Technoscientific Knowledge Research Articles

Agroecological innovation constructing socionatural order for social transformation: two case studies in Brazil

ABSTRACT The Green Revolution exemplifies the capital-intensive modernization model of resource plunder and labor exploitation. This has provoked small-scale producers and civil society groups to counterpose an agroecology-based solidarity economy (EcoSol-agroecology), especially in Latin America. But their efforts encounter dominant models – of innovation, management, markets, nature, etc. – which limit alternatives. To clarify a transformative agenda, advocates have elaborated agroecological innovation through several complementary practices. Nature is framed as agri-biodiversity complementing socio-cultural diversity. Short food-supply chains (circuitos curtos) build consumer support for production methods enhancing producers' livelihoods, providing socio-economic equity and conserving natural resources. Through diálogos de saberes, i.e. knowledge exchange among farmers and with external experts, cultivation and water-management methods are designed or adapted as socio-environmental technologies. Capacities are built for collective self-management of those solidarity relationships. In such ways, agroecological innovation co-produces specific forms of nature, technoscientific knowledge and society; their practices construct a distinctive socionatural order. Such order arises through several instruments – making identities, institutions and discourses – as understood by STS co-production theory. Here this theory illuminates two Brazilian agroforestry initiatives whose cooperative practices seek to transform their own participants' lives and wider agri-food systems. By combining diverse sources, composite cultures deepen the social basis of territorial belonging.

Diplomats in Science Diplomacy: Promoting Scientific and Technological Collaboration in International Relations**

Diplomats in Science Diplomacy: Promoting Scientific and Technological Collaboration in International Relations**

Problems All the Way Down

Besieged by ongoing economic crises, global health emergencies, geopolitical instabilities, ecological devastation, and growing political resentments, the intractable nature of the problems that configure the present has never loomed larger or more darkly. But what, indeed, is a problem? Problematising the modern image that treats problems as obstacles to be overcome by the progress of technoscientific knowledge and policy, this introductory article lays the groundwork for a generative conceptualisation of problems. Reweaving intercontinental connections between traditions of French philosophy and American pragmatism, it proffers a conception of the problematic as a mode of existence that is irreducible to the subjective, the methodological, or the epistemological. Problems go all the way down and up, requiring nothing less than an art of metamorphosis capable of engendering processes of creation, invention, and transformation in whose hold bodies and practices, knowledges and lives, thoughts and worlds, are done and undone, made and remade.

Walras in the light of Marx, Lacan and his own

ABSTRACT This article discusses Léon Walras’s conception of pure science, which naturalizes market prices. We then show how Marx critically explains the naturalization of economic phenomena in general. Then - based on Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject - we indicate how the discourse of positive science contributes to the formation of technoscientific knowledge and, specially, to the diffusion of the neoclassical theory. Moreover, the article shows that this understanding of knowledge contributes to deduct from the responsibilities of technobureaucrats for potentially disastrous consequences of the application of positive science to society.

Futuring a world without disease: visualising the elimination of hepatitis C

ABSTRACT Informed by work on futurity in science and technology studies, we trace how global disease elimination targets perform a world without disease through their translations in visual advocacy campaigns. Treating disease elimination targets and their visualisations as performative, we take the case of hepatitis C elimination to interrogate how futuring practices in public health govern the present and make effects. We focus specifically on how World Health Organization targets in the Global Health Sector Strategy on Viral Hepatitis entangle with visual resources produced by the World Hepatitis Alliance NOhep advocacy campaign. Targets and their visual representations in campaigns perform a disease elimination future which is set apart from the present, and yet urges action in-the-now. It enacts global health citizens but separates them from localised experiences of living with, and being cured of, disease. This disease elimination future relies heavily on instrumental rationalities and logics of the present, including the privileging of biomedical technoscientific knowledge, implementation science and global health governance, to the exclusion of other matters of concern, flattening out complexity to perform its certain achievability. These enactments raise political questions about how disease elimination futures might be made in a different mode.

