Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Franziska Zirker
(University of Marburg)
Finn Langbein (University of Marburg)
Sven Opitz (University of Marburg)
Leon Wolff (University of Marburg)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Tony Joakim Ananiassen Sandset
(University of Oslo)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- NU-3A47
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
Emergencies are epistemically exceptional. Conditions of urgency and uncertainty demand actionable knowledge, pressuring scientific practices into an emergency mode. Focussing on the interplay between emergency epistemics and epistemic emergencies, the panel brings together STS and Security Studies.
Long Abstract:
Emergencies are exceptional situations. They transform the ways in which social processes and events are problematized and made actionable. While the debate on governing emergencies (Adey, Anderson and Graham 2016; Collier and Lakoff 2021) has primarily dealt with administrative technologies employed in the executive branch, this panel seeks to shift the focus to the field of technoscience. Recent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, chemical exposures, or climate change not only push political decision-making routines to their limits, but also re-calibrate technoscientific practice. This panel asks how the state of emergency is inscribed into and shapes technoscientific practices, thereby bridging the gap between Security Studies and STS.
We start with the observation that technoscience is not only at the heart of the identification and establishment of emergencies, but that epistemic practice also changes significantly once it is faced with conditions of urgency. First, emergency technoscience is characterized by an emergency epistemics. To effectively address emergencies, specific epistemologies are required that are capable of comprehending crucial mechanisms of pandemics or finding appropriate courses of action in the face of planetary threats. These imply specialized knowledge hierarchies that emerge from idiosyncratic processes of knowledge production. Second, exceptional situations are often grounded in or cause epistemic emergencies: When dealing with the problems posed in the context of emergencies, the existing technoscientific practices become inadequate. Diseases without specific causes or sudden ecological transitions render conventional scientific routines, techniques, and patterns of interpretation and explanation insufficient. This inadequacy prompts a transformation of scientific practices, which may either stabilize for the duration of the emergency or endure beyond it.
Against this background, the panel critically examines the interplay between emergency epistemics and epistemic emergencies. We invite scholars to discuss with us papers on the transformation of technoscience in times of emergency.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -Short abstract:
In our introduction we identify three tendencies that may serve as an analytical grid to investigate how knowledge practices transform as they are tipped into an emergency mode: turbulent temporalities, atmospheres of urgency and the governmentalization of scientific expertise
Long abstract:
In our introduction to this panel, we elaborate the relation between “emergency epistemics” and “epistemic emergencies”. Emergencies caused by extreme weather events, pandemics, or large-scale accidents do not resemble epistemic black holes but are suffused with scientific knowledge practices. However, epistemic regimes are prone to change under exceptional circumstances. Normal science has to operate under heightened pressure, confronted with a demand to meet practical requirements of a constantly evolving, exceedingly uncertain situation. Against this background, we identify three tendencies that may serve as an analytical grid to investigate how knowledge practices transform as they are tipped into an emergency mode. First, turbulent temporalities: How do scientific routines evolve as they are required to navigate an extended emergency present that is at the same time characterized by accelerated change? Second, atmospheres of urgency: How does the affective order of scientific knowledge production and ideals of scientific practice become recalibrated as stressed humans, apparatuses and institutions become literally enveloped in their object of research? Third, the governmentalization of scientific expertise: How does science accommodate the political expectation to align knowledge procedures to the requirements of evaluating and intervening into a constantly critical present? Asking these questions may help us to understand the peculiar reciprocal capture of science and politics in emergency situations.
