This E-Special Issue collects together 11 articles from the archives of Theory, Culture & Society. These articles all articulate and debate the contribution of what some have described as either ‘complex complexity’ or ‘general complexity’. In contrast to reductionist or restricted attempts to understand complexity, the articles collected here move away from the tendency to assume mastery of complexity by expounding a set of universal and simple laws. Rather, the position of general complexity is that we cannot grasp the complexity (...) of the world in its complexity, and therefore depend upon models which are always incomplete, provisional and contingent. Yet, these models make knowledge and action possible, and it is therefore the contribution of general complexity to provide the means through which we can ethically and pragmatically engage with complexity in the hope of realizing alternative, perhaps better, worlds. (shrink)

Knowledge production is not free of political connotations. The researcher defines and moulds the research situation in which she will be gathering the data. Simultaneously, she will be also condit...

This article challenges the urge within Actor-Network Theory, posthumanism, and the ontological turn in sociology and anthropology to dissolve analytical distinctions between subject and object, society and nature, and human and non-human. It argues that only by acknowledging such distinctions and applying a realist ontology can exploitative and unsustainable global power relations be exposed. The predicament of the Anthropocene should not prompt us to abandon distinctions between society and nature but to refine the analytical framework through which we can distinguish (...) between sentience and non-sentience and between the symbolic and non-symbolic. The incompatibility of posthumanist and Marxist approaches to the Anthropocene and the question of agency derives from ideological differences as well as different methodological proclivities. A central illustration of these differences is the understanding of fetishism, a concept viewed by posthumanists as condescending but by Marxists as emancipatory. (shrink)

On 4 February 2021 a group of nurse scholar‐educators, nurses and other interested folks came together for the second of two virtual events to think together about the role of philosophy in the nursing world. The live streamed open access event provided an opportunity in the COVID‐19 pandemic for over 400 people to listen to five nursing scholars' presentations and to interact virtually through comments in chat and on the @IPONSociety Twitter social media platform. By reading the comments and questions (...) that were generated, and by looking at the social media comments related to the event, it is apparent that philosophy is an important thinking practice for nurses but many audience members critically expressed they felt excluded. Critical issues were raised by participants in chat and on Twitter—pointedly around the need for more representative voices—including the imperative to open nursing philosophy to diverse and disparate worldviews. This dialogue provides a summary of critical points raised during the live question and answer session for the panel entitled Addressing Current Debates in Nursing Theory, Education, Practice as well as examing comments selected from the @IPONSociety Twitter space in response to the panel. One commenter said it was great to see the discussion being lifted up from the influential roots of white supremacy, while other nurses expressed that they wished the panellists themselves were more diverse. In discussion of key takeaway, links are made to historical and ongoing structural oppressions in nursing where thinking practices like nursing philosophy and theory are still dominated by world views emanating from positionalities of able‐bodied cis‐gendered heterosexual western eurocentric whiteness. (shrink)

Feminist economics draws increasing attention from professional mainstream economists. In this paper, we discuss methodological issues, some theoretical developments – notably on the household – and issues of economic policy. We point to parallels between feminist economics and institutional economics, and argue that these relations might be strengthened to the benefit of both.

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over‐reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here (...) we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future. (shrink)

Evidence-based policy-making (EBP) is widely seen as a key instrument for good policy-making. Yet in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the debate on the relation of science and policy-making gained new momentum. The premises of EBP, its narrow understanding of what kind of knowledge counts and how to make decisions, appeared inapt to provide a sound foundation for policy-making under conditions of high complexity and uncertainty. This paper addresses the major shortcomings of EBP and argues for revising its evidentialist (...) framework. First, the idea of evidence itself has to be extended and pluralized by including alternative forms of knowledge. Second, uncertainty has to be taken seriously as a fundamental epistemic condition. To arrive at a more apt model of policy-making, this paper suggests to adopt a pragmatist perspective on the relation of politics, science and the public. This leads to an experimentalist account in the meliorist spirit. Such an account highlights the role of experience, participatory processes and collective learning. Furthermore, and in contrast to scientistic models, it underlines political responsibility and demands to cultivate sensitivity for possible failures and tragic constellations. Finally, a non-evidentialist model of policy advice is outlined. (shrink)

