We first met in 2021, within the Environmental Intelligence Centre for Doctoral Training, where we trained in how to use critical social science theory and methods to interrogate the use of big data and machine learning for researching environmental justice.  We were introduced to Ernesto’s research spanning conflict, data justice, and volcanic risk, and over the course of the year, Tom, Manju, and Ellie each worked to devise truly interdisciplinary research programmes to study urban mobility, heatwaves, and glaciers.  

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Since then, our research has led us from the floating urban chinampa islands of Mexico City, to the hot, dusty plains of Tarai in Nepal, and hidden rock glaciers in the arid mountains of Chile. We are interested in questions like: How can alternative forms of governance and bottom-up organisation bring about positive change in urban mobility and infrastructure? How do dominant narratives shape our understanding and experience of heatwaves, and in turn how do we shape them? How do our expectations for, and the practices of law, influence glacier, water, and mining (in)justices?

 Cutting across these questions, is a commitment to participatory, critical, and justice-oriented research into socioenvironmental challenges. Unique to our approach across these research projects, is our theory-methods package, centring on Earth, Air, Water, and Fire – also known as Drunken-Fist Kung Fu Ethnography. This involves on adopting different styles of ethnographic engagements with research questions, ‘the field’, data, and theory. In doing so, we cultivate ethnographic intimacies with our research based on our different positionalities and inclinations as researchers. This approach to research also enables us to integrate analysis from machine learning and remote sensing in a critical and politically engaged way.