Building on adaptive capacity to extreme events in Brazil: water reform, participation, and climate information across four river basins

Building the capacity of water systems to prepare and adapt to climate-driven events has become an important goal for water managers in Brazil. One aspect of building adaptive capacity (AC) is the ability of organizations and actors within these systems to apply techno-scientific knowledge (TSK), in particular, climatic information, to plan and respond to extreme events. However, the way the use of knowledge interacts with theorized determinants of AC, such as stakeholder-driven governance and democratic deliberation, remains relatively unexplored in the empirical literature. In this article, we propose a simple heuristic to understand the relationship between the use of climate knowledge and participatory management and explore it empirically in the context of integrated water resources management (IWRM) in four river basins in Brazil. We find that despite an overall increase in the capacity of the basins studied to manage drought through time, the relationship between use of TSK and participation is not straightforward. Rather, knowledge use to inform decision-making remains mostly insulated, with few groups controlling both the process of producing knowledge and making decisions in times of crisis. Yet, across all cases, the continued exposure of river basin organizations (RBOs) to TSK suggests a growing appreciation for the role of information in supporting action and increased efforts by RBOs to develop their own knowledge resources to become more relevant in the decision-making process.

Assessing governance challenges of local biodiversity and ecosystem services: Barriers identified by the expert community

This paper assesses barriers to local biodiversity and ecosystem (BES) governance within cities, drawing on findings from an international expert survey encompassing 45 cities in 25 countries. BES is recognised as a key foundation for sustainable cities, yet current literature indicates that more clarity is needed on the factors which may undermine BES initiatives. Survey findings show broad agreement that officials in development sectors have inadequate BES knowledge, budgets for BES are insufficient, and planners in the locality lack knowledge about BES. Respondents not working for local governments were more likely to see policy change with administrations, budget limitations, and lack of expertise as barriers. Respondents for cities in less-developed countries agreed significantly more that there were harmful cultural activities, and were more concerned that inadequate consideration from governments at different scales and poor internal communication were barriers. Based on the findings, we suggest (a) a need to evaluate the effectiveness of collaboration both within government and between sectors; (b) the importance of building capacity within local government staff, both in techno-scientific knowledge and in engaging the policy landscape with this knowledge; and (c) the importance of further considering how BES conservation may relate to culturally meaningful practices.

Assuntos inacabados: relato de encontro e rito de passagem

Resumo Os cuidados paliativos surgiram na medicina com o intuito de otimizar a assistência médica oferecida ao paciente, visando o alívio dos sintomas e a atenção integral ao indivíduo em si, e não à doença. Por ser especialidade relativamente nova, muitas vezes o profissional dessa área depara-se com situações que não podem ser explicadas simplesmente pelo conhecimento tecnocientífico. A partir de um relato de experiência, este artigo objetiva refletir sobre as circunstâncias envolvidas no período pré-morte.

Coping with Fragmentation. On the Role of Techno-Scientific Knowledge within the Sámi Community

The idea that different knowledge systems should be combined is prominent within environmental governance. This is not least the case regarding sustainability, for which indigenous knowledge is seen as crucial. While the practical challenges related to bridging knowledge systems are well documented, less is known about what it means from an indigenous perspective. Drawing on an interview study, this paper explores views on techno-scientific knowledge among the Sámi (indigenous to Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula of Russia). The analysis finds that techno-scientific knowledge is employed as coping strategies in the face of colonial stressors. Land fragmentation poses a particular threat to the Sámi way of life, and in response, a number of modern techniques have been adopted. There is a clear sense that valuable traditional knowledge is being lost in the process, with consequences for both sustainability and Sámi identity. The authors conclude that contemporary understandings of what cross-fertilization means need to be thoroughly reconsidered.

