scholarly journals Science Studies and the Metamorphic Multiple Earth: Bruno Latour’s Risky Diplomacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth de Freitas
Keyword(s):  
Science Studies ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Current Climate ◽  
Terrestrial Life ◽  
Metamorphic Zone ◽  
End Times ◽  
Climate Crisis

This essay focuses on Bruno Latour’s recent attempts to study the metamorphic zone of terrestrial life, within the current climate crisis and environmental “cosmocolossus.” I explore his proposal for a risky diplomacy in the Anthropocene “end times,” as a way of dealing with the increasingly tense relations between polarized and weaponized perspectives. I show how his work continues to seek a form of scientific practice that involves the invention of equipment (apparatus) that make perceptible (principally to humans) the existence of nonhuman agencies, thereby expanding the opportunities for alliances and a pluralist ecology, and ultimately assembling another more-than-human political body. I also discuss critiques and concerns regarding the specifics of this proposal.

Scientific Reforms, Feminist Interventions, and the Politics of Knowing: An Auto‐ethnography of a Feminist Neuroscientist

Hypatia ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-773 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Giordano
Keyword(s):  
Science Studies ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
Doctoral Work ◽  
Cultural Contingency

Feminist science studies scholars have documented the historical and cultural contingency of scientific knowledge production. It follows that political and social activism has impacted the practice of science today; however, little has been done to examine the current cultures of science in light of feminist critiques and activism. In this article, I argue that, although critiques have changed the cultures of science both directly and indirectly, fundamental epistemological questions have largely been ignored and neutralized through these policy reforms. I provide an auto‐ethnography of my doctoral work in a neuroscience program to a) demonstrate how the culture of science has incorporated critiques into its practices and b) identify how we might use these changes in scientific practices to advance feminist science agendas. I critically analyze three areas in current scientific practice in which I see obstacles and opportunities: 1) research ethics, 2) diversity of research subjects and scientists, and 3) identification of a project's significance for funding. I argue that an understanding of the complicated and changing cultures of science is necessary for future feminist interventions into the sciences that directly challenge science's claim to epistemic authority.

When everything is NOT awesome. Aktivisme, anklager og krisen som kontekst

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (77) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Hoff-Clausen
Keyword(s):  
Strong Resonance ◽  
Unusual Effect ◽  
Current Climate ◽  
Emotional Appeals ◽  
Short Video ◽  
Royal Dutch Shell ◽  
Climate Crisis

In 2014 Greenpeace posted a short video appealing to Lego to end its cooperation with Royal Dutch Shell. The video raised an informal accusation and invited its audiences to support it, which more than one million people did. A reputational crisis was inflicted upon the two companies. The article discusses the rhetoric that enabled this activist success and asks to what extent the example set by Greenpeace might be worthy of imitation. It is argued that the mobilizing effect of the video cannot be explained merely by studying its spectacular form and content. The unusual effect must be seen in light of the climate crisis as an affective context that gave the emotional appeals of the video a strong resonance. It was the current climate crisis, implied in the video, which helped create a burning platform for change in the conduct of Lego and Shell

scholarly journals Engineering the Climate

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Schubert
Keyword(s):  
Science Studies ◽  
Climate Engineering ◽  
Scientific Innovation ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
Scientific Expertise ◽  
Policy Agendas ◽  
Earth’S Climate ◽  
Societal Problems ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Dynamic Trajectory

Notions of the impending climate crisis have pushed a set of highly contested techno-scientific measures onto policy agendas around the world. Suggestions to deliberately alter, to engineer, the Earth’s climate have gained political currency in recent years not as a positive vision of techno-scientific innovation, but as a daunting measure of last resort. The controversial status of various so-called climate engineering proposals raises a simple, yet pressing question: How has it has come to this? And, more specifically, how did such contested measures earn their place on policy agendas, despite enormous scientific complexities and fierce political contestation? Global societal problems, such as climate change, financial crises, or pandemics have brought the political relevance of scientific expertise to the foreground. This book speaks to scholarship in sociology and science studies, seeking to illuminate the essential entanglements between efforts to understand and efforts to govern such problems. By giving climate engineering a life of its own and following its dynamic trajectory as a contested object of expert work, this book sheds light on the reflexive and historically contingent interplay of science and politics as two distinct, yet increasingly interdependent, realms of society.

Nature’s Broken Clocks Reimaging Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis

Public ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (63) ◽  
pp. 129-131
Author(s):  
Alysse Kushinski
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Current Climate ◽  
The Face ◽  
Climate Crisis

This article reviews Paul Huebener’s Nature’s Broken Clocks, which asserts the current climate crisis as a “a crisis of time,” critically engaging the criss-crossing temporalities imbricated with natural and cultural time.

