books that pioneer literary modes of writing the social sciences: Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus , 1 L’Histoire est une littérature contemporaine: Manifeste pour les sciences sociales , 2 and Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes . 3 These
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2018
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 1–13
Transforming Participatory Science into Socioecological Praxis
Valuing Marginalized Environmental Knowledges in the Face of the Neoliberalization of Nature and Science
Brian J. Burke and Nik Heynen
Citizen science and sustainability science promise the more just and democratic production of environmental knowledge and politics. In this review, we evaluate these participatory traditions within the context of (a) our theorization of how the valuation and devaluation of nature, knowledge, and people help to produce socio-ecological hierarchies, the uneven distribution of harms and benefits, and inequitable engagement within environmental politics, and (b) our analysis of how neoliberalism is reworking science and environmental governance. We find that citizen and sustainability science often fall short of their transformative potential because they do not directly confront the production of environmental injustice and political exclusion, including the knowledge hierarchies that shape how the environment is understood and acted upon, by whom, and for what ends. To deepen participatory practice, we propose a heterodox ethicopolitical praxis based in Gramscian, feminist, and postcolonial theory and describe how we have pursued transformative praxis in southern Appalachia through the Coweeta Listening Project.
Anxiety and learning
Cultural polarisation in social science courses
Jose Leonardo Santos
sure. Certainly, contentious issues have provoked strong reactions in my students. This research explores how professors perceive and deal with students’ sentiments around contentious issues. Social science presents particular pedagogical challenges
Introduction
Science/technology as politics by other means
Simone Abram
This article introduces a series of ideas about the categories of science and politics, by way of actor network theory, Gell's theories of index and agency, and governmentality studies. It explores the ways in which science has become a discursive element in contemporary government, and examines the tensions between the purifying categorizations of politics and science, and the re-embedding (or hybridizing) of science into national political discourse. What emerges is a series of practices by which science is nationalized, domesticating the ideal of a generalized science into localized political debates at both national and sub-national levels, practices which may be transformed at national boundaries. While we acknowledge that science in practice is not abstract or generalizable (since it must engage with a world which is not abstracted), it is the abstracting and purifying work attributed to science which makes it attractive as a political alibi for particular political projects. Rather than seeing science as politics by other means, perhaps we should be examining the creation of a rehybridized science-politics.
Natures of Naturalism
Reaching Bedrock in Climate Science
Martin Skrydstrup
and norms in culture as aspects of “two mutually exclusive orders,” presenting anthropology with “conflicting features” (ibid.: 8). When Lévi-Strauss spoke of nature, he was referring neither to the physical environment nor to what the field of science
Experiments in Excreta to Energy
Sustainability Science and Bio-Necro Collaboration in Urban Ghana
Brenda Chalfin
cases like Ashaiman's ‘excreta to energy’ system, intimate bodily functions. As the renaissance of interest in energy across an amalgam of human sciences makes evident, beyond recognizing the importance of energy writ large to human technological
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 88–104
Shelling from the ivory tower
Project Camelot and the post–World War II operationalization of social science
Philip Y. Kao
related social science–led undertakings that underpinned US imperialism and global power. The ethical debates spilling out from Project Camelot also informed anthropological thinking and social theory making in America in very particular ways, which will
Jerome Ravetz
In this essay I review my own involvement in climate science, and attempt to draw some useful lessons. I start with a critique of the theory of post-normal science (PNS). This is derived from the experience of the effective criticisms of PNS that were made on the blogosphere. I proceed to a critique of climate science itself, which might be described as the attempt to solve a post-normal problem by "normal science" methods. Since quality, in a variety of aspects, became crucial in the Climategate debates, I analyze that concept in the fraught context of a politicized, contested science. Such sciences have the seeds of tragedy for those who innocently engage with them believing that their task is simply to speak truth to power. Finally, out of my personal history I suggest that we keep in mind the personal investment of anyone holding a contested view, and respect their struggles to maintain integrity when their core beliefs are under attack. This motivates the fostering of non-violence in debates on policy science issues.
Phil Tattersall
least in part through a strong reliance on science that is based on positivist foundations. This worldview demands an objective, concrete, impersonal reality that is measurable and “real” and tends to judge those views and opinions based upon local or
David E. Long
In an ethnographic study set within a biology department of a public university in the United States, incongruity between the ideals and practice of science education are investigated. Against the background of religious conservative students' complaints about evolution in the curriculum, biology faculty describe their political intents for fostering science literacy. This article examines differences that emerge between the department's rhetorical commitment to improve science understanding amongst their students and the realities of course staffing and anxieties about promotion and tenure. Because tenure-track faculty are motivated to focus their careers on research productivity and teaching biology majors, other biology courses are staffed with adjunct instructors who are less equipped to negotiate complex pedagogies of science and religion. In practice, faculty avoid risky conversations about evolution versus creationism with religiously conservative students. I argue that such faculty are complicit, through their silence, in failing to equip their students with the science literacy which their own profession avows is crucial for a well-informed citizenry in a democracy.