Acknowledgements

The Digital Ecologies research group emerged at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when, for many people, many aspects of everyday life went online. It started as a series of informal conversations about the digitisation of human–nature relationships between Jonny, Adam, and Henry who were in Kyiv, Barcelona, and Cambridge at the time. These conversations quickly grew into research interests and, driven by the desire to connect with scholars during lockdown, the trio organised an online conference exploring the digital mediation of more-than-human worlds. The conference received widespread interest and took place over two days in March 2021 with Etienne Benson and Jennifer Gabrys delivering keynote presentations. Many of the contributions in this collection are reworkings of initial presentations which took place at the 2021 conference: thank you to all of the contributing authors to this collection who have each been a pleasure to work with over the past three years. Eva has been involved with the Digital Ecologies group since this time, initially as a discussant at the conference, and later as an active collaborator within the book project and broader intellectual project of Digital Ecologies.

In 2022, the group grew to include Oscar Hartman Davies, Pauline Chasseray-Peraldi, Jennifer Dodsworth, and Julia Poerting, each of whom have played an enormous role in shaping the contributions of this book. Without them, Digital Ecologies – as a research group and community, as well as a field of practical and intellectual inquiry – wouldn’t exist. We are very grateful also to other members of our advisory board – Jennifer Gabrys, William M. Adams, Jamie Lorimer, and Erica Von Essen – who have each offered feedback and guidance on various aspects of our group’s work and organisation. We are also grateful to the Digital Ecologies blog contributors who have shaped the ideas throughout this book in various ways, who are, by the time of full draft submission, in order of blog publication: Will Bindley, Ben Platt, Catherine Oliver, Erica von Essen, Alexandra Palmer, Adam Fish, Mónica Amador, Ben Newport, Juan Felipe Riaño, Georgios Tzoumas, Siddharth Unnithan Kumar, Samuel Cushman, Timothy Hodgetts, Theo Stanley, Noemi Duroux, Daniël de Zeeuw, Tommaso Campagna, Eleni Maragkou, Jesper Lust, Carlo de Gaetano, Michelle Lai, John Carillo, and Matthew Halpenny.

Our second conference – Digital Ecologies in Practice – took place in Bonn, Germany, in July 2022. This event involved engaging with practitioners and artists, expanding the scope of the research group and starting new and interdisciplinary conversations. The event included keynote lectures from Ron Wakkary and Mari Bastashevski, with the latter also exhibiting a multimedia installation in a local gallery space. Our team once again expanded to include Noemi Duroux and Kira Bautz as research assistants, and Karolina Uskakovych and Matthew Halpenny as artists-in-residence. The Digital Ecologies project has taken on new lines of flight through these collaborations, for which we are very grateful. Many of the interventions from this conference seeking to foster dialogue between the intellectual foundations of Digital Ecologies and artistic, creative, or activist practice have been published in a special issue of cultural geographies.

We have held further Digital Ecologies events, workshops, and conferences at Wageningen University in The Netherlands and the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities in Norway, with the support of Clemens Driessen and Hugo Reinert, Malene Bøyum, and Rachel Douglas-Jones. Thank you to all the speakers and panellists at or around these events, with a special mention to the artists who welcomed us into their studios: Polymorf, Ingrid Bjørnaali, Carolina Vásquez, Isak Wisløff, and Siri Austeen.

We are grateful to Karolina Uskakovych for producing the cover image for this book. Thanks also go to Will Bindley who designed our website and conference materials in 2021. Working with Karolina and Will involved conscious and deliberate attempts to translate key ideas and concepts from digital ecologies into visual form, informed by several discussions. We are lucky to have such wonderful interlocutors.

At the University of Sheffield, we are grateful to animal studies, STS, and digital media colleagues, particularly ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre), STeMiS (Science, Technology and Medicine in Society), iHuman, and the Digital Media & Society team. We are grateful for the wider support and mentorship of the Vital Geographies Research Group, the Winged Geographies group, and the Urban Ecologies project at the University of Cambridge, in addition to everyone at King’s College who helped us get this project off the ground. Thank you to the More-than-human Geography cluster at the University of Oxford, who cultivated a thriving and supportive research community throughout pandemic lockdowns and beyond, and who have generously given feedback at multiple occasions on the Digital Ecologies research agenda. In Liège, we are grateful for the support of everyone involved in the Centre Spiral STS group, and especially those working on the Body Societal ERC project. Our thanks also to colleagues at the Institute for Science and Society, Cultural and Historical Geography, and Environment and Society groups at the University of Nottingham.

As this book was developed between periods of industrial action in UK higher education, thanks also to colleagues on our various picket lines; a special shout out to everyone on the Elmfield picket in Sheffield, South Entrance picket in Nottingham, Downing Street picket in Cambridge, and South Parks Road picket in Oxford!

Thanks to our original editor Tom Dark for getting this project off the ground and to our new editors Shannon Kneis and Laura Swift who, along with colleagues at MUP such as Deborah Smith, have been hugely supportive in helping us deal with unexpected challenges during the process of developing the book.

This project has been supported by European Research Council Horizon 2020 Starting Grant ‘The Body Societal’ (Grant No. 949577) and the University of Sheffield Institutional Open Access Fund. We would like to issue huge thanks to these funders for enabling us to make this book open access.

Additionally, the Digital Ecologies research group has received funding from King’s College, University of Cambridge (2021); the Vital Geographies research group, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge (2021); the Institute of Geography, University of Bonn (2022); the Cultural Geography group, Wageningen University (2022); the German Research Foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project number 446600467 (2022); the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (2023); the Technological Life research cluster, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford (2021; 2023); and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project number: ES/W006952/1 (2022). The financial support of these funders allowed us to host conferences, workshops, art installations, and exhibitions, all of which have importantly shaped the intellectual contribution of Digital Ecologies.

Special personal thanks for the love and support of Anne and Nigel Turnbull and Clive and Wendy Searle whose encouragement spurred on certain editors of this book for many, many years. We are grateful to our partners, families, and friends for all you have done and continue to do for us.