Epistemic Cultures Research Articles

Understanding Foresight‐Policy Interactions: The Role of Institutionalization

ABSTRACTPublic administration in governments strives to develop forward‐looking capacities. Foresight has come to the fore as a set of practices that is mobilized to counter political myopia. Despite this increasing interest in governmental foresight, research suggests that diverging institutional practices, organizational structures, and epistemic cultures between foresight practices and policy‐making result in loose coupling. This article aims to contribute to understanding these complicated foresight‐policy interactions. To this end, we draw on findings from public administration scholarship. The concept of institutionalization is employed to analyze how foresight aligns with working practices and routines in government. Based on an in‐depth case study on the institutionalization of foresight practices within the German Federal Government, we demonstrate that scrutinizing the multiple dimensions of institutionalization helps not only to understand where and why loose ends occur but also provides new insights into some of the causes of the lacking impact. The article does not aim to provide an easy fix. Instead, we want to sensitize foresight practitioners, reduce both disappointment and overstating regarding the role of foresight in policy‐making, and provide a nuanced understanding of foresight practices in government.

De- and recoding algorithmic systems: The case of fact checkers and fact checked users

With the recent development of debunking on social media as a dominant agenda, fact checkers have increasingly used machine learning (ML) to identify, verify and correct factual claims, as ML promises the scaling of fact checking practices. However, it also places a new actor in between the fact checkers and the fact checked users. In this paper, we conducted a contrasted analysis of how fact checkers and fact checked users understand, evaluate and act towards the algorithmic system and the data flows in Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program: We did ethnographic fieldwork in the fact checking newsroom and interviewed and did protocol analysis with the fact checked. For both professional users and end users, the algorithmic system is experienced as a black box in which they have limited insight, and their sense-making practices happen based on the data and metrics that are made visible to them. In the paper, we draw on and expanded theory on decoding algorithms by not only exploring how the two user groups engage in decoding the algorithmic system, but also actively engage in forms of recoding by attempting to adapt or modify the algorithmic system to better fit within their cultural and social context, which is characterised by both varying epistemic cultures and societal positions. While the fact checkers from their hegemonic (sometimes negotiated) position understand the program as a (sometimes stupid) tool and primarily engage in passive acts of recoding, fact checked users, from their oppositional position, understand the program as an unpredictable censoring machine and engage primarily in more active acts of recoding. Based on the analysis, we end the paper with a discussion in which we argued for understanding data reflexivity as highly relational and processual.

Taking ‘nonsense’ seriously: Hoaxes, spoofs, and the epistemic cultures of geography

The ‘Grievance Studies Affair’, a deceptive publishing project launched in 2017, offers a revealing lens through which to see beyond simplifying polarizations and establish more constructive relations among geography's wide range of ‘epistemic cultures’. This article places the Grievance Studies Affair in the context of other hoaxes and spoofs and draws upon speech act theory to pin down how such deceptive publications are supposed to work. The core of the argument concerns the epistemological interpretation of instances where writings purported by their authors to be ‘nonsense’ have nevertheless been seen by other scholars – even when it is clear that a hoax or spoof was intended – as sense-bearing, valuable, or potentially fruitful. These instances shed fresh light on two epistemological issues: the role of authorial intention in academic arguments, and how much we really need to know about other epistemic cultures to form serious judgments about them. Attending to these points can enhance the possibility of respectful and constructive conversations between epistemic cultures in geography.

Performance Cultures as Epistemic Cultures, Volume I: (Re)Generating Knowledges in Performance and: Performance Cultures as Epistemic Cultures, Volume II: Interweaving Epistemologies by Erika Fischer-Lichte et al (review)

Performance Cultures as Epistemic Cultures, Volume I: (Re)Generating Knowledges in Performance and: Performance Cultures as Epistemic Cultures, Volume II: Interweaving Epistemologies by Erika Fischer-Lichte et al (review)

Professional learning and knowledge ‘transfer’ in practice: Immigrant engineers reticulating the epistemic culture of the profession

