traplessness: Disconnection and Entrapment in Multispecies Science Fiction
Scholars have noted that the celebration of relationality in multispecies and posthumanist scholarship sometimes disregards how more-than-human entanglements entail various kinds of disjuncture. While such critiques tend to figure disconnection as external to relation, this essay suggests that disconnection and connection are constitutive of all relations in equal measure. To help, the author draws on two multispecies science fiction novels- Chil…
Compression-Expansion: Miniaturization, Modularity, and Logistics Beyond Earth
If the Cold War space race culminated in a return to Earth, at present we are experiencing a renewed interest in space. Drawing on fieldwork among people working in the space sector in Sweden, this article focuses on some of the imaginaries underpinning this resurgence and the contemporary commercialization of space. Specifically, I hone in on the envisaged potential of miniaturized satellite technology to modify how humans relate to Earth and th…
Mining and/in outer space: Verticality, analogy, and infrastructural mediation in subarctic Sweden
Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked ethnographically: in oppositional terms, by herd…
Reindeer, rockets and space infrastructures: Enacting oligoptic-satellitarian environments in Northern Sweden
This article focuses on a series of connections between space infrastructures and environments in northern Sweden. Swedish space professionals often highlight the centrality of outer space for contemporary imaginaries about the planet as an interconnected whole. At the same time, the country's sounding rocket range outside the city of Kiruna relies on deep-seated constructions of the subarctic environment as empty wilderness. With the ongoing dev…
Ethnographic Lessons from Experimental Filmmaking: Capture and Captivation in Contemporary Iranian Cinema
Jafar Panahi's film Taxi is emblematic of how Iranian filmmakers find creative ways to undermine government-imposed regulations. As a socio-political critique that effectively suspends our doubts regarding the film's degree of improvisation and authenticity, Taxi recursively replicates its content in its own form by luring the Iranian government into demonstrating what the film merely sets out to communicate. In doing so, the film exemplifies a f…
Infrastructures and environments in late industrialism: An introduction
https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-544568
Ecology of Capture: Creating Land Titles Out of Thin Air in Coastal Peru
In coastal Peru, fog has recently been re-apprehended as an alternative water source for residents on the urban periphery. This article describes how a local NGO's fog capture project repurposed its multi-national big tech funder into an engine of informal urbanisation. I demonstrate how by instigating a process of multi-directional capture between NGO, funder, government, and recipients, the NGO's fog catchers mediated their beneficiaries' hopes…
Material Engagements with Fog in Lima
In the Peruvian capital of Lima, local NGOs, conservationists and residents on theurban periphery try to harness ground-touching clouds as part of alternative water-supply systems and environmental infrastructures of underground water production.While NGOs set up fog-capture nets to respond to the absence of state infrastructure,conservationists adopt similar methods to repair damaged more-than-human relationsand forestall desertification. Amid t…
Planetary Conversation: A Multidisciplinary Discussion about Ethnography and the Planetary
International audience
Smallness and Small-device Heuristics: Scaling Fog Catchers Down and Up in Lima, Peru
This article focuses on understandings of fog capture as an alternative water supply system in Lima. In neighbourhoods where state infrastructure is missing, fog catchers promise to alleviate residents’ dependency on private water suppliers. However, the utility of these micro-infrastructures is not self-evident. I show how a local NGO attempted to bring about commitment among prospective beneficiaries by framing the fog catchers against the size…
Experimenting with fog: Environmental infrastructures, infrastructuring environments, and the infrastructure of infrastructure
In coastal Peru, conservationists and scientists attend to fog as something that may be captured and transformed into water. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Limeñan conservationists who tapped into this atmospheric phenomenon as an alternative water source for use in fog oasis ecosystem reforestation. As I demonstrate, experimental engagements with fog had reconfigured conservationists' and other experimenters' understanding ab…
The Promise of Fog Capture: Ground-Touching Clouds as a Material (Im)Possibility in Peru
This article centers on an NGO-induced fog-capture project in Lima, Peru. While presented by the NGO as an alternative water-supply system for residents lacking state infrastructure, the fog catchers ultimately failed to live up to promises about potable water. Yet as fog turned into a material impossibility, the project's failure yielded a series of new possibilities and expectations, for instance about the potential acquisition of a piece of la…
Ethnographic research of outer space: Challenges and opportunities
The scales and categories of human activity are always evolving. The analytical and practical challenges that they pose for ethnographic theory and practice have the potential to consolidate as well as transform research methods and approaches. Drawing on our preliminary fieldwork, we explore how ethnographic practice can bring novel insights to the study of outer space, and map potential areas for future methodological innovation. We identify fo…
Speculative relations in Lima: Encounters with the limits of fog capture and ethnography
This article draws on two examples of encounters with the limits of fog capture in Lima to frame limitations as creative resources for ethnographic inquiry. In both examples, fog capture rendered speculatively conceivable previously backgrounded urban and ecological (dis)connections to residents on the city’s periphery, including the possibility to envisage certain relational reconfigurations. By analogously framing these experimental effects as …
