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

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?

Between the Lab and the Field: Plants and the Affective Atmospheres Of Southern Science

In view of persistent global inequalities in scientific knowledge production with clear centers and peripheries, this paper examines a lingering concern for many scientists in the Global South: why is it, at times, so hard to have scientific insights from the South recognized? This paper addresses this big question from within a long-term field immersion in a Ugandan–Australian scientific collaboration in molecular biology. I show how disciplinary hierarchies of value affect the distribution of labor between Uganda and Australia and thematize the role of place and its affective atmospheres that texture the quotidian scientific work in this project. Unsurprisingly, they tend to devalue Ugandan sites and contributions, and turn Uganda into a rather unlikely site for new insights to emerge. However, in spite of doing devalued and outsourced “menial” labor such as fieldwork, Ugandan biologists’ fieldwork involves affective encounters with their experimental banana plants that thereby become differently thinkable. The paper argues that attending to affective atmospheres that infuse research sites offers clues about scientists’ position in global hierarchies and at the same time can help make room for insights that emanate from unexpected places.

After the fact(s): Communicating scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in Aotearoa

<p>This thesis draws on social constructivist theories of scientific knowledge to analyse the public engagement practices of a cohort of scientist-communicators in Aotearoa as they represent scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in public. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, this thesis demonstrates that participants think defensively about the publics they communicate to, drawing boundaries between science and publics that minimise exposure of the elements of scientific knowledge they perceive might undermine scientific authority. Such boundary-work often demarcates public engagement from scientific knowledge production, constructing public engagement as a subjective process applied to scientific knowledge after the fact. These science-communicators also work to overcome these very same boundaries by making science more accessible and democratic. Such tensions suggest that participants not only socially construct science, but also contribute to the social construction of public engagement with science as they work to transform systemic and cultural barriers acting to entrench science as an inaccessible, exclusive, and unilateral arbiter of knowledge. In doing so, participants found that presenting a more accurate, complex picture of science—with all its uncertainties and failures—had not undermined public confidence in science. Instead, complexity, risk and uncertainty could become transparent elements of scientific knowledge production, thereby open to public scrutiny and definition. Participants’ representations of complexity, risk, and uncertainty were influenced by accessible, local publications, and economic and institutional conditions, but rarely by established public engagement scholarship.</p>

After the fact(s): Communicating scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in Aotearoa

<p>This thesis draws on social constructivist theories of scientific knowledge to analyse the public engagement practices of a cohort of scientist-communicators in Aotearoa as they represent scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in public. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, this thesis demonstrates that participants think defensively about the publics they communicate to, drawing boundaries between science and publics that minimise exposure of the elements of scientific knowledge they perceive might undermine scientific authority. Such boundary-work often demarcates public engagement from scientific knowledge production, constructing public engagement as a subjective process applied to scientific knowledge after the fact. These science-communicators also work to overcome these very same boundaries by making science more accessible and democratic. Such tensions suggest that participants not only socially construct science, but also contribute to the social construction of public engagement with science as they work to transform systemic and cultural barriers acting to entrench science as an inaccessible, exclusive, and unilateral arbiter of knowledge. In doing so, participants found that presenting a more accurate, complex picture of science—with all its uncertainties and failures—had not undermined public confidence in science. Instead, complexity, risk and uncertainty could become transparent elements of scientific knowledge production, thereby open to public scrutiny and definition. Participants’ representations of complexity, risk, and uncertainty were influenced by accessible, local publications, and economic and institutional conditions, but rarely by established public engagement scholarship.</p>

How are maps used in research? An exploratory review of PhD dissertations

Maps are a powerful medium for communicating research. Tools for analysing geospatial data and preparing maps are now readily available and widely used in research. Despite this, concerns are being raised over the quality of maps produced with online and desktop mapping products. As academics and supervisors of postgraduate students, we conducted an exploratory study to determine if and how these concerns apply to maps in PhD dissertations. We reviewed just over 1,000 dissertations published in 2015 and 2017 at three universities. Maps for indicating locations or study areas were used in a diverse range of topics, confirming our reliance on maps to communicate information about geographic space. Maps that communicated scientific results were prevalent in the natural sciences and in the humanities, and in these cases, the dissertations included a large number of maps. We provide a qualitative description of problems identified in the dissertations, which highlight challenges with the accurate and responsible presentation of scientific results in maps. The accumulation of minor inaccuracies on maps, especially if one result is based on another, can have serious consequences for scientific knowledge production. Future work could review maps in PhD dissertations to inform guidelines for preparing and evaluating maps to be included in dissertations.

