Production Of Scientific Knowledge Research Articles

On Slavery, Medicine, Speculation, and the Archive

In 1777, word spread along the Amazonian coast that the “cruel contagion of smallpox” was circulating in the Portuguese frontier captaincies of Grão-Pará and Maranhão.1 Rumor often announced the arrival of smallpox before authorities.2 The rumors wound their way along the roads and waterways of Belém, the capital of Grão-Pará, to the ears of thirty-three enslaved Africans, all of them property of Chief Physician Bento Viera Gomes. They were terrified of the ongoing outbreak—and of their enslaver. They knew of Gomes’s attempts to prevent the spread of smallpox by inoculating a group of soldiers stationed nearby. The soldiers refused the inoculations, fearing the disease and the procedure.3 To prove the procedure was safe and effective, Gomes conscripted the thirty-three to serve in an inoculation demonstration for the soldiers. As Gomes remarked, the enslaved people “(although equally fearful)…had no choice but to obey.”4 Each of them, between the ages of three and twenty-five, underwent the procedure. All survived. Nevertheless, this brief chapter in the history of inoculation brings questions of survival, quality of life, and archival objectivity to the fore.The slave trade and slavery established power relations that shaped the terms of scientific and medical knowledge production and practice. European imperial and medical archives naturalize these power relations. It is the historian’s task to unsettle and expose them. The intellectual foundations that presuppose inoculation as an inherent good because it saved lives (and it certainly did) do not prioritize Black people’s healing and well-being. To do so requires affective labor that begins with archival critique and proceeds with speculation.We find this inoculation story buried in a flurry of accounts from medical practitioners around the Portuguese-American colonies discussing plans for the implementation of the Jennerian cowpox vaccine.5 As a show of expertise to the Crown, physicians like Gomes highlighted their prior experiences using inoculation and demonstrated their knowledge of the literature, citing works such as Thomas Dimsdale’s recently translated inoculation manual.6 Vague allusions to inoculations performed in the British colonies, the primary competition for Amazonian industries, also pepper the pages. Perhaps Gomes read the Letters and Essays published by the notorious physician John Quier who experimented with smallpox inoculation on young, pregnant, and elderly enslaved Africans in Jamaica.7Too often, the history of inoculation serves as a prelude to triumphalist narratives of the resounding success of the Jennerian vaccine. Yet in the archival record, undercurrents of exploitation are plain: “they had no choice but to obey.” Enslaved people were the ideal candidates for inoculation demonstrations because colonists and slaveowners viewed them as replaceable commodities, chattels, and units of labor.8 They were expendable, yet essential to the imperial project.9 In Grão-Pará, inoculation would enable the imperial project to proceed despite its health consequences. Most enslaved people survived smallpox outbreaks or inoculation only to die of other causes. Even lifesaving technical and medical advancements can work to maintain the social, environmental, and existential order. Rather than sustaining life, smallpox inoculation reproduced and maintained the intertwined systems of imperialism and slavery, with their violence, pernicious inequity, morbidity, and needless death.Perhaps we might imagine beyond the thirty-three enslaved Africans’ fears and their enslavers’ reputed successes, through wonder, speculation, and questions.10 How much care and tenderness persisted amid the violence? Did parents or siblings hold the three-year-old as they prepared to receive an inoculation? Were mothers forced to hand over their children to strangers in the process? Did they smell the infected, who braced themselves to have smallpox pus removed? Did the infected person look at the recipient reassuringly? Did they exchange words, prayers, hopes, or ask questions about the procedure? Perhaps the twenty-five-year-old assisted, hoisting the small children into their lap and calming them before the incision. Which women (because it was usually women) tended the children until they recovered? Who hovered, feeding them vegetables and broth while their fevers broke, administering treatments, and applying balms and oils to their skin, ensuring they did not scratch and infect their pustules, or worse, disrupt the incision? Even without answers, these questions and errant speculations trouble the foundational liberal narratives of inoculation as progress.Speculation offers a way to divest from autopoiesis in slavery’s afterlife.11 What if we pursued and imagined thriving, not just preserving life? We could then confront our current ontologies of health and healing, and include anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist, and abolitionist collectivist politics that far exceed the neoliberal health care offered by a practitioner–patient dyad. If we want healing to account for Black life and thriving, we will have to reckon with history. We must examine the suffering and death European medical intervention rendered permissible and sustainable for their imperial projects—as well as their enduring legacies in medicine, public health, and science.

