What TMT Cannot See: Scientific Objectivity and Knowledge Prioritization

Giant telescope hits a raw nerve for Hawaiians

In reply to the news story “Protests halt telescope construction“ (May p11; http://ow.ly/LRkaZ), which described efforts to prevent the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) from being built on the summit of Mauna Kea, a site that many native Hawaiians regard as sacred.

This chapter looks at the political economy of mental health in the context of the transition of the Indian state from 'welfare medicine' to 'developmental medicine' to 'neo-liberal medicine' and the transition of the 'discourse on unreason' from unreason being seen as primarily a 'moral problem' to primarily a 'political problem' (where unreason is threat to both self and society) to primarily an 'economic problem' (where unreason leads to loss of productivity and efficiency). The chapter also sees how the political economy of mental health remains torn between 'incitement to discourse' around questions of mental health within the expanding 'circuits of global capital' and acute lack of resources, stigmatization, and ghettoization of unreason outside the circuits. The chapter works at the overdetermination of the axes of the ‘patient’ (which includes experience and suffering), the ‘professional’ (which includes listening, diagnosis, cure, care, and medical education), the ‘service provider’ (which includes public institutions with tertiary, secondary, and primary care delivery systems as also private clinics), and 'industry’ (which includes, on the one hand, circuits of global capital and global markets and, on the other, circuits of local capital and local markets).

The selection of the sacred summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi as the site for a Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) inaugurated a surge in activism against desecration of the mountain, particularly following a TMT groundbreaking ceremony in October 2014. Drawing on fieldwork I conducted immediately preceding and following the groundbreaking, I argue that the protectors in these initial years of protection were theorizing an Indigenous future that can be seen unfolding in the immediate present. The accumulated tensions between the state’s parameters for recognition and the existence of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) people and practice results in a dangerous dichotomy between Hawaiian knowledges and Western science that delegitimizes the former, so that Kānaka Maoli protecting Mauna Kea from the Thirty Meter Telescope are framed as antiscience, rather than anti-occupation. In response to the state’s disavowal of settler colonialism through the denial of Kanaka knowledges, Kanaka protection of Mauna Kea asserts itself as an anti-occupation reclamation of not just sovereign territory, but also of Kanaka ontologies. This combination demonstrates the mutually constituted nature of science, the sacred, and sovereignty under a Kanaka worldview. Kānaka Maoli position the struggle as a part of an ongoing sovereignty movement to assert continuities between their historical, contemporary, and emergent claims to land and knowledge.

A culturally informed understanding of what constitutes the sacred is the impetus for Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) struggles to protect that which they consider deserving of profound respect, such as ancestral remains, places, geographical features, animals, plants, and traditions. The controversy over the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) near the summit of Mauna Kea, also known as Mauna a Wakea, has garnered global attention and brought misconceptions about and biases towards Ho‘omana Hawai‘i (set of beliefs and belief-related practices indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands) to the fore because at the core of Kanaka Maoli efforts to protect the mountain is the belief that it is sacred. In public forums such as newspapers and social media, people have denied that Mauna a Wakea is sacred and questioned the authenticity of ceremonies on the basis that the Hawaiian religion is defunct. In actuality, there is abundant evidence for arguing the contrary.

Opponents say Thirty Meter Telescope violates sovereignty and sacred ground.

Construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), which has been delayed for months following protests by native Hawaiians, was set to resume, as Physics World went to press.

Abstract: Between the period of July 2019 and March 2020, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) kia‘i (protectors or guardians) blocked the access road up to Mauna a Wākea, Hawai‘i’s tallest peak, to protest and prevent the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). This proposed development, spearheaded by a conglomerate of international scientific organizations, has become the catalyst for the latest movement for reestablishing Hawaiian sovereignty after a long history of appropriation, desecration, and broken promises. For Kānaka Maoli the construction poses a threat to their sacred land, burial sites, and the delicate ecology of the mountain. During these protests, kia‘i demonstrated and reconfirmed their relationship to Mauna a Wākea through the mediums of music and dance in the newly created Mauna Protocol Ceremony performed at the protest site on Hawai‘i Island, public performance venues, and online. Performing for the mountain at accessible locations allowed more people to view and interact with Mauna a Wākea without having to be on location. It is through the Hawaiian concepts of ‘ike (know by doing), kū (stand firm), and hulihia (overturn) that I illustrate how kia‘i effectively transform secular spaces into sacred ones through the act of performance.