Constructive technology assessment aims at anticipating societal impacts of technological innovations and suggests incorporating reflexivity and social learning into technology development. Social learning involves fostering the ability of diverse social actors to cultivate sociotechnical critical skills, thus allowing technological and social change to be governed with consideration for social values and diverging interests. Based on this demand, our paper presents a discourse-theoretical, interventionist approach to software design introducing deconstruction and (un-)learning as reflective practices to guide development processes. Inspired by Donna (...) Haraway’s focus on power relations in technoscience culture, our approach—called ‘deconstructive design’—traces how structures such as in/formal hierarchies and discursive hegemonies affect the development processes and design decisions of teams or communities of practices. The underlying deconstructivist methodology refers to practice-based concepts of situated learning. Thus, it locates a potential for value-based intervention at the micro/meso-level of everyday work practices. (shrink)

In recent years a growing number of scholars in science studies and related fields are developing new ontologies to displace entrenched dualisms. These efforts often go together with a renewed interest in the roles played by symbolisms and tools in knowledge and being. This article brings Maurice Merleau-Ponty into these conversations, positioning him as a precursor of today’s innovative recastings of technoscience. While Merleau-Ponty is often invoked in relation to his early work on the body and embodiment, this article focuses (...) on his later work, where the investigation of perception is integrated with an ontological exploration. The resulting approach revolves around the highly original idea of the body as a standard of measurement. We further develop this idea by coining the term ‘the measuring body’, which to a greater extent than did Merleau-Ponty accentuates the relative autonomy of symbolisms and tools and their capacity to decentre the perceiving body. (shrink)

This particular roundtable falls at the end of a four-year networking project (COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’) and reflects upon the genealogies of new materialism and how these flow into the individual working practices of participants. The texts below were contributed remotely via email by members of the group, following face-to-face meetings in Barcelona, Maribor, Warsaw, Liverpool, Paris and Utrecht. Authors were unaware of each other’s responses and in this way the (...) dialogue has unfolded a little like a game of Exquisite Corpse or Consequences, with questions acting like a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Accordingly, the text is the product of a partially bounded experimental system ‘designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able to clearly ask’ (Rheinberger 1997: 28). Thus, it both ruminates upon work to date and is intended to generate novel responses from authors and readers alike. (shrink)

Feminist approaches in epistemology and philosophy of science have frequently been labelled as ’relativist’, both by feminist as well as by non-feminist philosophers. Regularly the so labelled distance themselves from even the mere suspicion of relativist tendencies. There is a remarkable discrepancy between an attributed and a self-declared relativism. Taking the self-declared relativism of Lorraine Code as an example, the article argues that it is a case of a rhetorical not epistemological relativism, better termed as anti-anti-relativism, but that there are (...) nevertheless good reasons for feminists to follow Code along that path. (shrink)

This study explores building code negotiation between straw bale advocates’ ecology-oriented values and health and safety values that underlie building codes in general by focusing on how values and ethics are articulated and embodied in practice and discourse in the two states where straw bale building standards were first initiated. The local, contingent nature of interactions, grounded in particular practices, material culture, and written and visual texts in which values were embedded, coupled with organizational factors contributed to strategies for a (...) prescriptive code in Arizona and for a performance code in New Mexico. Examination of situated practice in standards development for unconventional materials that may not fit well with practices based on conventional technologies sheds light on how norms associated with the ethics of safe building are enmeshed in existing practice where they can be taken for granted as ethical absolutes and illustrates the kinds of insights available through paying attention to ethics in practice. (shrink)

This article seeks to intervene in what I perceive to be a problematic opposition in feminist theory between ontological and epistemological accounts of existence and politics, by proposing an approach that weaves together Elspeth Probyn’s conceptualisation of ‘feminist reflexivity’ with a re-reading of feminist standpoint through affect. In so doing, I develop the concept of affective solidarity as necessary for sustainable feminist politics of transformation. This approach is proposed as a way of moving away from rooting feminist transformation in the (...) politics of identity and towards modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance experience can produce. Moving beyond empathy as a privileged way of connecting with others, I argue that the difference between ‘womanhood’ and ‘feminism’ is critical for a universal yet non-essential understanding of what motivates gendered change. (shrink)

The bias paradox emerges out of a tension between objectivism and relativism.If one rejects a certain the conception objectivity as absolute impartiality and value-neutrality (i.e., if all views are biased), how, then, can one hold that some epistemic perspectives are better than others? This is a problem that has been most explicitly dealt with in feminist epistemology, but it is not unique to feminist perspectives. In this paper, I wish to clearly lay out the nature of the paradox and the (...) various attempts to avoid it. I also intend to show why it is a problem for any epistemological view that rejects absolute objectivity. Finally, I wish to briefly outline a possible solution to the paradox, a solution that requires recognizing that rationality necessarily requires both objective and subjective elements. (shrink)

