| Summary: | One of the great strengths of Fleur Johns’ approach is her conceptual starting point: that sensing and knowing are intimately connected but distinct, and that therefore “sensing practice … encompasses those ways of knowing, or claims to knowledge, that are mobilized in the course of perception.” To borrow John Berger’s phrase, sensing practice is a “way of seeing” and whether we are viewing European oil paintings or the human-readable rendering of an algorithmic reading of data from a satellite, it is only possible to fully understand this process by recognizing that “sights” cannot be understood separately from society. Johns’ exploration of the questions of power and agency that are posed by an investigation into the implications of adopting new sensing technologies by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is important and timely because it opens up a wider discussion about the role played by Machine Learning (ML) in a wide range of social contexts, prompting us to ask about the social relations through which the technology itself is produced and used.
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