Pathways to sustainable futures: A “production pedagogy” model for STEM education

STEM education initiatives currently pervade the global landscape of educational reform. Unfortunately, the rush to adopt STEM reforms in North American schools and develop students for competitive 21st century knowledge economies has encouraged an uncritical embrace of underlying STEM narratives and purposes, thus foreclosing critical discussion, alternative models, and new perspectives on doing science education differently. Here, we unpack narratives and practices informing STEM education that induct learning actors into ‘anticipatory regimes’ that advance neoliberal ends and technocapitalist ideologies. We argue first that STEM narratives of progress, competition, and innovation increasingly obscure the urgent ecological, ethical and social justice conditions students confront daily. Ironically, this prepares them for a future rendered unsustainable by scientific and technological orthodoxy. We then draw upon critical sustainability studies (CSS) to articulate new axiological orientations that reposition science and technology learning. Lastly, we describe and illustrate an approach aligned with these critical principles – production pedagogy – whose theories and practices re-vision science and technology education. These strategies will situate students in agentive roles now, in this present, using real-world tools in authentic sociotechnical contexts. They can then confront their own capacities and limitations to engage in personally relevant ways, as producers, with techno-scientific knowledge.

Burdens of the Scientific Revolution: Euro/West-Centrism, Black Boxed Machines, and the (Post) Colonial Present.

How is it possible that past technoscientific research in India does not serve as a sluice for circulations of technoscience even within India? Why do technoscientific artifacts and knowledge continue to flow largely through the West? The answer to these and related questions, I argue, lies in the entanglement of technoscientific practices in India with Orientalist historiography of the origin of modern science. Such an Orientalist construction forms the basis of the diffusion model and constitutes technologies and societies as black boxes, which, as I show in this article, is strikingly on display in the historical accounts of NMR and MRI machines at even the best institutions and laboratories in India. I thus propose a deconstructive-empirical approach to unravel the enduring implications of Orientalist construction of the origin of modern science.

Quality in technoscience within the crisis of knowledge societies Some cases, critical aspects of 'research misconduct' category and a focus on 'knowledge' as commons

In this contribution, I focus on two cases of high social impact within the Italian and European context and for the whole 'scientific community'. The first case regards the diffusion of the public controversy regarding the Xylella bacteria affecting olive trees in South Italy (Salento, Puglia). The second relates the work of the National Great Risks Commission (GRC), under the National Service of the Italian Civil Protection, before, during and after the earthquake at L'Aquila, in 2009, and the reasons of the judicial dispute at L'Aquila Court, in which this technoscientific committee has been involved, and of the conviction against several expert members of these organisms. Exploring these cases can make visible the complexity and critical aspects of pursuing an approach of definition-categorisation of 'research misconduct' and the involvement of local communities within the dynamics of technoscientific knowledge reproduction and assessment.

Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America by Jamie L. Pietruska