The article discusses Berlin’s Poor Relief Policy from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, posing the question: how can premises of theoretical and political feminist discussion be put into practice? In analysing the shift in poor relief, I have taken up three essential aspects: (1) power relations must be examined in a context that cannot be reduced simply to the opposition between ruler and subject or men and women; (2) when does gender become a principle of social order?; (...) and (3) gender as a construct and women’s way of action need to be linked. I show how a method that combines the different statements made by the texts as conflicts and discourse is useful, in that it facilitates working out the diversity of poor relief politics and historicizing the term ‘poor women’. At the same time it can show how social change in everyday life was structured and established. (shrink)

The cyborg that Donna Haraway appropriated in ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ as a metaphor for political action and theoretical inquiry has ceased to have the potency it did 20 years ago. While Haraway has turned from a central focus on technoculture to companion species, much important cultural work remains to be done, especially in networked and programmable media. Problems with the cyborg as a metaphor include the implication that the liberal humanist subject, however problematized by its hybridization with cybernetic mechanism, continues (...) as a singular entity operating with localized agency. In a word, the cyborg is not networked enough to encompass the emergent possibilities associated with the Internet and the world-wide web and other phenomena of the contemporary digital era. Instead I propose the idea of the cognisphere. As operational concept and suggestive metaphor, the cognisphere recognizes that networked and programmable media are not only more pervasive than ever before in human history but also more cognitively powerful. It is closely associated with what many researchers regard as a major insight: the idea that the physical world is fundamentally computational. While these scientists regard computation as a physical process, the cultural critic is apt to see it as an over-determined metaphor. The binary choice between seeing the computational universe as a literal description of the physical world and reading it as an over-determined metaphor misses a crucial aspect of contemporary cultural dynamics: the interaction between means and metaphor, technology and cultural presupposition. Taking this dynamic into account leads to a more complete understanding summed up in the aphorism, ‘What we make and what we are co-evolve together.’. (shrink)

Although there has long been a division in studies of consciousness between a focus on neuronal processes or conversely an emphasis on the ruminations of a conscious self, the long-standing split between mechanism and meaning within the brain was mirrored by a split without, between information as a technical term and the meanings that messages are commonly thought to convey. How to heal this breach has posed formidable problems to researchers. Working through the history of cybernetics, one of the historical (...) sites where Claude Shannon’s information theory quickly became received doctrine, we argue that the cybernetic program as it developed through second-order cybernetics and autopoietic theory remains incomplete. In this article, we return to fundamental questions about pattern and noise, context and meaning, to forge connections between consciousness, narrative and media. The thrust of our project is to reintroduce context and narrative as crucial factors in the processes of meaning-making. The project proceeds along two fronts: advancing a theoretical framework within which context plays its properly central role; and demonstrating the importance of context by analyzing two fictions, Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Joseph McElroy’s Plus, in which context has been deformed by being wrenched away from normal human environments, with radical consequences for processes of meaning-making. (shrink)

PurposeThis paper aims to argue that traditional ethical theories used in disaster response may be inadequate and particularly strained by the emergence of new technologies and social media, particularly with regard to privacy. The paper suggests incorporation of care ethics into the disaster ethics nexus to better include the perspectives of disaster affected communities.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a theoretical examination of privacy and care ethics in the context of social media/digitally enhanced disaster response.FindingsThe paper proposes an ethics of care can fruitfully (...) by used by public and private agents in disaster management. Its relational ontology restores the priority of fostering good relationships between stakeholders, thus giving central importance to values such as transparency and trust and the situated knowledge of disaster-affected communities.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper presents theoretical research and is limited by the availability of empirical data. There is opportunity for future research to evaluate the impact of a conscious adoption of an ethics of care by disaster management agents.Practical implicationsAn ethos of care ethics needs to be mainstreamed into disaster management organisations and digital initiatives.Social implicationsThis paper argues that power asymmetry in disaster response renders the public vulnerable to abuse, and that the adoption of care ethics can support disaster management agents in recognising this power imbalance and wielding power responsibly.Originality/valueThis paper examines the applicability of an alternative ethical framework to novel circumstances. (shrink)

