Interview: Joycelyn Longdon
A conversation with environmental justice technologist Joycelyn Longdon exploring technology beyond dominant ideas of progress, and what more just, plural and ecologically connected futures might look like.
In this interview, I speak with Joycelyn Longdon, an environmental justice technologist, researcher, writer and communicator based in Cambridge, UK. Her work spans public engagement, art, sound, design and advocacy, with a particular focus on storytelling as a way to ground abstract ideas in cultural, artistic and grassroots perspectives.
In the summer of 2025, I attended a panel discussion hosted by Sexy Climate Change at the Piehouse Co-op, a not-for-profit arts space tucked beneath Deptford’s iconic railway arches in South London. Curated by climate journalist Issey Gladston, the evening's conversation featured Daza Aghaji, Imogen Malpas, Diyora Shadijanova and Joycelyn Longdon. What followed was an uplifting, funny and deeply relatable conversation on climate that unpacked complex themes of identity, colonialism and joyful resistance. Early in the discussion, a note from Joycelyn Longdon struck me: “Dreaming is a form of planning,” she said, quoting American activist Gloria Steinem.
Fresh off the release of her book Natural Connection, Joycelyn contributed to the conversation with her vision of environmentalism grounded in connection and justice, a shared calling rooted in community, empathy and ancestral wisdom. She also shared thoughts and feelings that felt deeply related to our theme of this issue of ACV: the in-between.
A few weeks after the panel, I was fortunate to meet with Joycelyn at her home in Cambridge. Together, we explored her interdisciplinary practice, her work in bioacoustics – “Shazam for nature”, as she describes it – and her research into conservation data justice in Ghana.
Connor: It’s so great to chat with you, Joycelyn. I’ve really been looking forward to this. Technology is going to be a big part of this discussion, so before we start, maybe it's important to be specific about what we mean by “technology”.
Joycelyn: Equally looking forward to this conversation, Connor, and that’s a great place to start. I think when most people think of technology today, they no doubt think of AI, or something like ChatGPT. It's understandable because it's featured a lot in the media among the Global Minority right now. But I think it's really dangerous not to have the technological literacy to understand that “technology” is much wider than these tech products or the companies that produce them. It’s important to consider technologies that are not created by people from the Global Minority – pre-industrial, alternative technologies that have existed for many years and have long evolved.
Connor: Could you give me an example of some of those alternative technologies that might have been forgotten?
Joycelyn: Take clay technologies like windcatchers, known as Badgirs in Iran. They’ve existed for centuries as natural cooling systems for buildings and are far more efficient and less polluting than air conditioning. I don’t think it’s about rejecting modern tech or returning to the past, though. For instance, a Delhi-based organisation, Ant Studio, has taken this Indigenous knowledge of clay and reimagined it into zero-carbon cooling systems for people in India who will face extreme heat stress by 2030. It's about regenerating, honouring older technologies and knowledge systems, and carrying them forward. If we see time as a spiral rather than linear, the present and future of technology are continuations of where we’ve been.
Connor: Do you think the “tech industry” has intentionally hijacked the word “tech” for its own economic benefit?
Joycelyn: They have, because they need to present what they're doing as the pinnacle of technological development. Their aim is to suck up as much of our attention as possible to feed the systems that they're building because these companies are rooted in oppressive and extraction ideologies predicated on disconnecting us from things like land, language and memory, so they can commodify us. I went to a conference last year in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, called Design XAI. I watched a talk by Tobias Revell about mythology and technology. This is why I think the spiral of time is really important: he proposed that what we're seeing now is no different than what we saw in the Romantic era or the Industrial era; there’s a repeating pattern of scientists and technologists creating mythologies around their supposed wizardry that promises progress, ingenuity and innovation, which captures imaginations. But whose imagination of technology are we living in?
Connor: That feels like a really important question that rarely gets asked. And maybe it is a good segue for you to explain how you engage with technology in your own practice?
Joycelyn: My academic practice comes from the perspective of critical technical practice, which is an approach to technical research that’s philosophical and sociological. It was introduced by American artificial intelligence researcher and humanities professor Phil Agre, who worked on very early AI. He developed this method, or practice, out of frustration with the objective, extractive and disconnected approaches to technical research that defined the field and to which he saw himself contributing.
