 My name is Emily Grandjean. I'll be talking with you all today about my thesis project, bodies, land and Instagram network forging and infrastructural media in the US. And for anyone who's not familiar with forging, in the US generally it's understood as the practice of collecting foods, medicines and other resources from the environment. I'll begin by explaining what network forging is and why it's topic worth investigating. Then after that I'll discuss my research question and what the central claims of my thesis are. Then I'll talk about who I am as a researcher and how this project relates to my background. I'll then describe the theoretical approach and methods I used, as well as some of my key findings and implications. And I'll end with a brief summary of my talk as well as acknowledgments of the many people who've supported this work. So what is network forging? I am using this term to refer to the use of social media to learn about the environment, practice forging and share forging knowledge and experiences with others. Alexis Nicole Nelson pictured here who often uses the handle Black Forager is a prominent networked forager who rose to fame in spring 2020 after she started to post these very playful, colorful sort of instructive videos demonstrating how to forge in her neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. My use of the term networked is inspired by Zaynep Tufeki's use of the term in her book from 2017 called Twitter and tear gas which examines networked protest movements that rely on digital technologies like Twitter. Although there's been a lot of academic work that examines the use effects and infrastructures of social media platforms and then other academic work that examines foraging practices around the world and through history, very few scholars have approached questions around the way in which people are using social media or digital media to forage. So why does networked foraging matter? What makes it a useful topic to study? First of all, when you look at the history of foraging in the US, it's clear that it's been a deeply political issue since the country's founding. Starting with the settlement of European colonists and displacement of indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands, the right to access and forage on a particular area of land in the US is a privilege not to take for granted. The forced displacement of indigenous peoples meant that they could not gather food for themselves in their traditional ways and they were coerced into buying food from the market economy that was set up by the colonists. At the same time, white settlers appropriated traditional indigenous knowledge, practices and land for their own purposes. Similarly, after the American Civil War, the enactment of no trespass and stock laws prevented newly freed black and African people from accessing the commons. They were often forced to go back to work for white landowners rather than being able to sustain themselves through foraging and raising livestock on the commons. And today food security issues are widespread in the US. In 2020, according to the USDA, 10.5% of US households did not have enough food due to lack of money and other resources. Foraging remains an essential practice for some people to feed themselves. However, the recent Black Lives Matter movement has emphasized the fact that black bodies continue to be under more threat than white bodies in the US. The ability to be outside, safe and able to forage is not a privilege that we all share. And my thesis research seeks to understand the ways in which networked foraging communities deal with issues of power and access. Second, we are in a very difficult time in which climate change is advancing, industrial pollution is widespread and digital media platforms have exacerbated the living conditions of people around the world. The precarity lab led by Lisa Nakamura at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, describes our current conditions as techno precarious. techno precarity disproportionately affects racial, ethnic and sexual minorities, women, indigenous peoples, the socioeconomically poor, migrants and people in the global South. In this context, networked foraging is an important topic because it brings up, excuse me, brings up questions about how networked foraging practices and cultures affect other humans and the broader ecological community. One more. So third, this topic raises important questions around the relationships between tech companies and the people who use their products and services. Companies like Metta and Google have a lot of power to influence the way that we interact with each other and the world around us. So it's worth exploring the ways in which the design of algorithms and interfaces may affect how we navigate within the environment and the kinds of relationships we develop. And finally, I think this research opens up exciting possibilities for redesigning digital tools and platforms to nurture more positive ecological relationships. There are ways in which social media platforms and digital apps can facilitate stronger communication within human communities as well as across species. So the key question underlying much of my research is, how do people use Instagram and Facebook to learn about and practice networked foraging? And how do these practices differentially value and affect bodies? So in other words, how do people use digital tools to learn how to forage and communicate with others about their foraging experiences and knowledge? And how does the way in which people use digital technology benefit some people and living beings more than others? I approached my research from a particular perspective, not just as a student in comparative media studies at MIT, but also as a white non-religious cisgender woman. Before coming to MIT, I worked as a UX researcher in tech as well as an academic researcher studying environmental and social responsibility and sustainability in the private sector. So although I've long been interested in the environment, I didn't know much about foraging or environmental science when I started this research. And inspired by Anna