There are a number of research fields that exhibit a special connection to some particular activist movement. Typically in these cases, we observe a remarkable degree of personnel overlap between the movements and the scientific communities. I have two primary aims. First, I shall explore the reasons why there are such close entanglements between some research fields and some activist movements. I argue that both scientists and activists have specific epistemic interests that help explain why both practices tend to intersect (...) functionally. Second, I shall evaluate these entanglements from an epistemological point of view. Drawing on a conception of science that has science consisting of two essential tasks—asking significant questions and adequately answering them—, I argue that activists’ contribution to science is ambivalent with regard to the first task because they can help to overcome the unjust distribution of resources, but they can also be the source of new inequalities. Regarding the second task, I similarly suggest that activists can serve a useful purpose in science, since they tend to exhibit certain epistemically valuable properties and can help compensate for what I call collective biases, although in certain situations they tend to reinforce collective biases. (shrink)

: Contemporary global health crises that involve mothers necessarily invoke the varied cultural problematics of maternal embodiment. Examining breastfeeding in light of current concerns about maternal contagion and contamination, with special attention to HIV and environmental toxins, allows us to consider how ambivalence toward maternal embodiment affects the ways we address these health crises within which mothers figure so significantly.

In this article I propose that a postphenomenological approach to science and technology can open new analytical understandings of how material artifacts, embodiment and social agency co-produce learned perceptions of objects. In particle physics, physicists work in huge groups of scientists from many cultural backgrounds. Communication to some extent depends on material hermeneutics of flowcharts, models and other visual presentations. As it appears in an examination of physicists’ scrutiny of visual renderings of different parts of a detector, perceptions vary in (...) relation to social and bodily experiences. Vision in physics has seemingly allowed an objective perception at a convenient distance of the body. This article challenges this view and proposes that the variations can be analysed as cultural at two echelons with the help of a postphenomenological approach combined with cultural psychological theory of artifacts. A third echelon presumably constitutes the phenomenological limit to culture in science. Even this last resort of subjectivity can be embraced by a postphenomenological approach. The process of culturalization in physics can be defined as a process of situating knowledge in a body whose continuous learning of micro-and macro perceptions makes scientific renderings unstable. Taken together postphenomenology, following the distinctions between body one and body two, and combined with cultural psychological learning theory, enables new insight into what constitutes culture in science. (shrink)

Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud provided powerful accounts of systematic interested ignorance. Fifty years ago, Anglo-American philosophies of science stigmatized Marx's and Freud's analyses as models of irrationality. They remain disvalued today, at a time when virtually all other humanities and social science disciplines have returned to extract valuable insights from them. Here the argument is that there are reasons distinctive to philosophy why such theories were especially disvalued then and why they remain so today. However, there are even better (...) reasons today for philosophy to break from this history and find more fruitful ways to engage with systematic interested ignorance. (shrink)

Since the early 1990s, high-resolution satellite imagery and imagery data, made by a vast system of architectures that were formally developed and monopolized by the U.S. military—industrial command economy, have become more widely available to the civilian public through a combination of declassified data sets, commercial satellite operators and imagery vendors, and value-added resellers of imagery data. In the various discourses surrounding imagery and the systems that collect, interpret, and construct them, this wider availability is associated with an increasing ‘‘global (...) transparency.’’ This article suggests that, specific to fields like nuclear non-proliferation, these techno-discursive discourses have a common narrative theme associated with mechanically augmented visual systems, that of the transparent window on the world. First, the author considers an epistemological problem of satellite imagery that has been contemplated for both the map and the photographic image, which is, does the image/map constitute a window or a text? Next, through a historical comparison between map making, photography, and satellite imagery interpretation, the author briefly explores different articulations of transparency, with a contemporary focus on the use of satellite imagery in the discourses surrounding nuclear non-proliferation. Finally, the author suggests that the discourses of satellite imagery, which include practices and what these practices are imagined to produce, are a crucial site where sociotechnical articulations of a modernist, positivist, or realist narrative are played out. These narratives account for the relation between subjective experience and the external ‘‘real’’ world and are associated with various and often contradictory concepts of transparency. (shrink)

This paper considers an area of research in clinical psychology that focuses on the resilience of members of marginalized groups who have experienced traumas directly related to their social identities. The paper describes these as social group-based traumas and outlines three effects of social group-based traumas that can make the experiences of them, as well as experiences of recovery following them, distinct from those involved in other kinds of traumas. In cases where resilience frameworks are useful for understanding such recoveries, (...) the paper proposes three methodological strategies for designing research to address the characteristics of social group-based trauma. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Standpoint Logic: Origins A Philosophy of Method Notes.

