I’m trying to take a step back and am starting to understand the theoretical background of my thesis topic. I do not know if it is the classes I am taking or the professors I have but I am being nudged, more like shoved, in the direction of Bruno Latour.
In Environmental Theory we are currently diving into Facing Gaia one of the Latour’s newer works. On Tuesday Michael Flower, currently of Portland State University previously of Lewis & Clark College, visited class to try and help us understand what we were getting ourselves into. He did this with two words and two images.
The words are Science and science. I swear, I’m not going crazy. Science, Flower said, is what people think of when you tell them you are a scientist. White lab coats, experiments, prestige, expertise, and exclusive epistemic communities. This is a somewhat comforting (at least for me) way to think about Science; the public has an impact on the science being done but we are not part of it (others will say this is extremely problematic but the goal of this post is not to discuss that discourse). The model below relates to this realm of thought.
This represents how people think that scientific claims become accepted. The public understands that there are outside forces like politics, economic forces, moralities and public understanding that influence the scientific process but they consider them separate from the work that scientists do.
Flower explained that this is very different from science. [s]cience is what actually happens when scientists do their work. There are flubs and mess ups, data is excluded, research is kept from being published; the glam and glitter is taken right out of it. As the model below illustrates, here there are not just connections between politics, economic forces, moralities, and public understanding, there is interplay. There are complicated mixtures and associations. It is a meshwork.
Now, what does this mean for me and my research? Up until this point, I thought that I could just draw a little flowchart showing how science is translated and what gets left out, but there’s so much more at play! I’ve got a lot more thinking to do about this but I think that it will really help to enhance my work. I am really lucky to have discovered this early because although this means significantly more work to really get at “what is going on”, it’s going to be much more enlightening.
I’m buckling up for a bumpy ride.
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