The human-as-sensor: instrumentality, situatedness, and human rights counter-investigations

This article develops the figure of the human-as-sensor as a critical heuristic to explore computational practices that put human sensing to work in contexts as varied as smart cities and humanitarian relief efforts. Teasing out some key ethico-political issues at stake in these practices, I first theorize the human sensor as defined by an empirico-instrumental mode of ‘situatedness’, which emphasizes the sensing subject’s capacity for spatial proximity and empirical data capture whilst problematically eliding the sociohistorical contents that have shaped that subject. Against this problem, I draw on Donna Haraway’s feminist epistemology to reconstruct a more expansive conception of ‘situatedness’ that reintroduces precisely the lost sociohistorical sediments which produce specifically situated beings. Grounding my approach in an exploration of Forensic Architecture’s human rights investigations, I show the ways that reading across these two kinds of situatedness affords possibilities for critically engaging with the contexts in which human sensors are deployed.