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- Convenors:
-
Libuše Hannah Vepřek
(University of Tübingen)
Anne Dippel (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Posthumanism
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Hierarchies of knowledge productions are in a mode of reversal. We invite researchers to discuss how scientists want to heal the world, how microbes, hardware and data are dictating rules and citizens break rules in order to make and shape knowledge in the digital era of the Anthropocene.
Long Abstract:
From citizen scientists to shaman cosmologists, from rational scientists to esoteric conspiracists, hierarchies of knowledge productions seem in a mode of reversal. While speed and capability of producing new knowledge increase, rules that guarantee trust and reliability seem to be breaking. Disruptions of academic modes of reasoning emerge on the basis of Moore's Law, mimicking the dynamics of technological development. While science projects grant open access to the public, from citizen science participation to public source code, the privatization of knowledge through patenting and secrecy (Jones 2014), the capitalization of public goods are inflational. Simultaneously, symmetrical concepts of knowledge emerge, yet old hierarchies are reproduced. Depending on the observer, digital modes of capitalism turn into a fairytale or a nightmare for those who actively seek to give voice to the mute within the Anthropocene (Haraway 1997).
We are looking for researchers, who study how and under which circumstances current shifts are happening. We invite scholars who do research amongst and with humans, non-humans and other-than-humans (Haraway 1997, De La Cadena 2014), investigating knowledge productions that reverse, subvert and break with the established rulebook of purification and mediation in the modern and post-modern conceptions of knowledge (Latour 1991). We want to discuss technical disruptions and social ruptures, how scientists want to heal the world, how microbes, hardware and data dictate rules and citizens break rules in order to make and shape knowledge. All researchers who critically study engagements in knowledge making of biospheres and technospheres are invited to this panel.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Anne Dippel (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores options for an anthropology of engagement. I am asking, how digital tools can support ethnographic inventions of culture, help to translate our knowledge for a broader audience, and bring order into the vast archives of artifacts, as well as recorded and written sources.
Paper long abstract:
From Fridays for Futures to Citizen Science Games: All over the world we see how social media can be used as tools of empowerment, engagement and resistance, as modes of knowledge production and distribution. We also see that rules of knowledge-making are changing, that new phenomena are appearing on the scene, all within new intra-actions (Karen Barad) of hitherto invisible actors. What role, options and possibilities have anthropologists to explore and nurture contemporary debates on what knowledge production means? How can these new modes and tools support our ethnographic “inventions of culture” (Roy Wagner), even help us to bring order into the vast archives of artifacts, as well as recorded and written sources?
To explore the options of our discipline, we need to understand how digital gadgets work, and what informatic code and media actually do, when in action. Taking these aspects as a starting point, I want to discuss future options and bring the contemporary in resonance with the origins of European folklore studies in the 19th and 20th century, where citizen scientists were seen and widely used as lay experts and supportive researchers for broader empirical research projects. These historic enterprises come close to today’s visions and realizations of citizen science. In discussing the scope of the observed correlations I want to end my preliminary sketch for a new research project by reflecting how the three-cornered constellation (Laura Nader) of citizens, science and knowledge is re-negotiated in the digital era.
Rebecca Carlson (Toyo University)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a comparison between Twitter citizen science in Japan and the hydroxychloroquine controversy, along with ethnographic data collection in a Japanese bioscience laboratory in Tokyo, this paper will explore virtual disruptions to scientific truth-making in the time of a pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
Typically, science moves through well-worn channels of competence building, data collection and peer reviewed publication in scientific journals. Online formats such as Twitter, along with blogs, and even preprint servers, however, are circumventing these more established tracks of scientific communication and production. During the COVID-19 outbreak, discussions on Twitter in particular reflected changing modes of discourse about scientific practice, and biological and epidemiological discoveries, as well as public engagement with the facts of science. These were heightened by a public health emergency in which scientists had a privileged position to create and substantiate knowledge that would guide global policy decisions and shape daily human behavior around the world.
But as amateurs began doing and distributing science more visibly, and discrete datasets circulated with ever increasing speed online, scientists debated the disruption of entrenched methods for fixing quality, consensus and truth in full view of, and in conversation with, the public sphere. Even so, this process of disruption was shaped by established disciplinary networks, just as it was largely contained in linguistic, national and disciplinary communities. What then do these online contentions tell us about the taken-for-granted practice of science? What might they reveal about the possibility for a more interconnected public and global science in the future? Drawing on a comparison between Twitter epidemiological citizen science in Japan and the hydroxychloroquine controversy, along with ethnographic data collection in a Japanese bioscience laboratory in Tokyo, this paper will explore virtual disruptions to scientific truth-making in the time of a pandemic.