Reviewed by: Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America by Jamie L. Pietruska Joy Rohde (bio) Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America. By Jamie L. Pietruska. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Hardcover $45. Looking Forward is a creative, original, and deeply-researched monograph. It offers a lively and compelling account of the ways that technical experts, government officials, and everyday Americans wrestled with the uncertainties associated with modern capitalist society between the 1860s and the 1920s. Historians have argued that the turn of the twentieth century was a period marked by the search for order. But Pietruska complicates that narrative. Government experts sought technoscientific knowledge that could [End Page 922] produce order. But they were hampered on two fronts. Commercial forecasters and skeptical publics challenged their claims to authority. And their own predictions fell far short of their expectations. Rather than being fulfilled, by 1920 the pursuit of certainty morphed into an uncomfortable acceptance of uncertainty as a fact of the modern condition. Instead of grasping for certainty, producers and users of foreknowledge embraced the provisional, yet scientific, status of expertise about the future. Pietruska makes her case by following expert, policy, and public debates in four well-chosen areas—crop estimates, weather forecasting, economic prediction, and fortune-telling. She traces the efforts of U.S. Department of Agriculture officials who sought to produce accurate estimates of cotton yield rooted in observational evidence and sound statistics. Despite fielding a network of trained crop surveyors, government estimators failed to produce accurate estimates. In some cases, they performed worse than commercial forecasters, amplifying the erratic nature of the trans-Atlantic cotton markets that they had hoped to tame. Not surprisingly, Americans were skeptical of government experts' claims that they could reliably predict the future. Yet, they were also adamant that such expertise be shared with them. This was especially the case when it came to the weather. Even as they derided the contents of the daily "Synopsis and Probabilities"—short-term weather forecasts thought to be particularly useful for agriculture—farmers in remote regions demanded timely access to them. They also sought long-range weather forecasts, which Weather Bureau officials initially insisted could not be produced to reasonable standards of scientific validity. But by 1906, they gave in to public demands and persistent private meteorological research. Here, Pietruska argues, government officials replaced their desire for scientific certainty with an acceptance that foreknowledge could be scientific, yet still uncertain. Despite—or perhaps because of—its failure to produce certainty, prediction gained the patina of science. Pietruska traces legal debates over fortune-telling to demonstrate Americans' embrace of the culture and science of prediction. Tracking court cases and newspaper accounts, she shows that fortune-tellers successfully claimed the mantle of science to protect themselves against criminal and civil charges. If palmistry and character reading were scientific, then their practitioners were not violating laws proscribing people from pretending to tell the future. Looking Forward is thoughtfully embedded in a variety of literatures, including the history of science and technology, the history of capitalism, and policy history. Pietruska places technoscientific experts and government elites alongside farmers and palm-readers to great effect. Her account demonstrates that non-experts—and especially rural Americans—were at the center of the era's new culture of scientific prediction. They challenged meteorologists, economists, statisticians, and other technical experts to [End Page 923] revise their own perceptions of scientific certainty. But the book's lessons are not limited to historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking Forward also shows that narratives that root the origins of expertise about the future in the Cold War are flawed. While pervasive anxieties about nuclear destruction and the growth of computation nurtured new forms of expertise after World War II, Americans generations before them cultivated a science and culture of prediction that has shaped modern life. Joy Rohde Joy Rohde is associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Michigan and the author of Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013). Her current book project examines the history of algorithmic and big data...

Enough is enough: how West African farmers judge water sufficiency

This article engages the concept of water literacy, coupled with photo-elicitation methods and long-term ethnographic research, to explore how West African farmers judge water sufficiency. The study focuses on the Upper Comoe river basin in southwest Burkina Faso, an area known for conflict among multiple water users. Pictures of familiar river sites were shown to farmers to explore how they determine whether water suffice to meet their irrigation and livelihood needs. The likelihood of finding water to be sufficient was influenced by who the respondents were (gender) and by where (downstream/upstream) and when (early/late dry season) the picture was taken. Farmers’ sufficiency judgments were framed as a cognitive and linguistic dichotomy that posits water as being either enough or not enough. They drew upon a diversity of indicators in the natural and built environment and hinged on salient attributes, such as the “face” and the “flow” of the water. These two attributes enabled farmers to determine the water’s “force,” a foundational cultural notion that blends material and spiritual considerations. Farmers’ assessments engage multiple time horizons, from memories of the past, to current observations and anticipated future scenarios. By relying upon shared memories and meanings, farmers can compare judgments, analyze options, and collectively mobilize to counteract the dominance of techno-scientific knowledge in official water allocation decisions.