Big Science projects, which are extremely costly and typically revolve around large and complex instruments, are increasingly common in research. Proponents often frame Big Science as a “win-win” for all stakeholders, including for local communities. Yet local opposition to Big Science projects is common, although it is often either short-lived or fails to raise wider awareness. The story is different for the kiaʻi mauna (protectors of the mountain), a group largely composed of Native Hawaiians. This group has sustained opposition to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaiʻi Island, since 2011 and has raised widespread attention for its advocacy. Combining social movement theory and the concept of place attachment, I investigate why the kiaʻi have been able to sustain such momentum. Based on 16 interviews that I conducted with Native Hawaiians, local community members, policymakers, and astronomers, I argue that six factors have been decisive for the resilience of opposition: multi-generational leaderful organization, grassroots resources, versatile tactics, anti-science counterframing, local and national political opportunity, as well as place attachment-driven commitment.

Within the medical and physical sciences journals evidence suggests that problems of authorship ethics and journal management bedevil the editors of these journals. Although anecdotal evidence suggests that similar problems persist in political science, the extent of these problems within political science is not well established. Here we report the results of a survey of political science journal editors' perceptions of ethical and managerial issues associated with their journals. We find that unlike ethical publication concerns in the clinical and natural sciences fields, these issues are not of significant concern among our sample. Ethical problems are of low concern and editors report high levels of confidence to address these problems. Managerial problems, such as the adequacy of reviewer pools, are of higher concern to our sample.

I would like to stress Vadim Mikhailovich's [Mezhuev's] position and clarify our conversation about culturology. It is constantly repeated that culturology is a science. It is my profound conviction that culturology is not a science. Culturology is a distinctive phenomenon of Russian culture and represents a certain intellectual movement. If one briefly surveys the history of its emergence, its philosophical origin becomes obvious. This intellectual movement consists of three levels, if one takes into account the -logy ending. First, the philosophical level, from which in the 1970s culture began to be conceived as a special field of knowledge in our country. Then, humanistic knowledge: a great many representatives of the humanities in Russia-historians, art specialists, art critics, essayists-studied culture. Finally, there is the socioscientific tendency, which is just beginning to form in Russia and carries the internationally accepted name of social and cultural anthropology. All of us are synergisti...