Conversations about tech tend to fall into binaries: tech is either going to save our climate, or it’s inherently oppressive and extractive, for example. Critical technical practice resists this. It’s not just critique for its own sake; it’s about asking: what do we create instead? Starting from an awareness of power and oppression helps ensure that what we build is just and grounded. I see critique as a foundation for creation, acknowledging that technology is never neutral but emerges from specific ideologies. This isn’t about choosing between “tech will save us” or “tech will destroy us,” but about inquiry and generation.
Starting from an awareness of power and oppression helps ensure that what we build is just and grounded. I see critique as a foundation for creation, acknowledging that technology is never neutral but emerges from specific ideologies.
Connor: We’re exploring the theme of the IN-BETWEEN, examining the messiness of this particular point in our spiral of time. How do you relate to this theme in your work and life?
Joycelyn: My work is interdisciplinary, so it means that I'm always in between, and I love being in that position. I want to advocate for all of us to constantly be in-between, navigating grey areas. It requires so much humility, for you to be empathetic, to be incredibly connected to people's humanity, to be very observational, to slow down, and to constantly challenge others and yourself. The most dangerous position I could be in is one of certainty, because certainty breeds the kind of disconnection society is witnessing around us at this point in time. I think certainty can be lazy because it doesn't require you to be that engaged. It doesn't require you to sit in discomfort or to engage in dialogue and try to figure out how to understand complexity. And I think that's an issue: that we try to binarise a world that is very complex.
It's very easy to assume that because you're doing environmental work or because you are creating the future through technology, that what you're doing is good, that you are beyond reproach. There are a lot of assumptions that come with doing this work that often, even when work is presented as good or presented as positive or generative or progressive, end up continuing to harm communities that are most vulnerable. There are lots of people doing this work in the Global Minority who present their work as being for those in the Global Majority, who end up being as extractive and as paternalistic as the colonial approaches and the colonial behaviours that they're critiquing. So I think humility and curiosity are the most important skills for us to learn.
Connor: Can you give us an example of complexity you’ve faced out in the field, where positive intentions perhaps became more complicated in practice, or where you had to navigate conflicting values on the ground?
Joycelyn: For the last five years that I've been working in a particular forest in Ghana, it has been increasingly destroyed by extractive mining. As an environmentalist or someone who is against extraction, you can immediately condemn that. But that's very easy to say when you're outside of the situation. In the context of the community that I work with, it's one full of contrasting values, and the people who are engaged in that work of destruction and extraction are also engaged in the work of generation for themselves out of positions of abject poverty and vulnerability. They are part of a system of capitalism that works on distance because the money and the political system that allows that to happen is so obscured that the only people you see are those who are the most vulnerable doing that work.
Connor: You mentioned capitalism operating on distance, which really interests me – the point has come up numerous times in conversations for this issue of ACV.
Joycelyn: Looking back to the colonial era and beyond, we can see how modern-dominant ideologies and their technologies have largely worked to disconnect us from each other and from our places and lands, which has disconnected people, especially those of local, traditional and Indigenous communities, from their cultures, their languages and their technologies. That is a core strategy of colonialism and of capitalism and of the construct of progress. Because once people are disconnected, you can then dictate how they live, how they interact, and what they depend on.
Connor: In your recent work with the community in Ghana, how have you seen those dynamics play out? What kinds of ethical challenges come up on the ground?
Joycelyn: Technology is often framed as a fast-track solution for conservation, but its rollout in the tropics overlooks the fact that people live in national reserves and parks, and not just live there, but rely on the resources there and are deeply connected to these environments. By contrast, conservation areas in geographies of the Global Minority tend not to be places where communities live, and therefore, scientists and researchers have free rein.
These ecosystems aren’t remote, extractable spaces as they are often treated by the Global Minority, where humans and nature are largely seen as separate. Among the Global Majority, that separation doesn’t exist. People see themselves as part of nature, in relationship with it. Yet the reality is that a majority of European researchers, perhaps unconsciously, perpetuate disconnecting approaches, behaviours and ideologies that create this distance we’re talking about, repeating colonial ideas of progress and certainty, and continuing oppression and unjust power dynamics.
Connor: What can you tell us specifically about some of the technology being used, and why your work critiques it?
