Contested Environments Flashcards
What is the Cartesian legacy?
Descartes suggested the world is made up of binaries. Such as: Nature/Society Object/Subject Reason/Passion Science/Politics.
Following the Cartesian divide:
Science deals with facts, matters, and objectivity;
Politics deals with subjects, passions, and cultural matters.
> To take decisions about the material, external world, Politics can rely on Science.
What are the issues of the Cartesian legacy?
Is scientific knowledge ever ‘pure’ from its societal context?
Scientific knowledge has a geography: where do legitimate sources of knowledge on nature come from?
An appeal to a singular Nature – revealed by Natural Science – has often been used to short cut politics.
Outline the controversy of the Empire and Ecology.
“Ecology provided ample contributions to colonial aspirations of power and control over territory and nature” (Adams 2003).
What scientists saw as ‘nature’ embodied millennia of human activity. During the 18th Century, ‘nature’ came to be defined in terms of absence of human impact. Non-Europeans were seen to be ‘natural’ themselves – close to wilderness in their primitive use of technology and ‘savage customs’
What are the challenges of scientific enquiry?
Uncertainty - “known unknowns”, e.g. projections of observed events in complex modelling systems.
Ontological ambiguity - Conflicting framings of the nature of the problem and why it matters.
Indeterminacy - e.g. the relationship between climate change and regional precipitation.
Ignorance - “unknown unknowns”.
Postnormal science: too many uncertainties to have strong assertions and too high political/social stakes to claim it is objective.
What are scientific controversies?
“[Controversies] arise when the rationales and reassurances of environmental science and policy fail to convince those affected by what is at issue or to allay their concerns”
(Whatmore 2009, p. 588)
How do scientific controversies form?
Scientific knowledge is by definition provisional, disputed and improved over time
Claims + counter-claims = scientific dispute
Such disputes may become heated if the lack of scientific consensus prevails and generates wider social interest, sometimes leading to the loss of public trust
Dispute + heat = knowledge controversy
What are the implications of controversies?
Crisis of trust and rejection of the figure of the expert
But also: “potential to foster the disordering conditions in which reasoning is forced to ‘slow down’” (Whatmore 2009, p. 588)
Following this, there may be a “reconfiguration of scientific divisions of labour to address to inter- or transdisciplinary objects of analysis”, leading to more transparency on uncertainty and increased public engagement activities.
What is a useful framework for understanding contestation?
Sociology of science
Scientific practice has a history and a geography; scientific are a group of actors whose activities are guided by norms, values and conventions which shift over time; knowledge is also produced outside of science.
Expertise in a time of uncertainty
Simultaneous increase in appeal to experts and in rejection of them. Uncertainty and ontological ambiguity have become central to scientific practice but are challenging to communicate.
The promise of controversies
Creating inter- and trans-disciplinarity, slowing thinking down, increasing public interest and potential for public engagement, citizen science and public deliberation.