At Home on the Mauna: Ecological Violence and Fantasies of Terra Nullius on Maunakea’s Summit Hi’ilei Julia Hobart (bio) it was the middle of summer in Hawai‘i, and snow was falling on the summit of Maunakea.1 Screen grabs taken from webcams bolted to the exteriors of the powerful telescopes that stand sentinel up there showed the unseasonal blanket of white that drifted down from the sky on July 17, 2015.2 One view, taken from the vantage of the Canada-France- Hawai‘i telescope, appeared on the Instagram feed managed by @protectmaunakea with a hashtag that read #PoliahuProtectingMaunakea (Figure 1).3 The commenters agreed that the timing seemed purposeful, with one writing, “The Mauna is protecting itself—at least for a while.” These reactions to the snowfall celebrated the fact that freezing conditions had temporarily halted activity and access to the construction site for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), which protesters had been occupying for nearly four months.4 Attributing the snow to Poli‘ahu, an important akua (god) of the cold who is known to reside at the top of Maunakea, many Kānaka Maoli recognized the event to be an exercise of her desire to protect the sacred mountain from desecration. The snow and reactions to it importantly signal Kanaka Maoli perspectives on the agential forces of the elements as not just atmosphere, precipitation, and temperature but as intention, ancestor, and spirit. In the context of the TMT controversy and Native Hawaiian resurgence more generally, animacy has emerged as a potent point of resistance that contends with Western colonialism’s effects on land and knowledge formations. In contrast, much of Maunakea’s development, from earliest Western contact to the present day, has been predicated on an idea of its emptiness. This article analyzes how elemental agency takes on particular importance on the summit because it is there that animacy most challenges how modern- day formations of terra nullius have been employed toward capitalist ends in the name of science. Such an argument is not limited, however, to Hawai‘i: the superimposition of Western spatial imaginaries—particularly emptiness—upon Indigenous geographies has been used to justify a number of development projects, from uranium mines and the Nevada nuclear test sites, to the construction of oil pipelines across unceded Native territories. [End Page 30] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Snowfall on the summit of Maunakea, July 17, 2015. Screen capture of Instagram post. Speaking, then, to the fields of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, critical science studies, and geography, this article focuses on historical and contemporary narratives of human and nonhuman activity on Maunakea in order to contextualize the logics of scientific and capitalist development on the summit beyond present-day protectorship. Specifically, I pay attention to how its landscape has suffered a process of deanimation across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when discourses of absence have systematically produced the Mauna as a place without humans, spirituality, nation, or even atmosphere. I locate this process in three phases: first, in the nineteenth century, when the earliest Western visitors summited the mountain and communicated written accounts of its desolation to Western audiences; second, in the mid-twentieth century, when U.S. military infrastructures increased access to the mountain and consequently facilitated a boom in both leisure and scientific activity, particularly in the form of winter sports framed as tourist novelty and NASA space walk simulations; finally, in the present moment, when the astronomy community and other political and economic beneficiaries have cast Maunakea as a crucial point of access to the galaxy, using the summit as both a place for celestial observation and an ongoing earthly simulation for Mars and the moon. Each of these moments is a plot point on a timeline of cumulative efforts to frame [End Page 31] Maunakea as empty and thus available for occupation by enacting Indigenous erasure through the recasting of place itself. Background While snowfall is relatively unusual on Maunakea’s summit in the summer months, the impressive altitude of the dormant volcano produces its characteristically cold and dry conditions year-round. At 32,000 feet from ocean floor to summit, Maunakea is the tallest mountain...

In this piece, I argue that the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the Big Island of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea constitutes both an ethical and epistemic – that is, knowledge-based – harm to Native Hawaiian (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) communities. It is epistemically problematic, for its mandated construction is a public and material declaration of the primacy and privileged epistemic status afforded to Western scientific inquiry and analysis (including astronomy) over Traditional (Hawaiian) Ways of Knowing. It is a matter of ethics and social justice, for its construction further perpetuates an ongoing set of eco-cultural harms to the Kanaka ‘Ōiwi people.

Life sciences data sources contain data about scientific objects such as genes and sequences that are richly interconnected, i.e., a gene object may have links to sequences, proteins, SNPs, citations, etc. Scientific knowledge is enhanced by exploration of relationships between scientific objects, requiring traversal of both links and paths (informally concatenations of links). There are significant limitations and challenges of such exploration, because the links are inherently poor with respect to syntactic representation and semantic knowledge. The links are syntactically poor because the source

We investigate how nondemocratic regimes use the military and how this can lead to the emergence of military dictatorships. Nondemocratic regimes need the use of force in order to remain in power, but this creates a political moral hazard problem' a strong military may not simply work as an agent of the elite but may turn against them in order to create a regime more in line with their own objectives. The political moral hazard problem increases the cost of using repression in nondemocratic regimes and in particular, necessitates high wages and policy concessions to the military. When these concessions are not sufficient, the military can take action against a nondemocratic regime in order to create its own dictatorship. A more important consequence of the presence of a strong military is that once transition to democracy takes place, the military poses a coup threat against the nascent democratic regime until it is reformed. The anticipation that the military will be reformed in the future acts as an additional motivation for the military to undertake coups against democratic governments. We show that greater inequality makes the use of the military in nondemocratic regimes more likely and also makes it more difficult for democracies to prevent military coups. In addition, greater inequality also makes it more likely that nondemocratic regimes are unable to solve the political moral hazard problem and thus creates another channel for the emergence of military dictatorships. We also show that greater natural resource rents make military coups against democracies more likely, but have ambiguous effects on the political equilibrium in nondemocracies (because with abundant natural resources, repression becomes more valuable to the elite, but also more expensive to maintain because of the more severe political moral hazard problem that natural resources induce). Finally, we discuss how the national defense role of the military interacts with its involvement in domestic politics.