Water in Atmospheric Suspension: Contact Zones between Ethnography and Speculative Realism
By installing fog catchers in the hills around Lima, Peru, conservationists seek to transform fog into water for use in infrastructures of fog oasis reforestation. This article describes the devices and techniques of inquiry through which fog was gradually rendered catchable. These relational engagements with the atmosphere, and the multifarious forms that fog assumed along the way, will be used to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of …
Displacing (in)formality: Endangered Species, Endangered City, and Unstable Grounds of Comparison
In this article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork among fog oasis conservationists in Lima, Peru, I show how emergent ethics of conservation become enmeshed with discourses on (in)formality. I demonstrate this by framing contemporary concerns about the endangerment of species endemic to Lima against the background of more long-running understandings of informal urbanization as a threat to the city itself. However, whilst serving as a mean…
Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space
Within the past decade, national and commercial activity in and connected to outer space has accelerated at an astounding rate. As anthropology and related social sciences keep pace with these developments, scholars have trained their critical faculties to understand how societies have related to space in the past and the present and how we may approach space in the future. In the autumn of 2021, the members of the project Anthropological Researc…
Infrastructures, Anthropology of
Having initially figured in social theory as a metaphor to theorize capitalism, infrastructures have become increasingly central to the study of more long‐running anthropological interests in politics and the mundane. Situated within or below, they are the conditions of possibility of other things, not least ethnographic practice itself. As such, infrastructures offer a number of possibilities for inquiry. We may ask about their constitutive rela…
The (ontological) politics of fog capture in Lima, Peru
Fog oasis conservationists in Lima attend to fog as a material possibility for capturing and enfolding in infrastructures of reforestation. Yet, their efforts become deliberately obstructed by the informal squatters whom conservationists perceive to threaten these ecosystems. Fog capture thus raises questions not only about the relation between infrastructure and environment but also the urban inequalities that must be addressed for such more-tha…
Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space
Within the past decade, national and commercial activity in and connected to outer space has accelerated at an astounding rate. As anthropology and related social sciences keep pace with these developments, scholars have trained their critical faculties to understand how societies have related to space in the past and the present and how we may approach space in the future. In the autumn of 2021, the members of the project Anthropological Researc…
Experimenting with fog: Environmental infrastructures, infrastructuring environments, and the infrastructure of infrastructure
In coastal Peru, conservationists and scientists attend to fog as something that may be captured and transformed into water. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Limeñan conservationists who tapped into this atmospheric phenomenon as an alternative water source for use in fog oasis ecosystem reforestation. As I demonstrate, experimental engagements with fog had reconfigured conservationists' and other experimenters' understanding ab…
The Promise of Fog Capture: Ground-Touching Clouds as a Material (Im)Possibility in Peru
This article centers on an NGO-induced fog-capture project in Lima, Peru. While presented by the NGO as an alternative water-supply system for residents lacking state infrastructure, the fog catchers ultimately failed to live up to promises about potable water. Yet as fog turned into a material impossibility, the project's failure yielded a series of new possibilities and expectations, for instance about the potential acquisition of a piece of la…
Reindeer, rockets and space infrastructures: Enacting oligoptic-satellitarian environments in Northern Sweden
This article focuses on a series of connections between space infrastructures and environments in northern Sweden. Swedish space professionals often highlight the centrality of outer space for contemporary imaginaries about the planet as an interconnected whole. At the same time, the country's sounding rocket range outside the city of Kiruna relies on deep-seated constructions of the subarctic environment as empty wilderness. With the ongoing dev…
Ecology of Capture: Creating Land Titles Out of Thin Air in Coastal Peru
In coastal Peru, fog has recently been re-apprehended as an alternative water source for residents on the urban periphery. This article describes how a local NGO's fog capture project repurposed its multi-national big tech funder into an engine of informal urbanisation. I demonstrate how by instigating a process of multi-directional capture between NGO, funder, government, and recipients, the NGO's fog catchers mediated their beneficiaries' hopes…
Compression-Expansion: Miniaturization, Modularity, and Logistics Beyond Earth
If the Cold War space race culminated in a return to Earth, at present we are experiencing a renewed interest in space. Drawing on fieldwork among people working in the space sector in Sweden, this article focuses on some of the imaginaries underpinning this resurgence and the contemporary commercialization of space. Specifically, I hone in on the envisaged potential of miniaturized satellite technology to modify how humans relate to Earth and th…
Mining and/in outer space: Verticality, analogy, and infrastructural mediation in subarctic Sweden
Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked ethnographically: in oppositional terms, by herd…