It is known that skilled immigrants learn to integrate professionally. This paper complexifies this image. By following the experiences of ‘successful’ immigrants working in the engineering profession in Canada, it argues that immigrants engage in not only learning but also knowledge ‘transfer’. Their learning at work often starts as legitimate peripheral participation, and evolves through expansive participation in work activities. Meanwhile, they also ‘transfer’ knowledge and practices, a role that could be amplified given their transnational experiences. Immigrants’ learning and knowledge practices can also be understood as a sociomaterial process of translation, through which they knot together people and objects, while negotating power, position, and positionality at the same time. Through continuous learning and knowledge practices, the paper further highlights that immigrant engineers necessarily articulate themselves into, and to some extent, reticulate the epistemic ‘machineries’ or ‘culture’ of the profession, which is constituted through a nexus of professional associations, societies, institutions, and practice communities that are bounded by professional domains and interests, and lifeworld exigencies. Conceptually, this paper draws on practice-based theories and views continuous learning and knowing as an effect of the sociocultural and sociomaterial organization of professional practices.

Что отличает традиционную индийскую эпистемическую культуру от классической эпистемической культуры Запада?

The paper presented to the reader’s attention pursues two goals. The first is a substantiation of the productivity of the concept “epistemic culture” (hereinafter – EC) as a tool of historico-philosophical intercultural research by the example of its application to the interpretation of the meanings of Indian logico-epistemological texts. The second is a demonstration of differences in understanding the purposes and ideals of cognition in traditional Indian EC, and in the Western classical EC with its scientific orientation. Wholeness of the foundations of traditional theoretical knowledge in India, and the leading role of religion in the process of its elaboration (1) led to a different understanding of the aims (2) and ideals (3) of cognition than those which took shape in Western theoretical knowledge, and which became the basis of the scientific revolution of the XVII century. The absence of the concept of the Divine Reason in Indian culture also prevented the formation in EC of the concepts of absolute (4) and objective (5) truth, human reason (6) and rationality (7) as criteria for the truth results of cognition. Indian philosophers placed the superintelligent comprehension (anubhava, pratibhāsa) (8) of the supreme truth (paramārtha) at the top of the hierarchy of cognitive abilities. The eight listed features of the Indian EC determined significant differences in the orientations of civilizational development in India and in the West: invariable orientation to the life “according to dharma”, getting rid of the suffering of the material world – in the Indian civilization, and to a material prosperous life based on technogenic development – in the West from the modernity.

Cultural-Anthropological Basis of Strong Constructivism in Social Cognition

Purpose. This article is aimed at identifying the cultural-anthropological limits of the applicability of strong constructivism in social cognition. Theoretical basis. The study of epistemic cultures, carried out by the modern German philosopher of science Karin Knorr Cetina, gave reasons to rethink the role of cultural anthropology as a methodological basis of strong constructivism not only for scientific cognition, but also for educational practices, and perhaps also for some other social practices. An important role in identifying less successful versions of strong constructivism was played by the concept of fictionalism of the German philosopher Hans Veihinger, the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturán and Francisco Varela, and the German sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann. Originality. Strong constructivism has broad prospects for use within cultural anthropology as an identification of the cultural foundations of human nature. Local research and educational practices are defined as a model for the formation of those social characteristics of their participants, which they themselves change through self-improvement. Strong constructivists involve the individual empirical experience of researchers, and also correct the inherited rules of scientific research as elements of research procedures and practices, thanks to which they achieve the creation of a common epistemic culture and the elimination of myths about the isolation of scientific cognition from the world. Conclusions. False ways of interpreting strong constructivism as fictionalism and as realism have been revealed. Fictionalism, as a methodology focused on the study of the contents of consciousness, loses the empirical experience of the world. Philosophical realism as positivism in the philosophy of science reduces the significance of scientific discoveries to confirmation of the laws of nature. Karin Knorr Cetina’s proposal to consider constructivism "on its own terms" appears not as a moderate compromise between these extremes, but as the only possible way to adequately reconcile the work of nature and the conscious activity of man. Such coordination takes place primarily in the creation of local epistemic cultures as a collective activity of researchers.