Sting's book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, I went on several foraging journeys in order to get a sense of what networked foraging is like in practice for me. In my thesis, I write about these journeys as a way to more explicitly acknowledge my own stakes in this research project, including the ethical dilemmas I faced and the forms of privilege that I experienced. And doing this research has helped me recognize the ways in which I've been socialized into settler, colonial, white supremacist, heteronormative and capitalist systems. So for this project, I use an approach to thinking about media developed by the American media theorist and historian John Durham Peters in his 2016 book, The Marvelous Clouds. According to Peters, media are not just devices like televisions or cell phones, but they can be understood more broadly as enabling environments or infrastructural media that nurture many different life forms, including other media. This framework conceives of media as our, quote, infrastructures of being the habitats and materials through which we act and are, end quote. Peters revives Aristotle's notion of media as things in the middle by developing this framework, which builds on the work of Marcel Mos, Harold Innes and Friedrich Kittler, among other scholars. So I use this infrastructural media framework in order to address questions about the relationships between bodies, land, iPhones and web apps in the context of foraging. So if we can imagine a ship as a medium that humans use to navigate the sea, you can also think of smartphones as media that enable people to navigate the world in particular ways. And as Cherokee, Hawaiian and Samoan media theorist, Jason Edward Lewis observes, designers and developers of media technology choose what counts as knowledge, what sorts of operations we can perform on that knowledge and how that knowledge becomes manifest in the world. The fact that they are often doing so without being conscious or deliberative about how they are reenacting a matrix of fundamental assumptions about human nature and human work in no way lessens the impact of those decisions. For this research project, I used a few different qualitative research methods. I first completed a thematic analysis of Instagram posts and Facebook foraging group posts in order to get a sense of the kinds of content network foragers were sharing and talking about online. And the results of this analysis informed the development of the discussion guides that I used in subsequent semi-structured interviews. So after that, I conducted 60 to 90 minute interviews with nine people. There were three Instagram users with more than 10,000 followers and six members of a local public Facebook foraging group. I selected a group of interviewees across a range of identified genders, ages and levels of foraging experience. Two of the people identified as black with Hispanic, Latinx or Spanish ancestry and seven identified as white. I used pseudonyms to allow my research participants to feel more comfortable reflecting on their experiences and feelings about the group-based social dynamics they were observing on Facebook. And in addition, I met up with two of my interviewees to observe them foraging outside in real time. And finally, I went on my own solo foraging journeys as I mentioned before to see what it was like to use digital apps to learn about the environment. So after collecting my interview and participant observation data, I went through and coded the transcripts to identify key themes in the way that people were describing their experiences and the processes they used to learn about foraging. After writing up a first draft of my thesis, I shared with each of my interviewees a summary of my analysis along with the quotes that I'd selected to include and I offered them an opportunity to revise their quotes if they wanted. And I also asked them for feedback on my analysis or if they wanted to share any additional thoughts. And I've heard back from most folks so far and so far everyone has approved my analysis and the quotes with a few minor kind of cosmetic changes. The first set of findings relate to how the people I interviewed oriented themselves within their local environments and began to learn how to identify unfamiliar species. So my interview, we've all described a process of gathering various sources of information primarily from blogs, excuse me, websites like Wikipedia and mobile phone apps like Google Maps and Seek by iNaturalist. Across many different levels of experience, all of them described relying on digital media to share and discuss foraging content with others. One of my interviewees, James, described how much of his learning process happened online because it was often too expensive to leave his home. He said, when I was on Facebook groups, I didn't have enough money to leave my house. Like you can go outside or you go outside and you can spend $100 just from blinking your eyes. So I'd be at home all the time and I would just be on the internet talking to people and posting pictures and looking at pictures. And digital photographs seem to be the primary medium through which people shared information about the environment. Within the Facebook group, there was a codified practice for how to photograph different kinds of species. And there was also an unspoken consensus among my interviewees that a key first skill to develop as a forager is to learn how to identify particular species which involves naming discrete living beings that make up the environment. Among my interviewees, the Linnaean taxonomic system, a legacy of Western imperialism and settler colonialism, seemed to be the undisputed standard for determining the identity of a particular organism. One of my interviewees, Bryn, described their experience with photographing species. They said, I always take a picture of the thing in its natural environment. I get the surrounding area to show what kind of tree it's on or under and I get up close shots of the thing itself. If it's a plant, you know, get leaves, get stem, get berries, get flowers, whatever. My interviewees would then upload these photos to Facebook