The conventional proper scientific self has an ethical obligation to strive to see everywhere in the universe from no particular location in that universe: he is to produce the view from nowhere. What different conceptions of the proper scientific self are created by the distinctive assumptions and research practices of social justice movements, such as feminism, anti-racism, and post-colonialism? Three such new ideals are: the multiple and conflicted knowing self; the researcher strategically located inside her research world; and the community (...) that knows. (shrink)

Building on the advances made by feminist reconsiderations of methods, methodology and epistemology, this paper calls for an alliance between feminist social science and the emerging field of queer theory. By challenging traditional scientific approaches to research on sexual minority groups, a distinctly 'queer' approach is advocated that adopts a reflexive position on subjectivity and sexuality. While essentialist approaches privilege gay/lesbian, man/woman, and object/subject, this approach advances a framework of critical sexualities that moves social science into an arena of inclusivity (...) and multiple identities, rather than reductionistic categorical thought. The implications are clear: a rethinking of identity categories that transcend stagnant dualisms. (shrink)

Building on the advances made by feminist reconsiderations of methods, methodology and epistemology, this paper calls for an alliance between feminist social science and the emerging field of queer theory. By challenging traditional scientific approaches to research on sexual minority groups, a distinctly ‘queer’ approach is advocated that adopts a reflexive position on subjectivity and sexuality. While essentialist approaches privilege gay/lesbian, man/woman, and object/subject, this approach advances a framework of critical sexualities that moves social science into an arena of inclusivity (...) and multiple identities, rather than reductionistic categorical thought. The implications are clear: a rethinking of identity categories that transcend stagnant dualisms. (shrink)

Building on the advances made by feminist reconsiderations of methods, methodology and epistemology, this paper calls for an alliance between feminist social science and the emerging field of queer theory. By challenging traditional scientific approaches to research on sexual minority groups, a distinctly ‘queer’ approach is advocated that adopts a reflexive position on subjectivity and sexuality. While essentialist approaches privilege gay/lesbian, man/woman, and object/subject, this approach advances a framework of critical sexualities that moves social science into an arena of inclusivity (...) and multiple identities, rather than reductionistic categorical thought. The implications are clear: a rethinking of identity categories that transcend stagnant dualisms. (shrink)

In the emergent field of creative practice higher degrees by research, first generation supervisors have developed new models of supervision for an unprecedented form of research, which combines creative practice and a written thesis. In a national research project, entitled ‘Effective supervision of creative practice higher research degrees’, we set out to capture and share early supervisors’ insights, strategies and approaches to supporting their creative practice PhD students. From the insights we gained during the early interview process, we expanded our (...) research methods in line with a distributed leadership model and developed a dialogic framework. This led us to unanticipated conclusions and unexpected recommendations. In this study, we primarily draw on philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogics to explain how giving precedence to the voices of supervisors not only facilitated the articulation of dispersed tacit knowledge, but also led to other discoveries. These include the nature of supervisors’ resistance to prescribed models, policies and central academic development programmes; the importance of polyvocality and responsive dialogue in enabling continued innovation in the field; the benefits to supervisors of reflecting, discussing and sharing practices with colleagues; and the value of distributed leadership and dialogue to academic development and supervision capacity building in research education. (shrink)

This paper is a response to scholars who have called for exploring and interrogating new strategies of data collection and new approaches to more traditional methods, such as interviewing in the context of the internet. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory, ‘reflexive email interviewing’ is proposed as a method for feminist research. The method is illustrated using a recent case study of email interviews with self-identified women who are members of World Pulse, an online community that aims to unite and amplify (...) women's voices worldwide. Through this case study, issues of power and resistance in the researcher/researched relationship and of participant reflexivity are interrogated. Lastly, criteria for reflexive email interviewing are proposed, including 1) strategies to interrogate and disrupt power hierarchies within the research process, 2) researcher reflexivity as a continuous part of the research process, and 3) continued invitations for participants to directly reflect on and respond to the research process. Reflexive questions are offered for researchers to use during research design and in each phase of their research process to ensure reflexivity is achieved. (shrink)