Reconceptualizing Simulations: Epistemic Objects and Epistemic Practices in Professional Education

This study explores how and why simulation training facilitates professional learning by investigating how simulators and simulations are used and conceptualized in two professional domains, nursing and maritime navigation, and offer a reconceptualization. Our aim is to move beyond past theorizing of simulators and simulations that has mainly centered on representational issues like validity, fidelity, and authenticity. Instead, we approach simulators as epistemic objects and simulations as epistemic practices. These concepts offer a lens to examine the situated and sociomaterial practices that make simulators into simulations and simulations into entry points to the epistemic culture of a profession. As a result, we pinpoint three central mechanisms for transforming the simulation experience into an event that facilitates the enrollment of students into their future profession. The first mechanism involves the instructional practice of “filling in” aspects of the work context that might be missing in the simulator. The second mechanism, sometimes labeled the “as-if” mode of simulations, manifests through the participants’ ongoing commitment to treat the simulation as-if it was a real professional encounter. The third relates to how simulation-based learning activities afford a crucial pedagogical orientation towards defining what constitutes exemplary professional practice in specific training situations.

History Uploaded: Digital Archives After Thirty Years of Democracy

ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of digital archival projects and online databases developed by scholars and archival practitioners in South Africa since the early 1990s. It sketches key shifts in theory and practice over this period, including the economic and practical perils of digital conservation as heritage and of increasing civic archival activism. It shows that the outlook, aims, and successes of these projects have changed in tune with shifts in the state’s archival legislation, changing publishing economics, decreasing cost of digitisation and equipment, and widening access to the internet. Recent archival projects, such as the Five Hundred Year Archive and EMANDULO Project, illustrate a pioneering trend in South African digital archival practice and are suggestive of the formation of a distinct digital epistemic culture. The article argues that South African scholars and archival practitioners have often been at the forefront of key turns in debates taking place in digital archival practice globally and in Africa.

The University As Infrastructure of Becoming: Re-Activating Academic Freedom Through Humility in Times of Radical Uncertainty

ABSTRACT Traditionally, the field of science and technology studies (STS) considered the scientific laboratory as the central site of knowledge production and technological development. While providing rich analyses of the social construction of scientific knowledge and the role of non-human actors, STS scholars have often neglected the university – the very context in which laboratories themselves are embedded – as a relevant object of research. In this paper, we argue for re-introducing the university as a relevant category and object of analysis by using the notion of epistemic virtues to link epistemic culture – traditionally the focus of STS – and epistemic structure – traditionally the focus of higher education studies. Advancing this line of argumentation, we make three analytical moves. First, we explore academic freedom as a specific version of negative liberty that extends beyond disciplinary boundaries. We suggest that academics continuously negotiate academic freedom considering culturally and socially situated epistemic virtues such as objectivity and neutrality. Second, we introduce the notion of humility to revisit scientific knowledge production more generally and academic freedom in particular. Finally, we argue that practicing humility leads to enacting the university as an infrastructure of becoming otherwise, thereby enriching our understanding of universities as distinct and highly complex social spaces with a logic of their own.

Observer 8: Outliers, Attention, and Situated Knowledge in a Qualitative Behavioral Assessment of Laboratory Mouse Welfare

This article explores how an innovative animal welfare methodology (Qualitative Behavior Assessment) negotiates subjectivism and objectivism in its distinctive epistemology, as it strives to produce a certain kind of laboratory mouse—a complex, social subject. Through an ethnographic study of the development of a Qualitative Behavior Assessment (QBA) tool for laboratory mouse welfare, I show how QBA foregrounds the animal’s lived emotional experience by using qualitative language to assess their welfare, while also relying on statistical methods of validation. Drawing on Mol et al.’s understanding of care as something that parses, handles, and balances diverse “goods,” I argue that QBA practitioners’ care for the data must balance competing priorities and values. I take particular interest in what makes a “good” assessor as they transform between subject and object. When two observers are found to be outliers, with their divergent judgments marring the successful statistical validation of the QBA mouse tool, the situated nature of knowledge is brought to the fore. I argue that turning to the embodied practice of attention, as distinct from care, helps us understand why, and raises questions about the epistemic culture of conventional animal welfare science and the extent to which the human observer risks reification within QBA’s formal methodological practice.

Midrange, Differential, Meaningful, and Multidisciplinary: Reflections onJCR’s Epistemic Culture

AbstractScientific communities such as journals or professional societies have their own ways of creating and sharing knowledge called “epistemic cultures.” Drawing on prior reflexive scholarship and conversations with eight preeminent consumer researchers, this article explores some of the central tenets of epistemic culture at the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR): midrange scope, differential insight, meaningful impact, and multidisciplinary field. It also provides some guidance to new consumer researchers on how to accomplish epistemic fluency.