Towards critical ethnographies of resource risks: Regulatory science on shale industry risks in the global North contexts of Brussels and California

By examining two instances of the production of scientific knowledge on the risks of shale rock exploration and extraction in the global North’s context of democratic governance and a great concern for transparency, this paper argues for a combination of ethnographic and critical geographic approaches to studying expert knowledge production on risk as different ontological realities with different political consequences. Analytically, the study distinguishes between risks related to the natural environment and human health. While the former were presented as data by the experts, the latter gained a status of local stories. Risks as data and stories co-produced different spaces of extraction risks as abstract and absolute. With this focus, I extend the call recently made in resource anthropology, i.e. by Richardson and Weszkalnys, to ethnographically study how resources become various things for various actors beyond their commodity form and address the questions about the political realities that become co-produced and the possibility to extract and govern them.

Tracing Absence

Zār is the complex of healing rituals connected to belief in spirit winds that afflict the body with physical and psychic pain. Linked, by anthropologists, to the movement of enslaved Africans from East Africa to Southwest Asia, zār is sometimes considered a trace of Indian Ocean slavery—a history for which archival evidence is scattered, imprecise, at times hardly available. Zār thus calls into being an alternative archive, one predicated on kinesis, self-disintegration, and the active use of the senses. (Rapture through scent is integral to the zār ceremony and is why those associated with the ritual are sometimes called ibn or bint bukhūr, “born into incense”).1The archive, as a repository of information, documentation, and evidence, is the dominant mode through which scholars produce knowledge about the past. What does it mean to consider a practice like zār a historical trace? What does it mean to approach healing rituals through the lens of the archive? In my writings on fascination with zār in Iranian cinema, I have been interested in how the phenomenon of zār defies anthropological, historical, and even political desire: the desire to record it, contextualize it, to capture its referent, to formulate its proper meaning. For inasmuch as zār registers a history of enslavement that has been blotted out of traditional, nation-based historiography, zār’s resistances to recording and inscription seem just as significant as its empirical, anthropological “content.” Zār’s resistances reflect the intransigent facticity—the ambivalent structure of our facts—regarding African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and point us toward models of historical memory that are more challenging than familiar oppositions like commemoration and denial, truth and nontruth.Forgetting, absence, loss, dissolution, emptiness. These are different ways one might describe what I take to be the most significant aspect of the zār ritual: loosely translatable as an entry into trance. Every component of the ceremony (the loud, thumping drums, the strong burning gums, the inscrutable cantations) directs the zārī toward her own self-dissolution. Participants sometimes describe a feeling of being emptied, of amnesia. Incomprehensible in their “speech and acts,” they are “no longer themselves.”2 At the climax of zār, consciousness lapses. A white cloth is thrown upon this disappearing person, protecting the dissolving self from the gaze of others. The cloth shield is tautological. Something of zār—its most curious and impenetrable facet—resists empirical observation. A discontinuity in the subject troubles the continuity of the observer who wants-to-know.In film and media studies, the “archival turn” of the nineteenth century has been compellingly linked to theories of technology.3 The proliferation of archives, as well as the proliferation of the archive’s “processes of subjectification,” can be read alongside an increasing precision of registration, the technoscientific evolution of which film is one of modernity’s most exemplary achievements.4 Both the growth of archives and the orthographic rectitude of audiovisual recording supports and supplements modernity’s increasing demand for and obsession with facts, facticity, and objectivity. This is as true in the human sciences as in the natural sciences, as well as in everything that falls between, including modern historiography, which is modeled upon, and views itself—despite its own, sometimes critical, caveats—as a science of the past.Film is a technology with the potential to supply us with reality, to attest to the being-there of the having-been-there.5 (This is why continuity filming has been equally central to the production of scientific knowledge, as to the political realism of counter-cinema aesthetics.6) But in zār, the certitude of the having-been-there flickers. Trance is a “being away,” a going absent; yghīb; a suspension.7 If zār is a trace of slavery, filmed zār is a trace of a trace. But attenuation, erosion of reality, is less the cause for the disappointments of zār’s cinematic recordings than the protrusion of an absence that undermines the goals of epistemological orientation. In place of information, what the phenomenology of zār offers is an absence at the heart of experience.How does one reconcile the demands of knowledge accumulation (the drive for facticity) with an absence that is not merely incurable but that is itself the cure? The force of this question continues to shape the way I think about African enslavement in the Indian Ocean. Which is to say, there is a power internal to this absence that stalls, diverts, and transforms how we might produce knowledge about it.

