scholarly journals Remarks on Science, Epistemology and Education in Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Kauffmann

In Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018), Bruno Latour argues that any effort to sustain life in the critical zone of our planet must leave behind the modern epistemologies, which reify and partition nature and science. In order to clear the ground for a proper descriptive stance, he dismisses ‘the view from nowhere’ and corresponding epistemic notions such as ‘Galileism’. I demonstrate why Latour’s fight against ‘the view from nowhere’ is misguided and wrong in the details. At best, his critique is largely irrelevant for the constructive use of science and education in ‘the climate war’.

2020 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-247
Author(s):  
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 215-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Valentin Stein Pedersen ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Nikolaj Schultz

Including empirical examples and theoretical clarifications on many of the analytical issues raised in his recently published Down to Earth (2018), this conversation with Bruno Latour and his collaborator, Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, offers key insights into Latour’s recent and ongoing work. Revolving around questions on political ecology and social theory in our ‘New Climatic Regime’, Latour argues that in order to have politics you need a land and you need a people. This interview present reflections on such politics, such land and such people, and it ends with a call for a sociology that takes up the task of connecting the three by investigating what he and Schultz call ‘geo-social classes’. The interview was conducted by Jakob Stein in Paris in November 2018.


2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Kloetzel

In recent years, arts festivals around the globe have become enamoured of touring, site-based performance. Such serialised site work is growing in popularity due to its accessibility, its spectacular characteristics, and its adaptive qualities. Employing practice-as-research methodologies to dissect the basis of such site-adaptive performances, the author highlights her discovery of the crumbling foundation of the adaptation discourse by way of her creative process for the performance work Room. Combining findings from the phenomenological explorations of her dancing body as well as from cultural analyses of the climate change debate by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), Claire Colebrook (2011, 2012), and Bruno Latour (2014), the author argues that only by fundamentally shifting the direction of the adaptation discourse – on scales from global to the personal – will we be able to build a site-adaptive performance strategy that resists the neoliberal drive towards ecological and economic precarity.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document