Short abstract:
Emergencies are frictional. The allure of engaging catastrophe through radically new epistemic frames is undone through local frictions that resist reductionist capture. Instead, thinking emergency epistemics requires cultivating improvised speculative practices of engagement with such friction
Long abstract:
In moments of acute crisis, the temptation to enact distinct epistemic frames is strong. The rise of anthropocene politics, climate change, and other perceived existential threats call for radical transformations of technoscientific practices. But the allure of such ‘emergency epistemics’ is deceptive. At moments of crisis, exceptional measures meet quotidian life-worlds and longstanding conditions of vulnerability. The frictions generated in these ‘sticky practical encounters’ subvert the emergency epistemics. ‘Actionable knowledge’ becomes a demand diverted and disrupted. To explore these processes and problematize the allure of emergency epistemics, this article historicizes humanitarian design responses. It does so focussing on the devastating 1970 Bhola cyclone in East Pakistan, present-day Bangladesh. This disaster shows the aspirations of an emergency epistemics, unable to get a grip over the disaster situation and subverted through a range of practices crossing scales. Instead of generating actionable knowledge on the terms given, the emergency opened a pathway for a situated improvising of humanitarian design responses grounded in systems-thinking, resilience, and appropriate technology precepts. We use this example to disaggregate how techno-scientific practices are recalibrated in creolized encounters with unexpected but also entirely unexceptional frictions that disasters do not create but crystalize. In doing so, we are especially concerned with reading techno-scientific engagements with humanitarian disasters through a postcolonial frame that critiques the dichotomy between exceptional emergency and technocratic management as well that between global and local. Instead, we conceptualize humanitarian design as necessarily involving the development of frictional speculative practices that stay with the world’s trouble.
Short abstract:
I examine how a particular urgency has shaped COVID 19-modeling as mode in which the state of emergency is inscribed into the practice of pandemic modeling. Following the interpermeation of temporality and affect, I sketch the way the urge of urgency is enacted as an instisting force.
Long abstract:
In my dissertation, I examine how the state of emergency during the COVID-19 pandemic has been inscribed into the practice of pandemic modeling. A key aspect of this inscription is a specific affective atmosphere that has shaped the process of knowledge production. In this presentation, I focus on an intensified urgency as prominent feature of this atmosphere reported by almost all the modelers I interviewed for my research.
As Niklas Luhmann has argued, omnipresent urgency is a consequence of functionally differentiated and highly complex societies, where factual, social, and temporal dimensions mutually constrain each other, leading to time scarcity and suboptimal decisions. However, scholars in the governing-emergencies debate have pointed out that urgency intensifies in emergency situations in specific ways. At the core of emergency practices, the urge of urgency acts as an insisting force in which temporality and affectivity interpermeate each other.
In my presentation, I outline the urgency of COVID-19 modeling in three steps, exploring the interpermeation of temporality and affectivity. After examining the literature on urgency with regard to conceptual points of connection, I show, on this basis, a recursive relationship between the urgency of modeling practice and political practice. I then turn my attention to deadlines as an element that not only plays a central role in the creation of urgency in modeling practice but also interweaves temporality and affectivity in a way that enables the accelerated production of emergency knowledge.
Short abstract:
What constitutes “real time” data in an epidemic? Based on expert interviews I argue that it is a contingent actualization of the present that opens it up as a space of intervention. Therein “real time” is not simply an unreachable ideal but a reflection on the extensibility of the present.
Long abstract:
The term “epidemic situation” has two meanings: First, as in the phrase “do we have a situation?”, it denotes the presence of an emergency, in this case an infectious threat to public health. In this meaning the whole duration of the health emergency surrounding Covid-19 is “a situation”. At the same time, the term also denotes a more punctualized representation of the occurrence of infectious disease or the spread of a pathogen within a certain space at a given time, that is, yesterday’s situation may not be today’s. While the first meaning broadly activates emergency governance technologies and their associated knowledge practices, the second meaning works towards enacting the present situation as an epistemic object within those practices. Within this project of capturing, assessing, and representing the given epidemic situation the notion of “real time” data takes center stage. Drawing on interviews with public health officials and epidemic intelligence experts, in this paper I examine what constitutes “real time” situational data in a public health emergency. Adapting Luhmann’s (1976) notion of “present pasts” and “present futures”, I argue that the epidemic situation enacts a present present, that is a contingent actualization of the present that opens it up as a space of intervention. Furthermore, I argue that “real time” is not simply an unreachable ideal forever in conflict with the temporal realities of disease and data management but a reflection on the extensibility of the present, that is, how long the representation remains “present enough”.