The Scientific Shortcomings of Postcolonial Theory

In the social sciences, there is a trend towards normative, identity based and activist understanding of science. This trend is particularly evident in the rise of postcolonial theory. This paper critically engages with its impact in International Relations. Postcolonial theory aims to challenge established methodologies and arguments in all social science disciplines but shows little interest in rigorous research and the production of scientific knowledge. This paper highlights the most fundamental flaws of postcolonial theory, such as ideological bias, the application of blurred and one-sided concepts, the preference for anecdotal evidence over empirical evidence and ignorance of the major social and political trends of our time. Subsequently, it is argued that postcolonial theory contributes to a distorted perception of reality. Perhaps, this article can stimulate a debate about the function and scientific nature of social sciences at a time when feelings and emotions, not facts, increasingly dominate academia.

MATERNIDADE: CONFLITOS ENTRE AS DIMENSÕES BIOLÓGICA E SOCIAL - O QUE DIZ A PRODUÇÃO ACADÊMICA BRASILEIRA?

ABSTRACT: This bibliographical review presents a set of research about motherhood as a constructed social practice, the deterministic discourse of biology, and how it emerges in the training of biologists and teachers. The focus is on the Brazilian academic productions about this subject and its related aspects. About the methodological approach, the papers were raised from CAPES Portal in searches directed by descriptors previously defined. A set of 23 papers were found, and their analysis resulted in 3 thematic categories: 1. What is a mother?; 2. Breastfeeding; 3. What is a woman? - the biological discourse on stage. The results demonstrate the scarce discussion on specific topics. In general terms, discourses that speak directly about biological characteristics in women corroborate with the social place intended for them, over time, gave way to other sexist discourses, however masking under scientific neutrality. Within the production of scientific knowledge, it is evident that the purpose is to justify stereotypes in female and male bodies ways and, consequently, inequalities.

The contribution of universities to the production of basic scientific knowledge in Russia

Modern Russia inherited the Soviet scientific system, in which the university sector was rather weakly involved in research activities. However, by now the situation has changed significantly. The Russian government has actively stimulated the development of science in universities. It is shown in this article that the contribution of the university sector to the production of scientific knowledge has grown significantly and is already comparable with the contribution of the research sector in a number of indicators. The results of scientific research in both sectors—university and research—are published in journals of a comparable level, and the levels of citation of these publications are also comparable. Note that in economics, psychology and psychiatry, and social sciences, the university sector dominates. In addition, researchers from universities are more involved in international scientific collaboration. However, the sector itself is heterogeneous. Its main scientific achievements are related to the results obtained in leading research universities.

Políticas públicas de educação financeira: do processo histórico às ações práticas em Instituições de Ensino Superior

Abstract In current times, the importance of financial education has gained prominence in discussions held within multilateral organizations and governments around the world, with the purpose of building a society that is aware of the impact of their actions as individual financial agents in global society, through education. In this environment, the general objective of this article is to discuss the conception of financial education as public in Brazil, tracing a mapping of the main practical actions in higher education, after the implementation of the National Strategy for Financial Education (ENEF). As for the methodology, a bibliographical survey is carried out of the scientific works published and made available on the Capes Portal and SciELO-Brasil platforms, in the period between 2011 and 2021, which address financial education as a public policy in the context of higher education. As a result, it is perceived that higher education students have largely been excluded from public policies related to this topic and Universities have acted timidly as disseminators of financial literacy and production of scientific knowledge, through academic publications that can contribute to the enhancement and expansion of ENEF's reach.