“These Were Not Boring Meetings”: Miguel García-Sancho Talks with Karin Knorr Cetina

In this interview, Karin Knorr Cetina evokes the first Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science at Cornell University in 1976 as a foundational moment for science and technology studies (STS). This conference consolidated a new approach to the study of science based on the anthropological observation of scientists at work in the laboratory. Knorr Cetina argues that, despite geographically cementing in the United States, this approach originated mainly through the work of European scholars. The years that followed the Cornell meeting were marked by intense debates between the defenders of this anthropological approach and other scholars more focused on ideas than on scientific practice. Knorr Cetina describes these debates as “bloodbaths” and recalls having first coined the term “constructivist” as applied to science studies in 1977. For Knorr Cetina, STS is now shifting its attention from the production to the consumption of technoscientific knowledge. Her current interest in the financial markets and other forms of screen technologies is an example of this transition. She argues that STS needs to overcome its current fragmentation and emphasis in isolated case studies. The establishment of basic research centers with the financial resources to develop collective and long-term programs would help scholars to expand their horizons. In his following reflection, Miguel García-Sancho explores the connections between STS and travel in both a sense of intellectual shift and a more mundane meaning of physical movement.

Chemical warfare in Colombia, evidentiary ecologies andsenti-actuandopractices of justice

Between 1994 and 2015, militarized aerial fumigation was a central component of US-Colombia antidrug policy. Crop duster planes sprayed a concentrated formula of Monsanto's herbicide, glyphosate, over illicit crops, and also forests, soils, pastures, livestock, watersheds, subsistence food and human bodies. Given that a national peace agreement was signed in 2016 between FARC-EP guerrillas and the state to end Colombia's over five decades of war, certain government officials are quick to proclaim aerial fumigation of glyphosate an issue of the past. Rural communities, however, file quejas (complaints or grievances) seeking compensation from the state for the ongoing effects of the destruction of their licit agro-forestry. At the interfaces of feminist science and technology studies and anthropology, this article examines how evidentiary claims are mobilized when war deeply politicizes and moralizes technoscientific knowledge production. By ethnographically tracking the grievances filed by small farmers, I reveal the extent to which evidence circulating in zones of war - tree seedlings, subsistence crops, GPS coordinates and bureaucratic documents - retains (or not) the imprints of violence and toxicity. Given the systematic rejection of compensation claims, farmers engage in everyday material practices that attempt to transform chemically degraded ecologies. These everyday actualizations of justice exist both alongside and outside contestation over the geopolitically backed violence of state law. Rather than simply contrasting everyday acts of justice with denunciatory claims made against the state, farmers' reparative practices produce an evidentiary ecology that holds the state accountable while also ' senti-actuando' (feel-acting) alternative forms of justice.

Educação para prevenção de desastres: a persistência do conhecimento tecnocientífico e da individualização do risco

A recente Política Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Civil Brasileira (Lei n’ 12.608/2012) ressaltou a cultura de prevenção e sua inserção no currículo escolar nacional. Este artigo apresenta os resultados da pesquisa, exploratória e qualitativa, sobre o estado da arte de conteúdos e abordagens educativas para a prevenção de desastre no Brasil. Os dados foram obtidos por pesquisa bibliográfica, documental e observação participante, a partir de 3 recortes: temático (inundações/enchentes e deslizamentos), temporal (de 2011 a 2014) e geográfico (região metropolitana do ABC Paulista). O corpus foi composto por materiais impressos/digitais e atividades de informação/capacitação. Por meio do método da análise de conteúdo, identificamos dois conteúdos (conhecimentos tecnocientíficos e comportamentos/atitudes de prevenção e auto-proteção) e duas abordagens (transmissão-assimilação e individualização do risco), que perpetuam uma “inquestionabilidade do risco”, alheia às causas profundas do risco, o que fragiliza as ações de redução de risco baseada na comunidade.