Smartphones are increasingly entangled with the most intimate areas of everyday life, providing possibilities for the continued expansion of digital self-tracking technologies. Within this context, the development of smartphone applications targeted at female reproductive health are offering novel forms and practices of knowledge production about reproductive bodies and processes. This article presents empirical research from the United Kingdom on women’s use of fertility tracking applications, known more generally as fertility apps, while trying to conceive. Drawing on material from interviews with (...) women who had experience of using fertility apps, I demonstrate the significance of this particular form of fertility tracking for the embodied shift from pregnancy prevention to actively facilitating pregnancy, participants’ sense of self and identity and how they perceived the reproductive potentiality of their bodies. I argue that fertility apps are significantly involved in making fertility cycles known and thus configuring the pre-pregnant reproductive body. (shrink)

(1992). The rituals of science: Comments on Abir‐Am (with response) Social Epistemology: Vol. 6, The Historical Ethnography of Scientific Rituals, pp. 373-387.

This article explores Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an “object of care” for use in examining the relationship between creativity and responsibility in the sciences and beyond. Through three short sketches from different disciplinary lenses—literature, science and technology studies, and feminist studies—readers get a sense of the different ways scholars might consider Shelley’s text as an object of care. Through an analysis and synthesis of these three sketches, the authors illustrate the value of such an object in thinking about broad cultural (...) issues. The article acts as a kind of boundary object by creating distinct, yet overlapping narratives from an object that is owned by many social worlds. The three sketches reveal Frankenstein as a thoughtful consideration about what it means to care for, or fail to care for, one’s creation, rather than as a cautionary tale about the evils of scientific hubris. Although infrastructures at universities often prevent interdisciplinary dialogue, the article concludes that purposeful boundary objects created around objects of care like Frankenstein can help build bridges and create shared meanings for new interdisciplinary spaces. (shrink)

Numerous articles and books focus on questions about teaching controversial issues in the classroom, and these controversial issues are on the educational agenda in many countries. The modest goal of this essay is to lay the necessary groundwork for a discussion and study of the goals for teaching controversial issues in schools, in order to examine the practicability of achieving them in the educational reality, and to study possible ways for raising such subjects in the classroom. It refines and adds (...) to the concept of “controversial issues” from a particular, timely, perspective. The rise of “fake news” and “illiberal democracy,“ including empowered illiberal subgroups in liberal democratic polities demands a reconsideration and new delineation of some of the major tenets proposed by previous scholarship. The delineation that is proposed here moves through three stages. The first stage separates and distinguishes between the controversial issues and the assertions that according to the criteria that logical positivists have coined are meaningful. The second stage proposes the main criterion for defining a topic as controversial, and this is the epistemic-rational criterion, as defined in this essay. The third delineation stage proposes seeing a subject as being controversial if it is currently relevant for social and political life. Moreover, the essay asserts that the result of the examination of these three stages is dependent upon the context – time and place – in which the educational act occurs. (shrink)

The article examines two Ghanaian-born intellectuals – economist George Ayittey and anthropologist and sociologist Kwesi Kwaa Prah – and their positions on both local and global inequalities by studying their writings from the mid-1980s–1990s. It answers the questions of how and through which debates both intellectuals addressed and engaged with notions of global inequality. Methodologically anchored in global intellectual history, this article offers a historical, qualitative, and actor-oriented study. As emphasised by Jonathon Earle, the question of how African intellectuals have (...) shaped the intellectual history of the modern world represents an understudied field within global intellectual history.11 Earle, “African Intellectual History,” paragraph 45. In an attempt to address this void, I show how Ayittey and Prah invoked global inequalities through different notions of neo-colonialism as well as criticisms of African elites, such as their indigenous rootlessness. The article argues that their conceptions of global inequalities were hinged on broader debates revolving around issues of African (under)development while their proposed solutions were founded on notions of African indigeneity, drawing on earlier African thought. I show how they actively reused ideas of indigenous development as formulated by Gold Coast intellectual Joseph E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) in the beginning of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Over recent decades, influential agri-food tech actors, institutions, policymakers and others have fostered dominant techno-optimistic, future visions of food and agriculture that are having profound material impacts in present agri-food worlds. Analyzing such realities has become paramount for scholars working across the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical agri-food studies, many of whom contribute to STSFAN—the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network. This article introduces a Special Issue featuring the scholarship of STSFAN members, which cover (...) a range of case studies and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary engagements involving such contested agri-food futures. Their contributions are unique in that they emerged from the network’s specific modus operandi: a workshopping practice that supports the constructive, interdisciplinary dialogue necessary for critical research and rigorous analyses of science and technology in agri-food settings. This introduction offers an overview of STS and critical agri-food studies scholarship, including their historical entanglements in respective studies of food scandals, scientific regimes and technological determinism. We illustrate how interdisciplinary engagement across these fields has contributed to the emergent field of what we term agri-food technoscience scholarship, which the contributions of this Special Issue speak to. After a brief discussion of STS concepts, theories and methods shaping agri-food policy, technology design and manufacturing, we present the eleven Special Issue contributions in three thematic clusters: influential actors and their agri-food imaginaries; obfuscated (material) realities in agri-food technologies; and conflictual and constructive engagements in academia and agri-food. The introduction ends with a short reflection on future research trajectories in agri-food technoscience scholarship. (shrink)