Gradismo e Cladismo no Ensino em uma Análise Foucaultiana

ABSTRACT The analytical course of this text is directed to the spaces of knowledge constitution and glimpses power relations that problematize issues related to biological classification systems and teaching, aiming to make visible the instances in which Evolutionary Systematics can represent a discontinuity concerning the Linean Systematics. At the same time, the phylogenetic discourse is positioned as the most adequate knowledge for the establishment of evolutionary relationships, however, in teaching spaces it suffers interdictions, which allows us to suppose that teacher training does not satisfactorily deal with the dynamics of some scientific constructions. Thus, the production of scientific knowledge goes beyond the simple acceptance of truth.

O PROGRAMA DE PESQUISA DE MARTIN EGER: PRINCÍPIOS DA HERMENÊUTICA FILOSÓFICA NA EDUCAÇÃO EM CIÊNCIAS

ABSTRACT: This text begins with a theoretical research program that seeks to map the tradition of Philosophical Hermeneutics (PH) in Science Education (SE), producing syntheses of works by different authors who assumed the PH in SE. The objective is to present research programs that articulated PH and SE as we tailored our own research program based on them. We started with the research on the work of Martin Eger, one of the pioneers in this discussion in English, who proposed a Philosophy of Science Education (PSE). The justification for this program is that PH provides arguments for understanding the role of language, which contributes to facing the daily challenges of teachers in Natural Sciences teaching and learning. In this text, based on a brief discussion of PH as developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, we have studied Martin Eger's work. Some of the concepts proposed by Gadamer, such as the hermeneutic circle and the expansion and fusion of horizons, as well as the triple hermeneutics, proposed by Eger, have supported the understanding of the language of Natural Sciences, thus undoing the separation between subject and object; in this way, students, teachers in training, professors and researchers in Education and Science Education, as well as scientists, can be seen as interpreters of the Natural Sciences. By bringing together the work of Natural Sciences and the work of art in a cascade of interpretations throughout the production of scientific knowledge and its learning by students, Eger's academic production provides arguments to understand the very history of Science Teaching, by rescuing paths and reviews. At the same time, it brings inspiration to think about the present.

Scientific production in biodiversity: the gender gap continues in Brazilian universities.

Scientometrics enables us to comprehend the interests and trends in scientific knowledge production and dissemination. In this study, we evaluate the effects of gender, academic experience, location of residence, and graduate program score on the quantity of published articles, the number of citations and the H-index of researchers belonging to Brazilian graduate programs in Biodiversity. Variables related to the researchers were measured, and the relevance in explaining scientific production was examined using hierarchical models. In graduate programs, there were more men than females. The number of articles as first author and the H-index increase progressively through the researchers' career, while the number of citations increases at the beginning of their careers, stabilizing between 10 and 20 years, and increasing again after 30 years of career. We concluded that gender, academic experience, and graduate program score were the most important variables in explaining the scientific production of graduate programs in Biodiversity in Brazil.

The Theory of Constraints in scientific knowledge production

The Theory of Constraints in scientific knowledge production

Impacto multidimensional da pesquisa: desenvolvimento e teste de um modelo para avaliação

Abstract In recent decades, changes in science have been characterized by internationalization and the quest for impact. This article introduces the impact assessment process of 23 research projects of the Capes prInt Program aimed at internationalizing Brazilian science. This work developed an impact assessment model, applying it experimentally. The development was based on scientific texts on modes of production of scientific knowledge and impact assessment. The assessment revealed that, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the projects have advanced in their internationalization goals. As for the impacts, those related to science and education predominated, with a significant number of projects also indicating impacts on public policies and organizational practices. The article adds to understanding modes of knowledge production and research impact measurement. Furthermore, it can be useful to directors of research institutions, research managers, and researchers interested in measuring the research impact on organizations and society.