Ethnographic research of outer space: Challenges and opportunities
The scales and categories of human activity are always evolving. The analytical and practical challenges that they pose for ethnographic theory and practice have the potential to consolidate as well as transform research methods and approaches. Drawing on our preliminary fieldwork, we explore how ethnographic practice can bring novel insights to the study of outer space, and map potential areas for future methodological innovation. We identify fo…
Displacing (in)formality: Endangered Species, Endangered City, and Unstable Grounds of Comparison
In this article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork among fog oasis conservationists in Lima, Peru, I show how emergent ethics of conservation become enmeshed with discourses on (in)formality. I demonstrate this by framing contemporary concerns about the endangerment of species endemic to Lima against the background of more long-running understandings of informal urbanization as a threat to the city itself. However, whilst serving as a mean…
Infrastructures, Anthropology of
Having initially figured in social theory as a metaphor to theorize capitalism, infrastructures have become increasingly central to the study of more long‐running anthropological interests in politics and the mundane. Situated within or below, they are the conditions of possibility of other things, not least ethnographic practice itself. As such, infrastructures offer a number of possibilities for inquiry. We may ask about their constitutive rela…
The (ontological) politics of fog capture in Lima, Peru
Fog oasis conservationists in Lima attend to fog as a material possibility for capturing and enfolding in infrastructures of reforestation. Yet, their efforts become deliberately obstructed by the informal squatters whom conservationists perceive to threaten these ecosystems. Fog capture thus raises questions not only about the relation between infrastructure and environment but also the urban inequalities that must be addressed for such more-tha…
Speculative relations in Lima: Encounters with the limits of fog capture and ethnography
This article draws on two examples of encounters with the limits of fog capture in Lima to frame limitations as creative resources for ethnographic inquiry. In both examples, fog capture rendered speculatively conceivable previously backgrounded urban and ecological (dis)connections to residents on the city’s periphery, including the possibility to envisage certain relational reconfigurations. By analogously framing these experimental effects as …
Water in Atmospheric Suspension: Contact Zones between Ethnography and Speculative Realism
By installing fog catchers in the hills around Lima, Peru, conservationists seek to transform fog into water for use in infrastructures of fog oasis reforestation. This article describes the devices and techniques of inquiry through which fog was gradually rendered catchable. These relational engagements with the atmosphere, and the multifarious forms that fog assumed along the way, will be used to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of …
Displacing (in)formality: Endangered Species, Endangered City, and Unstable Grounds of Comparison
In this article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork among fog oasis conservationists in Lima, Peru, I show how emergent ethics of conservation become enmeshed with discourses on (in)formality. I demonstrate this by framing contemporary concerns about the endangerment of species endemic to Lima against the background of more long-running understandings of informal urbanization as a threat to the city itself. However, whilst serving as a mean…
Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space
Within the past decade, national and commercial activity in and connected to outer space has accelerated at an astounding rate. As anthropology and related social sciences keep pace with these developments, scholars have trained their critical faculties to understand how societies have related to space in the past and the present and how we may approach space in the future. In the autumn of 2021, the members of the project Anthropological Researc…
Material Engagements with Fog in Lima
In the Peruvian capital of Lima, local NGOs, conservationists and residents on theurban periphery try to harness ground-touching clouds as part of alternative water-supply systems and environmental infrastructures of underground water production.While NGOs set up fog-capture nets to respond to the absence of state infrastructure,conservationists adopt similar methods to repair damaged more-than-human relationsand forestall desertification. Amid t…
Planetary Conversation: A Multidisciplinary Discussion about Ethnography and the Planetary
International audience
Smallness and Small-device Heuristics: Scaling Fog Catchers Down and Up in Lima, Peru
This article focuses on understandings of fog capture as an alternative water supply system in Lima. In neighbourhoods where state infrastructure is missing, fog catchers promise to alleviate residents’ dependency on private water suppliers. However, the utility of these micro-infrastructures is not self-evident. I show how a local NGO attempted to bring about commitment among prospective beneficiaries by framing the fog catchers against the size…
Experimenting with fog: Environmental infrastructures, infrastructuring environments, and the infrastructure of infrastructure
In coastal Peru, conservationists and scientists attend to fog as something that may be captured and transformed into water. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Limeñan conservationists who tapped into this atmospheric phenomenon as an alternative water source for use in fog oasis ecosystem reforestation. As I demonstrate, experimental engagements with fog had reconfigured conservationists' and other experimenters' understanding ab…
The Promise of Fog Capture: Ground-Touching Clouds as a Material (Im)Possibility in Peru