With the demand for “counter-knowledge” in the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, “counter-experts” became an integral part of politics. In the field of environmental activism, counter-experts were particularly well represented in regions and agglomerations with high levels of industrial pollution. This essay argues that awareness correlated with a mode of knowledge production that was typical for the environmental sciences in the twentieth century. The history of the environmental sciences throughout that period was shaped by regional epistemologies, often emerging (...) in the context of large-scale infrastructural projects. Many counter-experts therefore had strong ties with the field of the environmental sciences. The article traces three influential counter-experts in the Frankfurt Main region by 1980: the pastor Kurt Oeser; scientific green activist Jutta Ditfurth; and the project of a “social natural science” related to the Darmstadt philosopher Gernot Böhme. (shrink)

ABSTRACT “Complexity” is ubiquitous in contemporary political commentary, where it is invoked to justify innovative governance programs. However, the term lacks analytic clarity. One way to make sense of it is to construct a genealogy of the notion of “wicked problems,” a concept that highlights the intractability of complex problems and problematizes the technocratic management of complexity. The term wicked problems originated in science planning in postwar Germany and urban planning in the United States. In both cases, planners rejected a (...) naïve optimism about the potential of technical expertise in favor of recognizing that many problems transcend the knowledge possessed by experts. This appreciation of complexity led to attempts, still ongoing, to accommodate both participatory and expert-based decision making in the face of wicked problems, producing a form of technical democracy in which problem solving requires the orchestration of conflict. (shrink)

Despite formal decolonization, a global coloniality continues to exist : multiple and interrelated forms of domination based on gender, race, sexual practices, language, spirituality, etc. The decolonization of the world requires a new politics, beyond the assertions of identity in cultural studies and labor relations in Marxism. This new politics must give full scope to situated knowhow, and open up a geopolitics of knowledge. It is less a matter of taking power than of inventing collective institutions, both local and global.

What are ‘gay genes’ and are they real? This article looks at key research into these hypothesized gay genes, made possible, in part, by the Human Genome Project. I argue that the complexity of both genetics and human sexuality demands a truly critical approach: one that takes into account feminist epistemologies of science and queer approaches to the body, while putting into conversation resources from agential realism and critical realism. This approach is able to maintain the agential complexity of genetic (...) materiality, while also critically challenging the seemingly stable relationships between sex, gender and sexuality. (shrink)

Haraway foregrounds many stories that we, in a late capitalist era, tell ourselves in order to justify, or not even notice, actions that are harmful to all living things. While I am mindful of Haraway’s excellent attention to the ways that ‘stories tell stories, thoughts think thoughts, and knots knot knots,’ I argue that we must take great care when we, as educators, blur the lines between facts and fiction; reality and art. When everything becomes a story—with some stories simply (...) being more compelling than other stories—we run the risk of contributing to the very sense of unmooring that has led us to the status quo where arctic icecaps are melting, living things are becoming extinct, and humans are suffering from man-made pollution. In this paper, I trouble the use of stories to draw attention to the ecological harm we have done to our earth. While stories can be powerful, there are risks associated with how we tell stories; and particular risks when we blur the lines between critical storytelling and the idea of something as ‘factual’. Storytelling, and blurring the lines between stories and facts, can have negative implications for our quest to generate a sense of ‘response-ability’ for our planet and all who live on it. In order to make that argument, I first talk about my own story and the ways that I have used stories in the classroom. I then touch on Haraway and her particular use of stories. I then foreground the practice of telling truths with stories by exploring the use of critical fiction and narrative inquiry. I conclude with implications for pedagogy. (shrink)