Science in Transition How Science Goes Wrong and What to Do About It

Science in Transition, which started in 2013, is a small-scale Dutch initiative that presented a systems approach, comprised of analyses and suggested actions, based on experience in academia. It was built on writings by early science watchers and most recent theoretical developments in philosophy, history and sociology of science and STS on the practice and politics of science. This chapter will include my personal experiences as one of the four Dutch founders of Science in Transition. I will discuss the message and the various forms of reception over the past 6 years by the different actors in the field, including administrators in university, academic societies and Ministries of Higher Education, Economic Affairs and Public Health but also from leadership in the private sector. I will report on my personal experience of how these myths and ideologies play out in the daily practice of 40 years of biomedical research in policy and decision making in lab meetings, at departments, at grant review committees of funders and in the Board rooms and the rooms of Deans, Vice Chancellors and Rectors.It has in the previous chapters become clear that the ideology and ideals that we are brought up with are not valid, are not practiced despite that even in 2020 they are still somehow ‘believed’ by most scientists and even by many science watchers, journalists and used in political correct rhetoric and policy making by science’s leadership. In that way these ideologies and beliefs mostly implicitly but sometimes even explicitly determine debates regarding the internal policy of science and science policy in the public arena. These include all time classic themes like the uniqueness of science compared to any other societal activity; ethical superiority of science and scientists based on Mertonian norms; the vocational disinterested search for truth, autonomy; values and moral (political) neutrality, dominance of internal epistemic values and unpredictability regards impact. These ideas have influenced debates about the ideal and hegemony of natural science, the hierarchy of basic over applied science; theoretical over technological research and at a higher level in academic institutions and at the funders the widely held supremacy of STEM over SSH. This has directly determined the attitudes of scientists in the interaction with peers within the field, but also shaped the politics of science within science but also with policy makers and stakeholders from the public and private sector and with interactions with popular media.Science it was concluded was suboptimal because of growing problems with the quality and reproducibility of its published products due to failing quality control at several levels. Because of too little interactions with society during the phases of agenda setting and the actual process of knowledge production, its societal impact was limited which also relates to the lack of inclusiveness, multidisciplinarity and diversity in academia. Production of robust and significant results aiming at real world problems are mainly secondary to academic output relevant for an internally driven incentive and reward system steering for academic career advancement at the individual level. Similarly, at the higher organizational and national level this reward system is skewed to types of output and impact focused on positions on international ranking lists. This incentive and reward system, with flawed use of metrics, drives a hyper-competitive social system in academia which results in a widely felt lack of alignment and little shared value in the academic community. Empirical data, most of it from within science and academia, showing these problems in different academic disciplines, countries and continents are published on virtually a weekly basis since 2014. These critiques focus on the practices of scholarly publishing including Open Access and open data, the adverse effects of the incentive and reward system, in particular its flawed use of metrics. Images, ideologies and politics of science were exposed that insulate academia and science from society and its stakeholders, which distort the research agenda and subsequentially its societal and economic impact.

Jagadish Chandra Bose and the anticolonial politics of science fiction

In postcolonial studies there are two main strands of argument concerning the legacies and effects of cultural imperialism on science fiction as a literary genre. The first strand presents a critical reading of Western science fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a genre that is deeply embedded in the discourses and ideologies of colonialism and imperialism (Rieder, 2008; Kerslake, 2007). The second strand presents a critical reading of the writing back of postcolonial authors, stressing the subversive elements of both science and fiction and their power to undermine dominant narratives of cultural imperialism and (neo)colonialism (Chambers, 2003; Hoagland and Sarwal, 2010; Langer, 2011; Smith, 2012; Varughese, 2013 and 2017). In this article I focus on a piece of colonial-era science fiction from a non-Western writer: Jagadish Chandra Bose’s short story “Runaway Cyclone”. First published in 1896 and republished in an extended version by the author in 1921, I analyse how Bose’s story combines elements of science fiction and magical realism. I then argue that Bose turns the narrative tropes of Western science fiction on their head and thus undermines Western science as an epistemological tool of imperial control. Reading “Runaway Cyclone” alongside Bose’s non-fictional accounts on science in colonised India will then reveal a philosophy of science that embraces Western science and Indian philosophy, which in turn can be read as a politics of science that is in effect anticolonial.

Geographies of science and technology 1: Boundaries and crossings

In a world of accelerating environmental crises, global pandemics and seemingly unstoppable datafication of anything that moves, thinks or feels, the politics of science and technology are pervasive. In this first of three progress reports on the geographies of science and technology, I home in on some definitional questions which an account of anything like a new or emerging subfield must necessarily concern itself. I examine how geographers have addressed the spatial effects of the making and unmaking of boundaries between science, technology and their various outsides. While work on historical and contemporary geographies of technoscience has often pulled in slightly different directions, I identify some promising convergences around questions of political economy and on the topic of scale as an emergent property of technoscientific practices. New attention is also falling on the spatial practices through which technoscience gets plugged into wider worlds, such as politics and policymaking, while geographers have also been busy disrupting, in a more experimental mode, conventional boundaries and hierarchies of technoscientific practice. Finally, the report examines recent and welcome efforts to convene new conversations around the geography of technology but cautions against the potential seduction of the new, the innovative and the ‘disruptive’. Important recent work in cultural geography has purposively unsettled assumed hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ tech, new and old, and suggests that any nascent subfield of ‘geography of technology’ needs to reflexively attend to how boundaries get drawn around ‘technology’, and with what effects.