I entered this month thinking about my bee research the way an engineer thinks about a system, build a better sensor, get a cleaner signal, publish a stronger result. I’m leaving it asking a question I didn’t have language for a month ago. Not does this work, but who does this work actually reach, and who decided what counts as working in the first place.
The language for that shift already exists, it turns out, in a field I’d never read. A scholar named Sasha Costanza-Chock, in a framework called design justice, argues that technologies aren’t neutral tools dropped into the world from nowhere. They embody social relations, meaning power, and they tend to reflect the interests of whoever had the resources and authority to build them, whether or not that reproduction of existing inequality was intentional. A well designed tool built without input from the people it’s meant to serve can still end up reinforcing exactly the gap it claimed to close.
That framing lands differently on a bee monitoring system than it does on, say, a hiring algorithm, but the underlying question is the same. If my research produces something more accurate and more expensive, and it ends up in the hands of large commercial beekeeping operations while small scale and immigrant beekeepers, the ones with the least institutional support already, can’t afford it, I haven’t solved the problem I set out to solve. I’ve built a better tool for people who already had tools.
This isn’t just an outside framing pasted onto ordinary engineering. It shows up in academic critiques of climate technology broadly. A 2025 paper on environmental justice in technology design put it in terms I keep coming back to, when justice is treated as an add-on rather than a foundation, the result is often superficial fixes that leave deeper inequalities unaddressed. The fixes aren’t fake. They’re just aimed at the wrong layer of the problem, the symptom instead of the distribution.
Oona Castro, a director at the digital rights organization Nupef, made a related point at COP30 that I think about specifically in terms of my own hive sensors, technologies can support responses to crises, she said, but they’re only effective when built with and based on communities, not simply deployed onto them. Built with is doing real work in that sentence. It’s the difference between designing a tool for beekeepers and designing it alongside them, letting their actual constraints, cost, access, trust in outside researchers, shape the thing itself rather than getting treated as a rollout problem to solve after the technology already exists.
So the specific questions I’m carrying forward into my own research aren’t abstract anymore. Will the finished system be priced for a hobbyist with two hives or only for an operation with two hundred. Does it actually address why pesticide exposure and habitat loss are happening in the first place, or does it just get better at detecting the damage after it’s already done. Whose knowledge, the credentialed researcher’s or the beekeeper who’s kept hives alive for thirty years without any sensor at all, actually gets treated as data.
I don’t have good answers to those questions yet. A month ago I didn’t know they were the questions I was supposed to be asking.
Sources. Costanza-Chock, S., “Design Justice” framework; environmental justice in technology design research (2025); Castro, O., Nupef.