Justice-led Ecoacoustics

Within the last decade the field of ecoacoustics – which you can think of as ‘shazam for nature’ – has becoming a popular and important tool for wildlife monitoring and biodiversity conservation, facilitated by falling hardware costs and advances in machine learning techniques. Ecoacoustic research has been significantly supported by the expertise
and labour of citizen scientists, bird enthusiasts and crowdsourcers Yet, there remain few documented approaches to justice-oriented participation, especially in the tropics where regions of high biodiversity and the lands and livelihoods of Indigenous and Local communities (IPLC’s) often overlap. With already existing tensions and discrimination
within conservation research and practice where Indigenous and Local communities are concerned, computational methods and devices, such as ecoacoustic sensors, can compound and widen the disconnect between conservation projects and forest-dwelling communities, weakening important links to essential local knowledge and limiting the opportunity for effective, equitable and sustainable conservation interventions. My work looks to understand how participatory and justice-led methods of AI, data and technology, and conservation practice can lead to culturally appropriate, equitable, pluralistic and mutually beneficial technologies for conservation.

About the speaker:

Joycelyn is an award winning environmental justice researcher and educator. Her PhD research centres on the co-design of justice-led conservation technologies, specifically bioacoustics, for the conservation of tropical forest ecosystems, working with rural forest-fringe communities that are commonly excluded from conservation and technology research. Her scholarly work employs ethnographic, participatory design, and machine learning methods in order to contribute learnings and practices to the emerging field of Conservation Data Justice. She has presented her work to a wide range of audiences, most recently through her TEDxLondon Talk. She is also the founder of ClimateInColour, an online education platform and community for the climate curious, making climate conversations more accessible, diverse and hopeful. Through ClimateInColour, Joycelyn has made accessible the topics of climate justice, climate colonialism, activism, creativity and systems change in a wide variety of forums on and offline, including platforms such as Meta, The United Nations Geneva Dialogues, Greenpeace, Channel 4, Chatham House and Oxford University. She was 2022’s winner of the Emerging Designer London Design Medal and was featured in British Vogue’s December 2023 ‘Forces for Change’ Issue. Most recently, she has been listed as one of Pique Action and Harvard Chan C-CHANGE’s 2024 Climate Creators to Watch.