and others would share their ideas on what the species was and offer their own opinions on what particular species looked, tasted, smelled, or felt like. So the process of learning how to identify a new species was very much an embodied one. People essentially had to train their bodies to recognize new species based on many different sensory perceptions. In this context, I adopt Christina Graseni's concept of skilled vision as an embodied skilled trained sense and a useful one for thinking about the ways in which foragers learn to identify new species. Building on most's concept of body technique, Graseni proposes that skilled vision involves a multi-sensory active search for information from the environment, which can integrate multi-sensory manipulations, such as touching, cutting, or tasting in the case of foraging. Determining whose ideas and knowledge to trust was an important part of the learning process since not everyone agreed on the facts. Many interviewees described determining whom they trusted online based on whether the people had well-developed Facebook or other social media profiles, whether they provided links to websites to back up the claims, and how much Western scientific knowledge they shared in support of their claims. One of my interviewees, who was a foraging group moderator, described how he assessed the expertise of others. You kind of have to know names of people. You need to watch who's helping people who's backing up their claims with evidence and links to papers and websites, to confirm what they're doing, who are the people on Facebook a lot giving confident identifications. For these people, learning from digital technologies and Facebook foraging experts is integral to the process of developing skilled vision, the group-based interpretive lens through which networked foragers learn to perceive and make sense of the world. This process of orienting oneself and learning to identify new species may be constrained by the perspectives of people who have the time and resources to volunteer as experts within these Facebook groups. It was difficult to find leaders in the Facebook foraging group I studied or even regular members who weren't white. And I wondered what alternative forms of scientific knowledge and approaches to foraging were not represented or validated within these communities. So for example, in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, originally published in 2013, Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is a professor of environmental and forest biology and member of the citizen Potawatomi nation, writes of the Honorable Harvest, a set of unspoken, unwritten indigenous principles for foraging based on, as she puts it, quote, accountability to both the physical and the metaphysical worlds, end quote. In her own foraging experience, Kimmerer describes using a kind of skilled vision that has attuned to the needs and desires of the species that she is harvesting. This type of skilled vision did not seem to be taught within the Facebook community that I observed. The kind of skilled vision that I observed seemed to be in particular, a specifically white way of seeing the landscape that is produced through this networked foraging space on Facebook. As Zoe Todd writes, citing Brodkin at all 2011, a critique of whiteness is meant to draw attention to the structural, routineized aspects of white public space. And in this spirit, I hope that future research explores the possibilities of decentering whiteness within networked foraging communities like the one I studied. The remaining findings that I'll share, I'll go through relatively quickly due to time constraints. Some of my additional findings relate to how the people I interviewed decided how and what to harvest and consume. Before consuming anything, my interviewees describe the process they used to figure out whether something was edible or toxic. Some of the people I spoke with said that they were discouraged from asking questions about toxicity before learning on a more intellectual level about the species in question. An emphasis on learning that precludes consumption suggests a denial of a desiring, hungering body and a value, sorry, a valuing of the kind of disinterested intellectual brain over carnal relations, vital needs, and many ways of learning about and knowing other species. It seemed that people who practice foraging for their daily food needs may not feel totally comfortable participating in this kind of a Facebook group. And after learning how to prepare foraged items that were deemed to be non-toxic, my interviewees described the experience of eating new foods as forming new relationships. One person said that after learning how to eat the fruit from a ginkgo tree, they felt that they and the tree were essentially one in the same. This kind of sentiment suggested the possibilities that exist for foraging to be a way of coming to recognize the personhood and agency of other species. Many of my interviewees seemed to be uncomfortable talking online about the ethics of harvesting and consuming what they had foraged. There was a phenomenon called pick shaming in which people would, according to my interviewees, shame others for harvesting a species that was considered endangered or for harvesting too much of something or using harvested items in a way deemed questionable. Those who were identified as pick shamers were often quickly blocked from the Facebook group. It seemed that the group didn't know how to deal with difficult conversations around ethics and morality. At the same time, the digital apps that my interviewees were using often did not offer clear advice on how to harvest something without potentially harming the environment or how to harvest a species in a way that promotes the flourishing of its broader population. The third set of findings relate to how the people I interviewed decided what to record online about their foraging experiences. Perhaps not surprisingly, the people I interviewed described posting images and experiences that they thought would get the biggest amount of likes or other forms of digital engagement. As a result, one person described