Beyond Science Wars Redux: Feminist Philosophy of Science as Trustworthy Science Criticism

Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 858-868
Author(s):  
Ben Almassi
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
Trust Relationships ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
Climate Skepticism ◽  
Science Wars ◽  
Productive Role

Bruno Latour is not the only scholar to reflect on his earlier contributions to science studies with some regret and resolve over climate skepticism and science denialism. Given the ascendency of merchants of doubt, should those who share Latour's concerns join the scientists they study in circling the wagons, or is there a productive role still for science studies to question and critique scientists and scientific institutions? I argue for the latter, looking to postpositivist feminist philosophy as exemplified by Alison Wylie and Lynn Nelson, among others, as a guide. Feminist philosophers of science who ground their analysis in a detailed understanding of scientific practice are not science's champions nor its antagonists, but they do stand in a distinct relationship to science. If not merchants of doubt, are they scientific gadflies or perhaps in scientific loyal opposition? Though these notions can underwrite useful approaches to science studies, neither captures the distinctive interdependency and interestedness of feminist philosophers and science. I suggest that we would be better served by the notion of trustworthy science criticism, building on the analyses of trust and trustworthiness by Annette Baier, among others, attendant to the dynamics of interdependency in trust relationships.

scholarly journals SCIENTIFIC PRACTICES AS CULTURAL ACTIVITIES: A CHALLENGE AND AN OPPORTUNITY FOR EDUCATION

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-297
Author(s):  
Peter Heering
Keyword(s):  
Science Education ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Time Dependent ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Key Word ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
History Of

During the 20th century, the sciences have been considered as disciplines that are significantly distinct from the humanities, C.P. Snows term of the “two cultures” has become the key word for this development. However, recent science studies produced arguments for the thesis that sciences are also a cultural activity. As a consequence, science and the related practices become time dependent – what was an accepted scientific practice in a particular period would not meet the standards of another period. Understanding science as a cultural activity poses several challenges to educators, but offers also opportunities. One approach that meets these opportunities is the implementation of the history of science in science education. In the following, two specific approaches in this respect will be discussed: storytelling and the reenactment of historical experiments.

scholarly journals A pedagogy of biocentric relationality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Cultural Challenges ◽  
Current Climate ◽  
Early Childhood Care ◽  
Childhood Care ◽  
A Site ◽  
Climate Crisis

This paper theorises some implications for pedagogies for 'sustainabilities' in the light of the current climate crisis, reflecting particularly upon the work of 'eco-feminist philosopher, Rosi Braidotti, in order to re-imagine a pedagogy of biocentric relationality. A notion of complex, inter-related sustainabilities is promoted as holding pedagogical promise in response to the ecological and cultural challenges of our times. The discussion then moves to focus on Aotearoa as a site for place-based pedagogies founded in local Indigenous understandings. Lastly, some examples from a recent study within early childhood care and education settings in Aotearoa are employed to illustrate some pedagogical possibilities.

Old English Ecotheology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Catherine Barajas
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Current Climate ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Climate Crisis

The work of Ælfric and Wulfstan, produced in the shadow of the first millennium, in many ways anticipates the modern field of ecotheology, born in the years preceding the second. Like their modern counterparts, Ælfric and Wulfstan affirmed the interconnectedness of human and other-than-human beings as members of an increasingly fragile Earth community. They affirmed the intrinsic worth of the other-than-human, and the ability of the Earth community to cry against injustice and resist human domination. Crucially, Ælfric and Wulfstan also explicitly condemn humanity’s failure to be faithful custodians of creation. Reading the medieval texts against the modern demonstrates the existence of an Old English ecotheology which anticipates many of the questions raised by the current climate crisis.

Historization of Scientific Observation in Modern Scientific Researches

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Angelina V. Baeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Scientific Observation ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

This article is devoted to historization of scientific practices as one of the central points in problem field of modern science studies. The subject of our article is scientific observation as one of the epistemic practices. Historization of scientific observation in modern scientific studies is possible, because of material practices and social relations begin to problematize in the scientific field. Science is no longer characterized only by a propositional order of representations. It is an assemblage of connections and relations between different agents and network of things, people and practices. This network is complexly arranged and branched, but in the same time it is coordinated in a certain optics and it is producing the visual closure to constructed object. This new optics, that makes visible the material and routine practices, puts in a new way the task to understand, how to work with heterogeneous and historically changeable field of practices and different “ways to do science”. There is a rethinking of the self-evident epistemic categories and particularly scientific observation. As an epistemic genre and scientific practice observation begins to take shape relatively late – only in the XVII century, when there is a complication and multiplication of practices of production of the visual images, that are making concrete from abstract and visible from invisible. To historicize scientific observation is to show how it has become a self-evident epistemic category and an integral scientific function. Scientific observation can be historicized as a set of practices that emerged and spread throughout a particular historical period, on the one hand, as practices of production, coordination, presentation and description of observational data. And on the other hand, it can be historicized as practices of production of “scientific self” as instances of observation. This article attempts to show that observation as a practice and as historically varied object of science is characterized, on the one hand, by the production of “that is visible” and, on the other hand, by “scientific self”.

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