How Population Became an Environmental Problem

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-77
Author(s):  
Jade S. Sasser
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Environmental Problem ◽  
Environmental Problems ◽  
Political Advocacy ◽  
Environmental Sciences ◽  
Population Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

Chapter 2 explores the history of how population came to be known as an environmental problem, emerging through debates about eugenics, war, geopolitical stability, and land use. I begin the chapter by exploring how population was first identified as a central problem of state-making and security, and its role in the evolution of ecological sciences. Next, I trace the ways the environmental sciences and population politics have entwined and overlapped in subsequent decades. Throughout, I analyze the ways knowledge production linking population to environmental problems moved between political advocacy motivated by concerns about war and geopolitical security, concerns about planetary limits, and a site of scientific knowledge development and struggle.

Serengeti Shall Not Die

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-144
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Lekan
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Cattle Grazing ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
International Conventions

This chapter explores the politics of scientific knowledge and visual representation of savanna environments in Bernhard and Michael Grzimek’s bestselling book and Academy Award–winning documentary film, Serengeti Shall Not Die (1959). It shows how the Grzimeks used their iconic airplane, nicknamed the “Flying Zebra,” to conduct ecological reconnaissance and employ aerial filmography. They depicted the Serengeti as an untouched ecosystem and a global heritage of mankind, despite its history of pastoralist land use and as a battleground between contending German and British imperial forces. Following international conventions established in London in 1933, the Grzimeks insisted that the Serengeti should encompass the entire habitat of migrating wildebeest—and not, as some officials in the Tanganyika Territory insisted, be divided to accommodate the local Maasai people’s customary cattle grazing. The Grzimeks failed to stop the redrawing of the park’s boundaries, partly because the airborne camera never expunged the Serengeti’s “ghosts of land use past.”

Illicit Ecologies: Queer Animacy and Epistemological Erasure in History of Wolves

Meliora ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Christian Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of

This thesis attends to the slippages between life and nonlife in Emily Fridlunds 2017 novel History of Wolves. It traces the matter that is granted life or animacy, as well as the matter that is devitalized. Through the protagonist, Linda, the novel investigates the role of both scientific knowledge production and Christian Science in placing arbitrary biological limits on life forms, making some visible and others unseeable and unsayable. The thesis fleshes out the characters’ climate denial as yet another erasure of the animate agents. Ultimately, the thesis asks: if we can expand what is worthy of life, can we, in turn, expand what agents, actors, and matters are deserving of care?  

The history of science and the history of bureaucratic knowledge: Saxon mining, circa 1770

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Felten
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Ore Deposit ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Ranking Official ◽  
Knowledge Claims

This article looks into mining in central Germany in the late eighteenth century as one area of highly charged exchange between (specific manifestations of early modern) science and the (early modern) state. It describes bureaucratic knowledge as socially distributed cognition by following the steps of a high-ranking official that led him to discover a rich silver ore deposit. Although this involved hybridization of practical/artisanal and theoretical/scientific knowledge, and knowers, the focus of this article is on purification or boundary work that took place when actors in and around the mines consciously contributed to different circuits of knowledge production. For the sake of analysis, the article suggests a way of opposing bureaucratic versus scientific knowledge production, even when the sites, actors involved in, and practices of that knowledge production were the same or similar. Whereas the science of the time invoked consensus among equals to conflate competing knowledge claims, bureaucracies did so by applying a hierarchy among ranked individuals.

Custodianship of Shahidganj in colonial Lahore: Land, land use and the formation of religious community, 1850–1936

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sana Haroon
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Urban Land Use ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Administrative Practice ◽  
History Of Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Detailed Record

This article presents the history of the administration and management of the Lahore Shahidganj, a site that was disputed between Muslims and Sikhs, from 1850 to 1936. Drawing on a rare and detailed record of land bequest, management of the Shahidganj site by its ‘unreformed’ Sikh mahants from 1850 to 1928, and representations by Anjuman-i Islamia and Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), this article accounts for almost 100 years of history of development, use of and ambitions for this site. This highly textured account of personal and familial interests, urban land use and Sikh and Muslim shrine worship and orthodoxy at the Shahidganj is one of very few long-ranging studies of religious endowments in colonial India. The dispute over Shahidganj has largely been understood through the lenses of symbolic association and communal politics; this study complicates the understanding of formation of community at this place of worship in colonial north India by focusing on the nature and significance of custodial control over the site under colonial law and administrative practice. It demonstrates public participation and use of this religious site to be contingent on the rights and practices of custodians, both real and prospective. This article complicates the view that places of worship in colonial India were inherently accessible and supported the formation of religious publics, instead demonstrating how religious uses of the Shahidganj site were managed and deeply contested.