posting images of abundance like a large number of ripe berries rather than images of less visually striking plants. On Instagram, images of the environment may be biased in favor of the spectacular. A couple of my interviewees described holding back on what they shared of themselves to their audiences. For example, one of my interviewees who had over 20,000 followers described getting negative feedback from followers after posting content about issues of homelessness where he lives. His followers seemed to want him to post only about foraging and not about politics, suggesting that foraging is somehow apolitical, divorced from human affairs and issues of land and property ownership. On the other hand, others talked about posting on deliberately messy subjects like mistakes they had made or they post pictures that they thought were ugly. They felt this was a way of getting rid of followers who weren't genuinely interested in them as whole people. And finally, some people talked about posting online based on their perceptions of how Facebook and Instagram's algorithms worked. For example, they would post videos more frequently if they felt that Instagram's feed was prioritizing video content at that moment in time. These findings demonstrate the ways in which the design of social media platforms and perceptions of the design of social media platforms influence the types of digital content that networked forgers publish online. So just to quickly summarize my research through interviews with Instagram and Facebook users as well as participant observation, I found that networked foraging communities may privilege whiteness and individualism, commodify nature and deny other forms of knowledge and ways of knowing other forms of life. I also found that digital media used by network foragers often fails to account for the needs and experiences of more than human forms of life. This research study uses data from a very small population, just six members of one Facebook foraging group and three Instagram users. Other studies may investigate networked foraging practices within a larger population and also across other social media platforms. Some questions that could be interesting to explore include how might networked foraging communities design new digital tools that decenter white forms of knowledge and capitalist values? In what ways might digital apps be redesigned to better account for the needs and experiences of other forms of life? And how are people in countries other than the US using social media and digital technologies to forge? In what ways might the cultures of networked foraging communities vary across geographic areas? So I just wanna thank my thesis committee, Jim, Laura and Darren for their generous support and guidance throughout this project. Many thanks also to the CMSW faculty and staff to my cohort and the cohort from the year before to my wonderful family and friends and to the people who spent their time talking with me and going on forays. Thank you very much for listening and I'd be happy to answer any questions or share feedback you may have. Or someone said something on Facebook about to keep them out because they didn't know who is behind the labor of moderating this group? Yeah, I, you know, in it. Yeah, yeah, sure. The question from Tomas was around like who are the moderators of these Facebook foraging groups and how do they sort of manage these decisions around like blocking people or not blocking people based on what they say? I talked with one moderator and this person, this person seemed to kind of totally dismiss the notion that shaming people was acceptable and that there were, it just seemed like there were no clear methods for addressing these kinds of conflicts that come up and like mediating conversation. So the first response for that person that I spoke with was basically just to remove the person from the group. Another person I spoke with who wasn't a moderator but was like seen as an expert within the community, talked about removing people from the group automatically as being a very standard practice and not one really to question, almost like fake news in a way. Like it struck me as strange that there was no kind of distinction between science and ethics because I think that is really a meaningful distinction to make within this kind of group. And people just said like whatever, like if someone was like, you shouldn't harvest a mushroom in that way, like that's not good or you shouldn't harvest that many mushrooms or something, there can be clear kind of environmental reasons for making those claims as well as ethical reasons for making those claims. And it just seemed like, yeah, for some reason the moderators often or usually did not recognize that differentiation. So I think it'd be definitely worth exploring more, talking with more moderators and getting a sense of how they work together behind the scenes and also how they think individually about those kinds of issues. Yes, Heather? I was interested in how you, one of your openings as you were referring to community you know, start with a notion of communities very based in like our communities whereas social media and other social platforms are for communication, they're more like tools. Yeah. For communities to spread messages. And then what's really community is one people together. And it seemed if I'm understanding correctly that when you're thinking about foragers often it's individuals that go out and any community they have is virtual. And I'm just curious about if I understand it correctly if you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, that's a great question. So Heather was asking about my use of the term networked and the kinds of communities that form around foraging online relative to what Zaynep Tufeki observed in her own sort of research on networked protest movements which were much more about kind of physical presence. And I think I was actually anticipating before starting this project that the Facebook groups would be more sites for organizing meetups and less about like doing foraging solo together alone together as Sherry Turkle might say. So yeah, it was interesting