Joycelyn: Much of the technology we use for conservation in the Global Minority arises out of militarisation. Drones, satellites, sensors. These are technologies of surveillance and extraction. So if you don't start from a position of critique of what these technologies might represent and how they might function in these ecosystems, particularly given that people live in them, then we start to replicate these militaristic surveillance approaches to conservation. That further disconnects and marginalises those who are already marginalised in these ecosystems. It also repeats colonial patterns of superiority. It begins to value and prioritise new technologies over the tacit lived knowledge and experience of the people of these ecosystems, which leads to the loss of local knowledge and wisdom. It is proven that, in many cases, when Indigenous communities or local communities are given the agency to conserve and protect ecosystems alongside their traditional knowledge or their evolving ecological knowledge that we get better conservation outcomes. That's where my work stems from. It looks to investigate what happens when you introduce technology into a community that lives in a way that's connected to the forest, and the impacts, concerns and injustices that can emerge.
Among the Global Majority, that separation doesn’t exist. People see themselves as part of nature, in relationship with it.
Connor: How do you bring your work into action with this community on the ground? I’m curious about the process behind ensuring that the technology and conservation work actually reflects the community’s needs and knowledge.
Joycelyn: My role is not researcher or facilitator; it’s listener. Over the last five years, I’ve spent countless hours sitting in a church and spending time with community members. I speak about consent and trust building, which are major issues in conservation.
I focus on pluralism in the design process, recognising that there is no single “right” approach, especially when moving away from modern-dominant frameworks for designing technology. Together, we explore culturally appropriate, co-designed technologies that support communities in understanding and analysing the conservation data collected by these tools.
I also work on issues of remunerative justice, challenging the current norm in which community members are often paid very little to perform repetitive tasks that train machine-learning algorithms, a form of artificial intelligence.
The work can be very complex, but at its core, it's sitting with people for hours and hours and speaking and telling stories. Walking together and talking together and being connected to the forest together, even though we're doing technological development work.
Connor: I'm so fascinated by what you do and the fact that you've been able to walk these forests and landscapes with communities who are in direct relationship with the land, to just bear witness to the wonder of nature. How does this impact you?
Joycelyn: You mentioned bear witness, and I think that is pretty much what my work over the last four years has forced me to do: to bear witness to our interactions with the living world and be a perpetual student. I read a book recently called An Immense World by Ed Yong, in which he talks about this bumblebee in the Amazon that only flies at night, and when it migrates, it lands on the exact branch that it flew to the year before – that is just incredible to me. When I was younger, I watched a documentary about bird migrations and the theory that birds use quantum physics to migrate to the same places over long journeys. There is so much happening beyond our human intelligence. But often, we think about human intelligence as the top of the pyramid, but there's this ecological intelligence that is so far beyond human categorisation. That also links to these communities I work with because they're continually with these ecosystems and have internal knowledge of this intelligence that can't necessarily be written in a paper or described with language. Researchers in Australia were studying a specific bird called a zebra finch, and they found through eco-acoustic analysis that this bird was singing particular songs to its unhatched chicks to inform them about temperature changes, so those chicks then shifted DNA and were born to be more resilient to hotter temperatures. That is technology. That is the technology of sound, of singing, of oral tradition between mother and child.
Connor: These examples from nature really show how much technology exists beyond humans. How do you think we can begin to shift our perspective in the Global Minority to recognise that we are woven into a much larger ecological intelligence?
Joycelyn: I think this is where culture and creativity come in. It's how we continue to tell and show these stories and engage people with ecological intelligence and bring back reverence for the more-than-human world. This is something that we don't talk enough about in the environmental space. In Ghana specifically, you have priests and healers who connect, engage and guide the community in that reverence and knowledge. But it's another thing that we've been disconnected from in the Global Minority.
For me, I feel part of the issue is that we don't have ways to collectively have this reverence for the planet around us that doesn't require us to go halfway across the world and into a forest to feel a sense of contemplation or reflection. To feel that spiritual practice that, in its most simple form, invites us to tap into different ways of being with, belonging to and sensing the world. Again, the modern-dominant ideology of the Global Minority is disconnected from the living world and ourselves as ecological beings, which shuts us off from actually engaging with these larger ecological intelligences.
Connor: From our observation, it feels like part of the messiness of these in-between times is that people are waking up to the fact that the modern-dominant paradigm is begging to be retired, but this is creating an ideological and spiritual unmooring at a cultural level. It seems, however, that people are moving towards seeking meaning and belonging in (re)connecting to themselves, community and the living world. Hopefully, this will underpin how we engage with each other, the living world and technology in the future.
Joycelyn: I really hope so, too.