Uma incursão pelo lado “não-respeitável” da pesquisa de campo

Abstract This article was originally published in 1981. It addresses ethical and methodological questions involved in fieldwork among people from the anthropologist’s own society, but from a subaltern social group. It asks: What does legitimate the scientific methods of investigating other people’s lives, making them appear as acceptable instead of as object of resistance? It uses Foucault’s analysis of social sciences’ regimes of power-truth to understand what frames different methodologies of research and the author’s practices. It considers that field research is structured in the context of a certain regime of production of scientific knowledge that legitimates relationships of power in which one asks to know everything and the others feel obliged to tell the truth that, however, only the questioner will be able to reveal. The article argues that what is presented as truth either in interviews or in the text of the analyst is the product of a certain relationship shaped by power imbalances and social inequality. Moreover, it suggests that the field relationship is productive: What is said did not exist before ready to be revealed, but was constructed in this uneven relationship. Therefore, the interpretation of field data must always consider the conditions of its production.

Oriental Studies in Russia: New Reality, Old Challenges

The report by Vasily A. Kuznetsov Deputy Director for Research of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Russian Oriental Studies: Challenges and Prospects for Development in the New Reality,” released in the fall of 2023, draws attention to the complex issues facing Russian Oriental Studies in the new geopolitical reality. The “Turn to the East” concept, widely declared at the state level, creates both new growth opportunities and fundamental challenges for Oriental studies. Among the latter, Vasily A. Kusnetsov largely highlights factors related to intra-academic discourse and technological development. The most significant of them are to determine the place of Oriental studies in the modern system of production of scientific knowledge, characterized by a high degree of methodological segmentation of disciplines, and the development of machine translation algorithms, potentially eroding the core of Oriental studies — proficiency in the Oriental language. We are inclined to agree with the existence of both exogenous factors in the development of academic oriental studies, which, however, are also characteristic of the global context. In this article, we propose to pay attention to the challenges characteristic of the Russian academic and educational context. The growing interest of the state, business environment and the society in Oriental studies is due to the rapid transformation of the geographical structure of Russia’s foreign economic relations, where former familiar partners from Western countries are being replaced by new counterparties, whose star is rising in the East. There is a growing demand for orientalistic expertise and for the skillful personnel speaking Eastern languages. Oriental studies as an academic discourse and as an educational standard bears a heavy burden of responsibility: the problem of inflated expectations. From Oriental studies they are expected to build conceptual bridges between Russia and the East, from Oriental studies-graduates is expected high-quality work in a wide range of branches of foreign economic activity, where the only thing that will connect them with Oriental studies as an academic specialty is knowledge of the Oriental language. The current demand dictates the need to change existing educational programs and the system of reproduction of orientalistic knowledge. However, the ice separating the dark waters of the corrosive properties of the market from the actualization of the existing academic paradigm seems to be thin.

Teoria da Interseccionalidade, Desafios para Pesquisas Empíricas e Contribuições para a Psicologia

Abstract The Theory of Intersectionality is an important contribution from feminist epistemologies to the scientific field. This narrative literature review aims to discuss methodological possibilities and challenges in producing and analyzing empirical evidence based on the Theory of Intersectionality, as well as its contributions to Psychology. While this theory is increasingly being cited as the basis for empirical research, articulating its assumptions in knowledge production processes is still a difficulty. Qualitative approaches prevail in the field, but advancements in statistical analysis methods allow for an intersectional interpretation in quantitative studies. Intersectionality contributes to understanding psychological processes and challenging dominant and exclusionary assumptions in the field of Psychology. Embracing this theory requires a commitment to the imperative of social transformation and entails placing claims, values, practices, and power relations at the core of scientific knowledge production, regardless of the field under study.