hearing about the incredible role that digital technologies play in this learning process and how people like really seem to think it's reasonable and useful to translate sensory experiences from the physical world into like words on a Facebook group. So like, I mean, for example the Matsu Taki mushroom as Anna Singh explores the smell is very different to different people. Like some people describe it as like heavenly. They pay large sums of money for it. Other people think it doesn't smell very good at all and they would rather avoid it entirely. It was just interesting to me that there was no recognition of the subjectivities of sensory perceptions. And so I wondered kind of how that might affect people's ways of identifying certain species and understanding them. And yeah, I guess I want to point out though that the groups were occasionally used as places to kind of advertise in a light way. Like, hey, I'm going on a foraging walk next weekend. If anyone wants to meet up with me, totally can. So it did seem like people did meet up in-person on occasion, but it wasn't the kind of default way of gathering together. Tia? If you were talking about the characteristics of the state. Yeah, I think, let me know if I'm misinterpreting it, but the question from Tia was like, how do I think about the role of soil or the role of like the kind of monolithic landscape in between the people who are doing the foraging and the things that are being foraged? Yeah. Yeah, so the thing about the group that I studied was that it was a local group, but distributed pretty broadly within a region. So what one person experienced in one community may not be relevant to another person in the same group. So I didn't notice really many conversations at all talking about like local heavy metal presence within soils or other environmental contaminants, but people did talk about like they had kind of certain heuristics for staying away from places that may be more toxic than others, like staying away from roadways or walking paths where dogs might pee on something. But then like, I think I listened to a podcast by Alexis Nicole Nelson who talks about how like pretty much everything has been peed on by something at some point, you know? And Alexis Nicole Nelson actually talked in more detail about reading the landscape by understanding potentially the soil erosion sort of status of the particular area that you're in so that if you can tell that erosion is potentially a problem there, then you wouldn't clear away like brush or you might find somewhere that is more exposed maybe to the wind and doesn't have that much problem, doesn't seem to be dealing with that issue. So, yeah, it just seemed like maybe the more complex observations about ecosystems and contaminants were happening. We're happening kind of in these kind of deeper conversations on podcasts or from the accounts of social media, I don't want to use the word influencers because a lot of them reject that term, but people like Alexis Nicole Nelson who has this really strong kind of broad platform that it's really aware of the history of foraging and aware of the power dynamics and ecological kind of dynamics. I thought that was like really the most educational place to look for that kind of information. And then I think there was also someone I interviewed who talked about really getting to know the land they were foraging on. They said they spent like, I wanna say a year or something studying the local milkweed population before touching it. Like they just wanted to see what other kinds of creatures interacted with that species and how they interacted with it and whether the milkweed population was strong enough to really be foraged and they really took their time going back like again and again to see how it evolved over time. And I think having that kind of rooted relationship with an area of land is super important for understanding the kind of broader issues that the land is facing or just observing kind of like visual cues that might let you know that maybe something's different here than you expected it to be. And with other people it seemed like foraging was more of a form of entertainment but didn't require so much attention to detail in time. And so that's where I would worry that maybe people aren't aware so much of the presence of certain environmental toxicants from industrial pollution that would affect the sort of eating quality of whatever they're consuming. Did I answer your question? Oh, thank you, Jen. That's a great question. So what is the future of networked foraging? Is it expanding, contracting in a study state? I'm not sure how to answer that question because I think foraging exists in different ways in different parts of the world for different reasons and I've studied one small group and I'm not sure how to draw kind of broader projections or inferences about like how it might unfold over time but it does seem to me that with the changes brought about by climate change as well as industrial pollution and mass migrations placements, I think that it's important for people to really pay attention to the land around them and get a better sense of the communities that they're a part of and how they can help heal their own communities, not just through things like volunteering to like do restoration projects or things like that but also the people I spoke with talked about using their bodies as tools of environmental management. They would eat invasive species or species they considered to be potentially harmful to the vision of the landscape that they imagined. So I think being able to talk about locally kind of what our vision is for the future and how we can work together with plants, with mushrooms if you will, how to kind of bring about more reciprocal relationships, more symbiotic relationships, ones that sort of remind us that we depend on land and that land is part of our identity. I think that's super important and I hope that that it continues to be an interesting source of conversation for people and also that people continue to learn about the history of foraging and the political implications of foraging. Thank you so much. Thank you.