"A world we don't know": the spatial configuration of sensory practices and production of knowledge in and around Mexican seismic monitoring

AbstractA single technoscientific knowledge project can entail many different kinds of knowledge production. Here, I show how a Mexican technoscientific knowledge project about seismicity requires diverse sensory practices and the production of knowledge about many kinds of environmental and social conditions. I argue that Mexican territorial politics frame this knowledge. Further, I demonstrate that these politics become evident in the very ways that knowledge about Mexico is configured spatially, that is, in topological and topographic ways that technicians and engineers come to understand and relate to Mexican territory. After situating this argument within contemporary critical attention to the production of geographic knowledge, I address it ethnographically. First, I describe how Mexican seismic monitoring is undertaken from the headquarters of the Centro de Instrumentación y Registro Sísmico (CIRES). Then, I deal with the arrangements of power that structure seismic monitoring and social conditions in what CIRES engineers and technicians call "the field." As I relate the sensory work and knowledge production that field teams do when they leave CIRES headquarters, I show how the things that field teams can know are shaped by territorial politics, and consequently reflect them.Key Words: Mexico, environmental monitoring, sense, knowledge, earthquakes

Review: A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience, by Jiat-Hwee Chang

Jiat-Hwee Chang A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience London: Routledge, 2016, 290 pp., 97 b/w illus. $180 (cloth), ISBN 9780415840774; $53.95 (paper), ISBN 9780415840781 Tropical architecture developed in the nineteenth century as a global discourse across the networks of the British, French, and Dutch empires. Each node that became a site of tropical architecture had a distinct trajectory and areas of emphasis, yet climatic design unifies the diverse histories of these sites. The multiple discourses that have defined tropical architecture as a field developed diachronically through numerous disciplinary terrains, including medicine, sanitation, meteorology, civil engineering, architecture, and environmental design. In A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture , Jiat-Hwee Chang builds upon scholarship inaugurated by Mark Crinson, Hannah le Roux, and Ola Uduku, who first revealed tropical architecture to be a neocolonial discourse that developed after World War II and operated within asymmetrical power relationships.1 Chang examines tropical architecture from the vantage point of Singapore, producing a highly granulated history that shows how unequal power relationships were spatialized through regimes of technoscientific knowledge. This scholarly endeavor demonstrates how the seemingly apolitical and ahistorical publications on tropical architecture that have persisted well into the twenty-first century have a genealogy that extends beyond the immediate postwar period and is deeply embedded in early colonial ideology. Shade, natural lighting, and ventilation––ostensibly ideologically neutral environmental elements that form the bedrock of tropical architecture––were the products of broader colonial discourses that collectively constituted the tropical sciences. Chang investigates an extended period, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the third quarter of the twentieth century, in order to historicize tropical architecture in colonial discourse, charting its disciplinary migration from hygiene to architecture. In the process, tropical architecture was subject to the ideological machinations associated with the vicissitudes of the British Empire. Initially developed as an instrument of direct imperial power, tropical architecture became a means of exercising soft power after World War II, as decolonization led to the empire's …

Nuclear science and technology in the Malaysian context: Three phases of technoscientific knowledge transfer (ETTLG)

This essay considers the development of the nuclear science programme in Malaysia from a transnational perspective by examining the interactions between state agents and other external nuclear-knowledge/technology related actors and agents. Going beyond the model of knowledge diffusion that brings together concerns articulated in Harris’s (2011) geographies of long distance knowledge and Reinhardt's (2011) role of the expert in knowledge transfer, the proposed three-phase model of knowledge transfer theorises the pathways undertaken by a late-blooming participant of modern science and technology as the latter moves from epistemic dependency to increasing independence despite the hurdles encountered, and the underdevelopment of many areas of its technoscientific economy. The model considers tensions stemming from the pressures of expediency for meeting national developmental goals on the one side, and the call to support the objectives of basic science on the other. The three phases of the model are epistemic transition, epistemic transplantation and localisation, and epistemic generation (ETTLG). As additional support for the proposed model, three arguments are proffered as deeper explanations of the epistemic goal by using Malaysia as a case study: knowledge transfer for political legitimization, knowledge transfer for countering agnotology, and knowledge transfer for social engineering and science diplomacy.