Fluid Histories: Swamps, Law and the Company-State in Colonial Bengal

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1036-1073 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debjani Bhattacharyya
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Eminent Domain ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Geographical Knowledge ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Legal Geography ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Law Making

AbstractThe movement of the Hughli River in 1804-5 resulted in the deposition of alluvion along Calcutta’s river banks which unfolded as an ownership crisis for the East India Company. The Company responded by developing new legal categories and administrative language to manage these newly formed lands and thereby fashioning itself as a public agent of Calcutta’s land and landed property. Focusing on specific legal aspects of colonial hydrology that arose in the making of property in these amphibious spaces, the article argues that the soaking ecology of Bengal became a site for productive law-making by creating open-ended possibilities for taking land. It demonstrates how the Company used this new land formation to gradually institute a legal architecture regulating alluvion and dereliction and subsequently subjecting these soaking ecologies to an intricate documentary regime with the aim of disciplining the existing landed property relations in Calcutta. Documenting the haphazard extension and enactment of these new legal doctrines in a mobile landscape illuminates a particular history of the colonial regime of property and the Company-State’s early articulations of a particular type of quasi-eminent domain as a manner of taking land. Pushing a new direction in legal geography, the piece shows how the legal arena became a productive site for geographical knowledge production and legal experimentation in the colony.

Rhetorische Epistemologie der Wissenschaften

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-219
Author(s):  
Alexander Thumfart
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
Science Culture ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Results

During the last three decades research in the rhetoric of natural science has established itself as a prominent topic in the history of science, culture, and society. Despite this overall success, the status, function and place of rhetoric in the process of knowledge production is still ambivalent and disputed. While some scholars place rhetoric right in the centre of the construction of scientific knowledge, others support the view that scientific knowledge is epistemologically privileged. Based on research done by the prominent sociologist, philosopher, and historian Bruno Latour, the article argues that rhetoric plays a minimal role in the production of knowledge but is crucial in the dissemination and (successful) implementation of scientific results.

Patriotic hygiene: Tracing new places of knowledge production about malaria in Vietnam, 1919–75

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
Malaria Control ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Industrial Hygiene ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Medical Doctors ◽  
Racial Hygiene ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of

This article examines knowledge production about malaria in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam. During the 1920s and 1930s, medical doctors cooperated with plantation managers in order to develop industrial hygiene techniques consisting of environmental modification and quinine use. By the 1930s, changing motivations, in particular racial hygiene and patriotism, drove malaria control efforts. The wartime pressures to control malaria between the 1940s and 1975 further encouraged patriotic hygiene. This history of malaria science in Vietnam highlights the tension between change and continuity and shows the importance of place in the conjunction of scientific knowledge production and nation-building projects.

The Reformation of Prophecy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Sujin Pak
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Developmental Analysis ◽  
Sacred History

The Reformation of Prophecy presents and supports the case for viewing the prophet and biblical prophecy as a powerful lens by which to illuminate many aspects of the reforming work of the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It provides a chronological and developmental analysis of the significance of the prophet and biblical prophecy across leading Protestant reformers in articulating a theology of the priesthood of all believers, a biblical model of the pastoral office, a biblical vision of the reform of worship, and biblical processes for discerning right interpretation of Scripture. Through the tool of the prophet and biblical prophecy, the reformers framed their work under, within, and in support of the authority of Scripture—for the true prophet speaks the Word of God alone and calls the people, their worship and their beliefs and practices, back to the Word of God. The book also demonstrates how interpretations and understandings of the prophet and biblical prophecy contributed to the formation and consolidation of distinctive confessional identities, especially around differences in their visions of sacred history, Christological exegesis of Old Testament prophecy, and interpretation of Old Testament metaphors. This book illuminates the significant shifts in the history of Protestant reformers’ engagement with the prophet and biblical prophecy—shifts from these serving as a tool to advance the priesthood of all believers to a tool to clarify and buttress clerical identity and authority to a site of polemical-confessional exchange concerning right interpretations of Scripture.

‘It Is a Tradition in the Nuclear Industry . . . Secrecy’: Political Opportunity Structures and Nuclear Knowledge Production in France

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042110250
Author(s):  
Julie Schweitzer ◽  
Tamara L Mix
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Nuclear Energy ◽  
Nuclear Industry ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Nuclear Program ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Shaping Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Opportunity Structures

Employing the example of France’s civil nuclear program, we connect political opportunity structures (POSs) to mechanisms of knowledge production, identifying how opposing stakeholders generate knowledge about a controversial technology. A history of nuclear dependence in France creates a context that praises, normalizes, and rationalizes nuclear energy while stigmatizing attempts to question or contest the nuclear industry’s dominant position. Integrating Bond’s knowledge-shaping process with Coy and colleagues’ concept of oppositional knowledge, we consider how the broader social, political, and economic context influences opposing stakeholder assessments of nuclear energy. Employing qualitative semi-structured interviews, we offer unique insight into the French nuclear debate, discussing the role of POS in shaping knowledge production.

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