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- Convenors:
-
Franziska Zirker
(University of Marburg)
Finn Langbein (University of Marburg)
Sven Opitz (University of Marburg)
Leon Wolff (University of Marburg)
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- Discussant:
-
Tony Joakim Ananiassen Sandset
(University of Oslo)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
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 1Leon Wolff (University of Marburg) Sven Opitz (University of Marburg)
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.
Virga Popovaitė (Nord University)
Long abstract:
With this presentation, I analyze how the use of digital mapping platforms shapes the response capacity of Norwegian rescue services in the Norwegian Arctic and sub-Arctic. The services are based on cross-organizational collaboration, bringing digital maps to the forefront for action coordination. Maps have to be reliable, yet, they do not always act as intended, hampering efficiency of the response. My study is situated within more-than-human sociology and leans on three pillars: new materialism, actor-network theory, and critical cartography. With a regional focus on northern Norway, I investigate how maps are practiced within Norwegian rescue services. The findings reveal immense more-than-human networks required for maps to work the way they do. This widens the scope of knowledge production and (im)material interactions regarding search and rescue operations, which are human-centered and based on immediacy. The availability of mapping solutions has the potential to strengthen or weaken the response capacity. Through examples from maritime and land rescue services, I argue that maps generate conditional knowing, such as an absence, a possibility, or an estimation, thus influencing the rescue response capacity.
Anna Leander (Geneva Graduate Institute) Tania Mikaela Messell (FHNW) Jonathan Luke Austin
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.
Finn Langbein (University of Marburg)
Long abstract:
I examine how the experimental practice of COVID-19 simulations was affectively charged. I draw on Anderson's understanding of “affective atmospheres” to render experimental practices analytically accessible as force fields with their own space-times that elicit specific intensities. In Science and Technology Studies, this concept has already been adopted to investigate the affective dimension of experimental practice. Calkins (2023), for example, demonstrated how affective atmospheres of research sites infuse global hierarchies into research processes while simultaneously making room for insights emanating from unexpected places. I link this line of research with the debate on “governing emergencies” (Anderson/Adey/Graham) by describing the affective atmosphere inherent in COVID-19 simulations. I use excerpts from expert interviews to showcase four aspects that constitute the affective atmosphere of this form of crisis knowledge production. First, there is an acceleration of research practice corresponding to the temporality of the epistemic object, leading to tension and stress. Second, a shift in research logic from openness to closure can be observed: in the face of an uncertain, changeable and threatening object, the COVID-19 simulations did not primarily try to be eventfully affected but aimed at epistemic closure to generate evidence that was sufficient to make policy decisions. Third, researchers were transformed from post-heroic to heroic subjects through the immediate practical relevance of research results and their personal involvement in them. Fourth, a media public that was not always well-disposed towards simulation practice led to a paranoia towards the outside of science.
Franziska Zirker (University of Marburg)
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”.