Paper short abstract:

This paper examines permaculture and biodynamic farming as examples of refused knowledge. A recent public controversy in Italy allow to concentrate on online sources for highlighting retorical strategies used by supporters of these alternatives forms of, allegedly, sustainable food production.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines permaculture and biodynamic farming as examples of refused knowledge in the realm of sustainability and food production in Italy. While proponents of these methodologies emphasize their ecological and sustainable principles, they have faced criticism for being pseudoscientific due to their reliance on unproven concepts and methodologies. Biodynamic agriculture, rooted in Rudolf Steiner's teachings, emphasizes the integration of farming with cosmic forces, including astrological and lunar cycles, and the use of specific preparations to enhance soil fertility. Permaculture, in contrast, is a design system that aims to create sustainable human settlements by emulating natural ecosystems, focusing on principles such as diversity, interdependence, and self-sufficiency. However, the scientific foundation of permaculture has been criticized for lacking rigorous experimental validation and relying heavily on anecdotal evidence.

Despite the criticisms, both biodynamic farming and permaculture have gained popularity among farmers and consumers seeking sustainable alternatives to conventional farming. Using a content analysis of selected websites, YouTube videos, and other media sources from Italy, this study adopts an agnostic perspective to analyze the rhetorical strategies, mobilized resources, and framing employed by supporters to counter skepticism. In Italy, controversies arose when the inclusion of biodynamic farming in organic agriculture was debated in Parliament. As STS scholarship about controversies taught us, the public debate on this topic is an unvaluable opportunity to enrich the analysis.

In doing so these case studies contribute to expanding debates on refused knowledge and the discourse surrounding sustainability amidst ecological crisis.

Paper short abstract:

In "Challenging Autism, Challenging Experts," I argue that social movements are important spaces for the cultivation and preservation of unorthodox ideas because they organize the resources necessary to transform contested ideas into practice.

Paper long abstract:

How are controversial beliefs empowered? How do they persist? "Challenging Autism, Challenging Experts: Social Movements as Spaces for the Creation of Controversial Bodies and Identities" investigates two movements that resist experts, taking issue with conventional understandings of Autism Spectrum Disorder, a developmental disability. I argue that social movements are important spaces for the cultivation and preservation of unorthodox ideas because they organize the resources necessary to transform contested ideas into practice. This study draws from over three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with members of the alternative biomedical and autistic rights movements. These two movements reimagine autism in different and conflicting ways. The alternative biomedical movement is dominated by parents and practitioners who believe in a disproven idea: that vaccines “trigger” autism. Believing in “vaccine injury,” they argue that autism can be “reversed” with alternative and experimental treatments. The autistic rights movement, in contrast, is composed primarily of autistic adults who contend that autism is a natural human variation, as opposed to a disorder; thus, they demand social and cultural acceptance. Focusing on structural barriers, autistic rights activists advocate for policy changes that would expand the rights and protection of autistic people. Both movements encounter opposition from researchers, professionals, and other parents outside their communities who support a mainstream model. In this study, I examine their separate struggles to gain legitimacy and their efforts to transform their beliefs into lived realities.

Paper short abstract:

Discussion of the pitfalls that arise when researching dichotomized knowledge controversies and the challenge of not confronting the injustice inherent in each othering of the actors involved with an othering under a reversed sign, but rather finding a position that remains open to differentiations.

Paper long abstract:

Based on anthropological fieldwork and in reference to David Bloor's symmetrical approach, I have examined the transatlantic entanglements of orthodox and heterodox knowledge practices, especially regarding what is called modern esotericism. In these controversies, the category science plays a central role and, in a tendency to dichotomize the different positions within these controversies, heterodox knowledge practices are usually unified and accused of being unscientific and increasingly also hostile to science and linked to political intentions. As this is usually a distortion in such a generalized way, the ostracized are often encouraged to return the accusations directed at them in an equally generalized way, thereby creating their own kind of symmetrization. With the SARS-CoV-2-pandemic, the history and present of modern esotericism has gone from being a marginal to a central topic with great political relevance and public attention. This current politicization of such knowledge controversies has also changed the conditions and circumstances of research and publicly talking about research on heterodox (or, according to the panel abstract, rejected) knowledge practices and has apparently made it even more difficult to promote an agnostic approach. In this presentation, I focus on the pitfalls that can arise in research due to the mutual symmetrical othering of the actors involved in such controversies and the challenge of not countering the injustice inherent in each othering with an othering under a reversed sign, but instead finding a position that preserves its agnosticism beyond any othering and is political precisely because of this.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses discourses on health and wellbeing performed in two communities building knowledge refused by science. The study employs a mixed-method approach, combining qualitative techniques and social network analysis, to identify epistemic structures within these social worlds.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with the social configurations through which online communities build discourses aimed at conferring credibility to knowledge about healthcare. The study focuses on two different case studies of communities devoted to promoting health practices not approved (or explicitly refused) by science and aimed at improving wellbeing and curing diseases. Theoretically, these communities are conceived of as social worlds within which people work to legitimise knowledge claims, while knowledge itself is understood as a discursive assemblage of claims and heterogeneous actors enrolled to legitimise them. The proposal illustrates the mixed-method strategy adopted for the study, which relies on a combination of qualitative techniques and social network analysis (SNA). Through a web-ethnography conducted from January 2020 to December 2021, we analysed universes of discourse (Mead, 1972; Clarke and Star, 2008) shared within these communities, and investigated the discursive relational structures of each social world by two-mode network models in which knowledge claims are connected to the actors supporting these claims. Relying on SNA and factorial techniques (community detection, betweenness centrality scores, multiple correspondence analysis), an analysis of the configuration of claim–actor connections is provided and the ‘flexible’ objects linking diverse sub-groups of nodes — that is, claims or actors that act as ‘boundary objects’. The analysis shows the hybrid nature of the epistemic structures shared within these social worlds, where different repertoires and processes of “translation of science” act to support knowledge refused by science.