An STS analysis of a digital humanities collaboration: trading zones, boundary objects, and interactional expertise in the DECRYPT project

A widely shared recognition over the past decade is that the methodology and the basic concepts of science and technology studies (STS) can be used to analyze collaborations in the cross-disciplinary field of digital humanities (DH). The concepts of trading zones (Galison, 2010), boundary objects (Star and Griesemer, 1989), and interactional expertise (Collins and Evans, 2007) are particularly fruitful for describing projects in which researchers from massively different epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina, 1999) are trying to develop a common language. The literature, however, primarily concentrates on examples where only two parties, historians and IT experts, work together. More exciting perspectives open up for analysis when more than two, more nuanced and different epistemic cultures seek a common language and common research goals. In the DECRYPT project funded by the Swedish Research Council, computational linguists, historians, computer scientists and AI experts, cryptologists, computer vision specialists, historical linguists, archivists, and philologists collaborate with strikingly different methodologies, publication patterns, and approaches. They develop and use common resources (including a database and a large collection of European historical texts) and tools (among others a code-breaking software, a hand-written text recognition tool for transcription), researching partly overlapping topics (handwritten historical ciphers and keys) to reach common goals. In this article, we aim to show how the STS concepts are illuminating when describing the mechanisms of the DECRYPT collaboration and shed some light on the best practices and challenges of a truly cross-disciplinary DH project.

Using Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) to analyze the research and publication culture in immunology

Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) is a method to reveal the historical roots and landmark papers of a research field based on cited references data. RPYS visualizes how frequently cited references occur in the cited reference lists of papers published in the research field. Previous RPYS studies revealed various historical aspects of the research and publication culture in various fields of study (e.g., economy and philosophy of science). Employing RPYS, we examine a dataset of citing publications in immunology. We identify and analyze 20 cited publications occurring very frequently in the cited reference lists of these citing papers. The 20 publications shed light on the epistemic culture and the development of the field of immunology. Whereas 65% of the publications were contributions to the theoretical and empirical understanding of immunology, 35% were contributions to methodology.

Field-building and the epistemic culture of AI safety

The emerging field of “AI safety” has attracted public attention and large infusions of capital to support its implied promise: the ability to deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) while reducing its gravest risks. Ideas from effective altruism, longtermism, and the study of existential risk are foundational to this new field. In this paper, we contend that overlapping communities interested in these ideas have merged into what we refer to as the broader “AI safety epistemic community,” which is sustained through its mutually reinforcing community-building and knowledge production practices. We support this assertion through an analysis of four core sites in this community’s epistemic culture: 1) online community-building through Web forums and career advising; 2) AI forecasting; 3) AI safety research; and 4) prize competitions. The dispersal of this epistemic community’s members throughout the tech industry, academia, and policy organizations ensures their continued input into global discourse about AI. Understanding the epistemic culture that fuses their moral convictions and knowledge claims is crucial to evaluating these claims, which are gaining influence in critical, rapidly changing debates about the harms of AI and how to mitigate them.

“Maybe you need to do something about it”: challenges in global environmental change research with and within local communities

AbstractResearch on issues such as adapting to rapid environmental change should include indigenous and local people in developing more robust and inclusive diagnoses and responses. Various studies indicate that such projects may face challenges. Researchers touch on these in papers where they reflect on their own work, but to a lesser extent in their empirical papers. Based on interviews with, and articles by, a varied sample of 15 researchers who work with local or indigenous peoples around the globe, I identified the challenges they face and how they deal with them. Thematic analysis of interview transcripts revealed eight themes: (1) external pressure, (2) engaging local people, (3) relevance of projects, (4) prior negative experiences, (5) cultural, historical, and geographical differences, (6) language challenges, (7) payment for participation, and (8) diverging epistemic cultures. Respondents’ statements in all themes contain reflections displaying care, consideration, or responsibility for the projects and the local people they involve. This links the challenges with everyday ethics. Analysis of scientific papers written by the respondents showed that they hardly write about the challenges they face, whereby neither local participants nor other readers of these texts are actively informed by and engaged in critical-reflective discussions about the challenges arising during the research and the strategies used to deal with them. The research community has a responsibility to remedy this shortcoming: in their papers, authors should discuss the main challenges faced and develop, describe, and promulgate strategies for dealing with them.

A dataset without a code book: ethnography and open science.

