@article{jpe 2082, author = {Elizabeth Reddy}, title = {"A world we don't know": the spatial configuration of sensory practices and production of knowledge in and around Mexican seismic monitoring}, volume = {25}, year = {2018}, url = {http://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/2082/}, issue = {1}, doi = {10.2458/v25i1.23076}, abstract = {<p>A single technoscientific knowledge project can entail many different kinds of knowledge production. Here,I show how a Mexican technoscientific knowledge project about seismicity requires diverse sensory practices and the production of knowledge about many kinds of environmental and social conditions. I argue that Mexican territorial politics frame this knowledge. Further, I demonstrate that these politics become evident in the very ways that knowledge about Mexico is configured spatially, that is, in <i>topological </i>and <i>topographic</i> ways that technicians and engineers come to understand and relate to Mexican territory. After situating this argument within contemporary critical attention to the production of geographic knowledge, I address it ethnographically. First, I describe how Mexican seismic monitoring is undertaken from the headquarters of the <i>Centro de Instrumentación y Registro Sísmico </i>(CIRES). Then, I deal with the arrangements of power that structure seismic monitoring and social conditions in what CIRES engineers and technicians call "the field." As I relate the sensory work and knowledge production that field teams do when they leave CIRES headquarters, I show how the things that field teams can know are shaped by territorial politics, and consequently reflect them.</p>}, month = {1}, pages = {508-524}, keywords = {Mexico,environmental monitoring,sense,knowledge,earthquakes}, issn = {1073-0451}, publisher={University of Arizona Libraries}, journal = {Journal of Political Ecology} }