The scientometric landscape of Evolang: A comprehensive database of the Evolang conference

Abstract Language evolution is a modern incarnation of a long intellectual tradition that addresses the fundamental question of how language began. Such a formulation is intuitively obvious, but a more precise characterisation of this area of research with its central notions—language and evolution—has proved surprisingly elusive. In this paper, we show how conceptual analysis can be complemented with scientometric analysis in describing language evolution. To this end, we built a database containing information on the contributions and contributors to the proceedings of the nine most recent iterations (years 2004–20) of the Evolang conference, which given its long history (1996–) and attendance rates gives a good reflection of the thematic scope and research trends in the field of language evolution as a whole. We present several analyses of these data, concerning the geographical distribution of the researchers contributing to the conference, a set of ‘classic’ references most frequently cited in Evolang proceedings, researcher profiles self-associated with the most popular tags for this area of research (such as ‘evolution of language’ vs. ‘language evolution’), and the changes to the profile of the conference as represented in the proportions of topics and author networks over the most recent Evolang iterations. While our resource is intended primarily as a source of insight into the Evolang conference—and by extension into the entire field of language evolution—it holds potential for comparisons with other fields and for addressing questions on the production of scientific knowledge.

Flexible and Precariat Form of Employment Policies at Higher Education in Turkey

<p style="text-align: justify;">The main objective of current study was to determine the opinions of adjunct faculty members regarding the flexible and precariat form of employment policies at universities in Turkey. The research was conducted qualitatively. The participants were 16 adjunct faculty members who were chosen with purposive sampling method. An interview technique was implemented in order to obtain data, and content analysis method was used to analyze the data. Results revealed that this form of employment policy causes organizational, academic and personal problems. As for organizational problems, it causes to prioritize financial points of views rather than academic expectations. Regarding personal problems, adjunct faculty members are underpaid, overworked, ignored regarding their professional development. Also academic and scientific knowledge production are ignored. Students do dot respect adjunct faculty members. It is recommended that this kind of employment policy should be reconsidered and full-time employment should be preferred.</p>

La sociologie et l’anthropologie indiennes entre quête décolonisatrice et Occident. Réflexion à partir du cas d’Irawati Karve

This paper analyses the scientific knowledge production of Indian anthropologist/sociologist Irawati Karve (1905-1970) against the backdrop of India’s decolonisation. I shed light on her efforts to engage with internationally validated social scientific knowledge and to adapt it to local and national questions and traditions of inquiry. Through an analysis of her work’s reception, which includes sharp criticism by Louis Dumont, I discuss how Karve’s efforts were restricted not only by an international system of validation majorly influenced by scholars in centres in the global North, but also by the pervading colonial legacy of anthropology. Thinking with Karve’s case as an example of a double bind between nationalising/indigenising impulses in the creation of scientific knowledge and global inequalities in the geopolitics of international science, I reflect on the difficult position occupied by sociologists and anthropologists in the global South in response to the quest of decolonising knowledge.

A systematic review of trends and gaps in the production of scientific knowledge on the sociopolitical impacts of emojis in computer-mediated communication

A systematic review of trends and gaps in the production of scientific knowledge on the sociopolitical impacts of emojis in computer-mediated communication

Medicine and Arabic literary production in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century

AbstractThe selection of nineteenth-century Arabic texts on medical education, medicine and health demonstrates the significant link between the revival of the Arabic language and literary culture of the nineteenth century, known as thenahda, and the introduction of medical education to the Ottoman Empire. These include doctor Ibrahim al-Najjar's autobiographical account of his studies in Cairo (1855), an article by doctor Amin Abi Khatir advising on the health and care of infants (1877), questions and answers in the major popular Arabic journalsal-Hilalandal-Muqtataf(1877–1901) and an article about a new tuberculosis treatment by doctor Anisa Sayba‘a (1903). Taken together they contribute to our understanding of the bottom-up production, reproduction and reception of global scientific knowledge, as well as to a social and intellectual history of science. We argue that the engagement with science during thenahdawas a multi-vocal and dialogical process, in which doctors and patients, journal editors and their readers, negotiated the implications of scientific knowledge for their own lives and their own society. The texts of the original documents and their translations can be found in the supplementary material tab athttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000413.