Libuše Hannah Vepřek (University of Tübingen)
Paper short abstract:
This work explores how citizen scientists renegotiate the inscriptions of projects located between science and games and how (citizen) science can be meaningful beyond knowledge production, as a form of coping with everyday life marked by challenges such as incurable disease or an ongoing pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
While advocates of citizen science argue that it democratizes science by opening up knowledge production to society, others criticize that citizen science projects both reproduce hierarchies and exploit volunteers without letting them participate in the actual step of knowledge production.
This paper, in contrast, proposes another approach to discussing citizen science, changing the focus from power relations and potential impact on traditional scientific roles to the volunteer participants themselves. Based on ethnographic research of two online citizen science games, I investigate how participants perceive the projects and what meanings they ascribe to them. This perspective shows how the in-betweenness of these projects - between science and games - allows participants to adopt the systems in their own way while at the same time rejecting their designation as "games". I argue that this rejection is linked to the motivation and meaning of contribution to citizen science as a form of enduring the everyday in which participants face unresolvable challenges, in this case a still-incurable disease. Here, citizen science allows them to feel less helpless by contributing to research that aims at finding a treatment or cure, as well as to feel empowered to actively do something to help affected relatives or friends or, preventatively, themselves. The meaning of citizen science as a form of coping with everyday life also became particularly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic: Unprecedented numbers of volunteers started to participate in various coronavirus-related research projects in order to "do something" and overcome their perceived powerlessness.
Anne-Sophie Reichert (University of Chicago)
Paper short abstract:
Contrary to common perception, dancers are not only artists but can be researchers. This paper elaborates on the research practice and knowledge production of such dancers between the arts and sciences and discusses the larger trend to learn and borrow from the arts for science and society.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2016, I have observed and collaborated with an international group of dance researchers that form the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC). The ISSC studies embodied expertise and claims that the resulting knowledge can aid science and society. Meeting in local and virtual CoLaboratories, the dancers have more flexibility in their research protocols and experimental set-ups than scientists studying comparable phenomena in the academy. Yet, resources and recognition are scant because as artists, they are on the bottom of the knowledge hierarchy.
The idea to think of art in general and dance in specific as experimentation or research practice is en vogue and might appear as just another spin of the knowledge economy. However, the history of contemporary dance suggests that the practice emerged as a mode of research that investigated human embodiment in close collaboration with natural and social scientists in the late 19th century. With an increasing separation of the arts and sciences, and the turn to behaviorism and cognitivism in psychology, the experience-based research of the dancers diminished in scientific value and put dancers in the place in which we perceive them today: as expressive rather than as inventive of new knowledge.
I elaborate on the details of how dancers research and produce knowledge and compare their work to similar research in the sciences proper. Furthermore, I situate the work of the ISSC in a discussion of the larger trend to learn and borrow from the knowledge of the arts.
Ana Cristina Lopes (Stanford University)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will explore a few case studies that involve laboratory research on highly-advanced Tibetan Buddhist meditators to discuss the emergence of new epistemologies and a new model of being a scientist: the Buddhist scientist.
Paper long abstract:
As is well documented, the encounter between Buddhism and Western systems of thought has a long history that has unfolded through stages in many different directions. The relatively recent laboratory research experiments on contemplative practices derived from Buddhism conducted at major research institutions around the world point to a crucial moment in the history of this encounter. By bringing Buddhist contemplative practices to the laboratory, these research institutions have taken this encounter to a whole different level, creating a series of displacements (Latour 1983) that have upset seemingly well-established boundaries and hierarchies between the domains of religion and secularity, tradition and modernity, first-person and third-person observation and so forth. By exploring a few case studies that involve laboratory research on highly-advanced Tibetan Buddhist meditators in connection to the Mind & Life Institute, and their derivative inscribed products (scientific articles, dharma books, popular science books, articles in popular media), this presentation will discuss how, through various media, or better yet “layers” of translation, contemplative practices are apprehended as scientific objects differently in distinct contexts, engendering the creation of multiple networks, or realities (Mol 2002) in connection with the scientific, Buddhist, and popular spheres. Such realities, despite being intimately related to each other, do not entirely match-up. How these realities and actors connect, or partially connect (Strathern 2004 [1991]) points to the emergence of new epistemologies and a new model of being a scientist: the Buddhist scientist.