The ‘New Urban Science’: towards the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary pursuit of sustainable transformations

Digitalisation is an increasingly important driver of urban development. The ‘New Urban Science’ is one particular approach to urban digitalisation that promises new ways of knowing and managing cities more effectively. Proponents of the New Urban Science emphasise urban data analytics and modelling as a means to develop novel insights on how cities function. However, there are multiple opportunities to broaden and deepen these practices through collaborations between the natural and social sciences as well as with public authorities, private companies, and civil society. In this article, we summarise the history and critiques of urban science and then call for a New Urban Science that embraces interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to scientific knowledge production and application. We argue that such an expanded version of the New Urban Science can be used to develop urban transformative capacity and achieve ecologically resilient, economically prosperous, and socially robust cities of the twenty-first century.

WHAT IS THE RESEARCH IMPACT OF (THE IDEAL OF) SCIENTIFIC TRUTH?

Aim. This paper elucidates how the emergent impact agenda is slowly but surely changing the normative framework of modern Western science. Method. The paper investigates conceptually the implications of the impact agenda for the research process. We outline a chronology around the evaluation regime of research impact and identify the causal mechanisms that change the disciplinary structure of the research ecosystem. We draw upon a sociological model of scientific knowledge production to contrast and discuss how impact facts mimic the process of scientific knowledge production but are geared towards a different end. Results. Our findings indicate that an explicit emphasis on societal contribution not only propositions a different purpose of research, but also changes the logic of research along its entire construction. The impact logic mimics the creation of scientific facts; nevertheless, as it is geared towards a different end, it hermetically seals itself from criticism as any form of scrutiny would otherwise undermine its own legitimacy. Conclusion. We conclude that only explicit acknowledgement of the adverse potential of the impact agenda can maintain science’s benefit to society. We argue that an emphasis on the advancement of knowledge, as opposed to impact, can maintain innovation and preempt social tension. The contribution of this paper lies in identifying the societal influence of the scientific ideal of truth, and articulating the unintended consequences of the impact agenda as the emerging impact or starve paradigm.

Link-based approach to study scientific software usage: the case of VOSviewer

Scientific software is a fundamental player in modern science, participating in all stages of scientific knowledge production. Software occasionally supports the development of trivial tasks, while at other instances it determines procedures, methods, protocols, results, or conclusions related with the scientific work. The growing relevance of scientific software as a research product with value of its own has triggered the development of quantitative science studies of scientific software. The main objective of this study is to illustrate a link-based webometric approach to characterize the online mentions to scientific software across different analytical frameworks. To do this, the bibliometric software VOSviewer is used as a case study. Considering VOSviewer’s official website as a baseline, online mentions to this website were counted in three different analytical frameworks: academic literature via Google Scholar (988 mentioning publications), webpages via Majestic (1,330 mentioning websites), and tweets via Twitter (267 mentioning tweets). Google scholar mentions shows how VOSviewer is used as a research resource, whilst mentions in webpages and tweets show the interest on VOSviewer’s website from an informational and a conversational point of view. Results evidence that URL mentions can be used to gather all sorts of online impacts related to non-traditional research objects, like software, thus expanding the analytical scientometric toolset by incorporating a novel digital dimension.

On Constructing a Scientific Archives Network

Computational approaches to archives present archivists and users with new ways of engaging with records and their provenance. Such approaches are particularly useful for scientific archives due to the collective and collaborative nature of modern scientific knowledge production. This article explores computational approaches to digitized fonds of scientists involved in the transdisciplinary scientific movement cybernetics through the Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project as a means to reveal the ways cyberneticians have developed concepts and debated ideas through the creation and exchange of correspondence and other records. The project has experimented with machine-learning and natural-language-processing tools to generate data from the materials in an effort to reveal connections between the cyberneticians and their correspondence. Cybernetics seeks to understand the human condition through experiments with machines, and, in a cybernetically inspired sense, so too do archivists seek to understand their archives through experiments with machines. Such explorations are important for documenting scientific thought collectives like cybernetics in a digital age.