This article centers on an NGO-induced fog-capture project in Lima, Peru. While presented by the NGO as an alternative water-supply system for residents lacking state infrastructure, the fog catchers ultimately failed to live up to promises about potable water. Yet as fog turned into a material impossibility, the project's failure yielded a series of new possibilities and expectations, for instance about the potential acquisition of a piece of la…
Ethnographic research of outer space: Challenges and opportunities
The scales and categories of human activity are always evolving. The analytical and practical challenges that they pose for ethnographic theory and practice have the potential to consolidate as well as transform research methods and approaches. Drawing on our preliminary fieldwork, we explore how ethnographic practice can bring novel insights to the study of outer space, and map potential areas for future methodological innovation. We identify fo…
Reindeer, rockets and space infrastructures: Enacting oligoptic-satellitarian environments in Northern Sweden
This article focuses on a series of connections between space infrastructures and environments in northern Sweden. Swedish space professionals often highlight the centrality of outer space for contemporary imaginaries about the planet as an interconnected whole. At the same time, the country's sounding rocket range outside the city of Kiruna relies on deep-seated constructions of the subarctic environment as empty wilderness. With the ongoing dev…
Ethnographic Lessons from Experimental Filmmaking: Capture and Captivation in Contemporary Iranian Cinema
Jafar Panahi's film Taxi is emblematic of how Iranian filmmakers find creative ways to undermine government-imposed regulations. As a socio-political critique that effectively suspends our doubts regarding the film's degree of improvisation and authenticity, Taxi recursively replicates its content in its own form by luring the Iranian government into demonstrating what the film merely sets out to communicate. In doing so, the film exemplifies a f…
Infrastructures and environments in late industrialism: An introduction
https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-544568
Ecology of Capture: Creating Land Titles Out of Thin Air in Coastal Peru
In coastal Peru, fog has recently been re-apprehended as an alternative water source for residents on the urban periphery. This article describes how a local NGO's fog capture project repurposed its multi-national big tech funder into an engine of informal urbanisation. I demonstrate how by instigating a process of multi-directional capture between NGO, funder, government, and recipients, the NGO's fog catchers mediated their beneficiaries' hopes…
The Enemy of Kinship & Kinship with the Enemy
This Special Issue, The Enemy of Kinship & Kinship with the Enemy, examines anti-anthropocentric ideas of kinship through the lens of the “enemy.” It asks how animals conceptualized as “enemies” challenge expanded definitions of kinship. The introduction explores how figures such as parasites, pests, and invasive species disrupt ethical imperatives for kinship and compassion with nonhuman others. These beings often seek contact with humans, who f…
Against Traplessness: Disconnection and Entrapment in Multispecies Science Fiction
Scholars have noted that the celebration of relationality in multispecies and posthumanist scholarship sometimes disregards how more-than-human entanglements entail various kinds of disjuncture. While such critiques tend to figure disconnection as external to relation, this essay suggests that disconnection and connection are constitutive of all relations in equal measure. To help, the author draws on two multispecies science fiction novels- Chil…
Compression-Expansion: Miniaturization, Modularity, and Logistics Beyond Earth
If the Cold War space race culminated in a return to Earth, at present we are experiencing a renewed interest in space. Drawing on fieldwork among people working in the space sector in Sweden, this article focuses on some of the imaginaries underpinning this resurgence and the contemporary commercialization of space. Specifically, I hone in on the envisaged potential of miniaturized satellite technology to modify how humans relate to Earth and th…
Mining and/in outer space: Verticality, analogy, and infrastructural mediation in subarctic Sweden
Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked ethnographically: in oppositional terms, by herd…
Un-Earthing STS: The Topological Quality of Cosmic Relations
Contemporary social inquiry into outer space often focuses on the extraterrestrial’s embeddedness in earthbound categories, politics, and socio-material relations. Space—and whatever is done to, in, or with it—is a figure that cannot but have recourse to Earth-as-ground. While this focus productively highlights the cultural tropes and sociopolitical processes by which human engagements with space are inevitably informed, emergent extraplanetary r…
“The project doesn’t exist!”: An ecology of non-projects in coastal Peru
In this article, I focus on how the members of a Peruvian NGO – specializing in the implementation of fog catchers – mobilized the notion of “the project” to pursue their goals. While the fog catchers were presented by the NGO workers as a water supply system for vulnerable populations on the urban periphery, they were often redirected by their beneficiaries as tools for informal urbanization. The fog catchers captured not only fog, but also prop…
In the Shadows of the New Space Economy
Space agencies and private companies around the world are taking various measures to tap into the new space economy. In Sweden, this is reflected in the construction of a spaceport for launching small satellites into Earth orbit. While these endeavors are sometimes justified by the potential of space infrastructure to address climate change, the Swedish case also highlights how space exploration, commercialization, and militarization can perpetua…
Geography (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (9 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Ethnography (7 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (7 works) · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life (7 works) · Archaeology (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)