This paper reflects upon calls for "open data" in ethnography, drawing on our experiences doing research on sexual violence. The core claim of this paper is not that open data is undesirable; it is that there is a lot we must know before we presume its benefits apply to ethnographic research. The epistemic and ontological foundation of open data is grounded in a logic that is not always consistent with that of ethnographic practice. We begin by identifying three logics of open data-epistemic, political-economic, and regulatory-which each address a perceived problem with knowledge production and point to open science as the solution. We then evaluate these logics in the context of the practice of ethnographic research. Claims that open data would improve data quality are, in our assessment, potentially reversed: in our own ethnographic work, open data practices would likely have compromised our data quality. And protecting subject identities would have meant creating accessible data that would not allow for replication. For ethnographic work, open data would be like having the data set without the codebook. Before we adopt open data to improve the quality of science, we need to answer a series of questions about what open data does to data quality. Rather than blindly make a normative commitment to a principle, we need empirical work on the impact of such practices - work which must be done with respect to the different epistemic cultures' modes of inquiry. Ethnographers, as well as the institutions that fund and regulate ethnographic research, should only embrace open data after the subject has been researched and evaluated within our own epistemic community.

On Advantage or Disadvantage of Academic Scholarship for Life

The article with allusions on Nietzsche’s provocation about history lessons proposes an interdisciplinary approach to academic scholarship considered as a special cultural and organizational form of advanced studies aimed at professional development or skill exchange, which have influence on human being in contemporary societies involved in the process of globalization. The theoretical conceptualization of institutionalized forms of scholarships and internships is analyze in connection with its practical representation and economical allocation. Pathological representations of academic scholarship as an end in itself are unveiled as a kind of conspicuous consumptions symbolizing the status position or exclusivity on the borders between academic community and mass-media. The purpose of this article is to explicate some representations of academic scholarship in the contexts of the academic capitalism searching the way of overcoming its utilitarian limitations with universal ethical imperatives. To realize such a purpose, phenomenological reduction is applied in combination with the biographical method. Assumptions made in the article are verified on biographical fragments of curriculum vitae of influential sociologists such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Niklas Luhmann, because the social and professional self-realization and revision of the life-priorities of them was due in many aspects to academic scholarship gained by different ways but with success, especially in the field of educational policy and in the case of establishing democracy in the process of post-totalitarian transformation in Germany. This experience can be useful for Ukraine as well. The phenomenon of the cultural shock and its influence on visiting scholars is explicated. The role of communication between epistemic cultures is emphasized on by overcoming epistemic injustice and establishing academic integrity.

Temporalities and Values in an Epistemic Culture: Citizen Humanities, Local Knowledge, and AI-supported Transcription of Archives

An enormous amount of handwritten documents in archives can only be accessed by experts trained in reading older handwriting. Through artificial intelligence (AI)-supported technology, they can now be transcribed and made available for wider audiences. To produce transcriptions an AI needs training and a feasible way is to invite citizens to fulfil such tasks. To understand how an epistemic culture develops in such work, this study conducted interviews with participants on how they associate value, meaning and recognise themselves as active epistemic subjects in relation to the project. Despite that the formation of an epistemic culture are beyond the influence and control of project owners, findings show a strong relation between participants’ knowledge of local history, and personal and emotional ties to archival content, for achieving high quality in AI-transcriptions.

Unveiling Research Intermediations in Citizen Science

Drawing on the conceptual framework of intermediations in grassroots innovation for sustainability, this paper presents the first in-depth analysis of the role of third sector organizations in citizen science. The empirical data are derived from 31 case studies of associations (representing 80% of third sector organizations in France). We identify two clusters of associations (social innovation and natural sciences) based on research domain. They differ in epistemic cultures, but they both value experiential and actionable knowledge. We present an analytical framework to characterize the role of these associations in citizen science. Derived from systemic intermediations for transitions, this framework is based on the association’s position in networks, infrastructures, and projects. Our results reveal four categories, three of which are intermediations that depend on the organization’s position in the network, the degree of structuration of its partnerships with academics, and the goals and achievements of the projects in which it is involved. Associations do not only articulate different knowledge in projects, they also contribute to organizational learning in networks. In addition, associations perform the boundary work required to build hybrid infrastructures with institutions. A fourth category unveils the complexity of structuring hybrid epistemic communities for sustainability. This four-way categorization of intermediations highlights the crucial roles of associations in a systemic approach to citizen science.