Religie wordt vaak opgevat als een illusionaire macht waarmee onderscheid wordt gemaakt tussen het seculiere en het sacrale en daarmee tussen mensen die wel en mensen die niet uitverkoren zijn. Macht en geweld vallen in een dergelijke opvatting vrijwel samen. Aan de hand van het werk van Pierre Bourdieu laat ik zien dat dit leidt, hetzij tot een positie waarin ieder onderscheidend vermogen tussen wat waar of niet waar is verdwijnt, hetzij tot een positie waarin de criteria zo hoog worden (...) opgeschroefd dat waarheidsvinding nauwelijks mogelijk meer is. Tot slot verdedig ik een positie waarin religie begrepen wordt als een normatieve praktijk, waarin ook aan de uitoefening van macht een eigen plaats toekomt. (shrink)

Though the invocation to be “reflexive” is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to “turn back” and resituate our work—about how to engage with research subjects’ visions of the world and with our own theoretical models. Rather than a superficial rehearsal of researcher and interlocutor standpoints, I argue that “reflexivity” should help researchers theorize the social world in relational ways. To make this claim, I draw together the insights of feminist standpoint theory and Bourdieu’s reflexive (...) sociology to lay the foundation for a renewed reflexive project that centers epistemic privilege, the idea that positions of structural exclusion provide the best resources for theorizing social power. Reflexive sociology should consider interlocutors’ experiences of exclusion and contradiction, engaging with sites of alternative knowledge and incorporating them into the object of study. This type of reflexivity provides improved resources for relational theory building. I offer support for these theoretical arguments with a historical analysis of knowledge production in the feminist anti-violence movement. (shrink)

Some exceptional and surprising mistakes of scholarship made in the writings of a number of feminist academics (Ruth Bleier, Ruth Hubbard, Susan Bordo, Sandra Harding, and Rae Langton) are examined in detail. This essay offers the psychological hypothesis that these mistakes were the result of political passion and concludes with some remarks about the ability of the social sciences to study the effect of the politics of the researcher on the quality of his or her research.

: Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between "sex" and "gender" and "impairment" and "disability" as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases (among others) that (...) form disabled women's oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)

Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between “sex” and “gender” and “impairment” and “disability” as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases that form disabled women's (...) oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)

One way to articulate the promise of interdisciplinary research is in terms of the relationship between knowledge and ignorance. Disciplinary research yields deep knowledge of a circumscribed range of issues, but remains ignorant of those issues that stretch outside its purview. Because complex problems such as climate change do not respect disciplinary boundaries, disciplinary research responses to such problems are limited and partial. Interdisciplinary research responses, by contrast, integrate disciplinary perspectives by combining knowledge about different issues and as a result (...) reduce ignorance about more aspects of the problem. In this paper, we develop this idea and argue that while interdisciplinary research can help remediate damaging ignorance about complex problems, it also creates conditions in which other damaging forms of ignorance can arise. We illustrate this point in detail with three case studies before discussing three implications of our analysis for identifying and managing deleterio... (shrink)

Bruner shows that in cultural interactions, members of minority groups will learn to interact with members of majority groups more quickly—minorities tend to meet majorities more often as a brute fact of their respective numbers—and, as a result, may come to be disadvantaged in situations where they divide resources. In this paper, we discuss the implications of this effect for epistemic communities. We use evolutionary game theoretic methods to show that minority groups can end up disadvantaged in academic interactions like (...) bargaining and collaboration as a result of this effect. These outcomes are more likely, in our models, the smaller the minority group. They occur despite assumptions that majority and minority groups do not differ with respect to skill level, personality, preference, or competence of any sort. Furthermore, as we will argue, these disadvantaged outcomes for minority groups may negatively impact the progress of epistemic communities. (shrink)

For the past three decades or so, the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has shed light on the interrelationship between modern science and technology, on one side, and contemporary society, on the other. A majority of this knowledge and insights are situated in the context of Western societies, or more precisely, in economically and technologically advanced societies in Western Europe and North America. However, STS has much to offer to the discourse of science and technology in the Global (...) South, a territory characterized by developmental processes. Insights from different schools of thoughts in STS are arguably not only relevant but also applicable to unveil the root cause of problems that many developing societies are facing today. To make this possible, an STS-informed framework is developed to replace the Triple Helix model, which is currently a dominant perspective that prompts how science, technology, and innovation are structurally organized in the developing world. Two steps are taken in this agenda. First, limitations of the Triple Helix are exposed, and second, a new approach drawing on STS concepts is offered as an alternative model that takes into account structural, cultural, and epistemological features of technoscience. (shrink)

In this essay, I term the dominant educational paradigm of our time as scientific education and subject it to historical analysis in order to bring its tacit racial, colonial and Eurocentric biases into view. I subsume this cluster of problems under the general heading of “the problem of scientific education”, a problem simultaneously submerged deeply in the invisible background of current education and across its foreground inasmuch as it conditions daily educational practices beyond educators’ awareness. The delicate question to be (...) answered is: enclosed as we are within a scientific framing of our educational system, how can we find an alternative way of looking at this educational system that will help us resolve the problem of colonial, racial and cultural subordinations inherent in its scientific framing? (shrink)

Data science is not simply a method but an organising idea. Commitment to the new paradigm overrides concerns caused by collateral damage, and only a counterculture can constitute an effective critique. Understanding data science requires an appreciation of what algorithms actually do; in particular, how machine learning learns. The resulting ‘insight through opacity’ drives the observable problems of algorithmic discrimination and the evasion of due process. But attempts to stem the tide have not grasped the nature of data science as (...) both metaphysical and machinic. Data science strongly echoes the neoplatonism that informed the early science of Copernicus and Galileo. It appears to reveal a hidden mathematical order in the world that is superior to our direct experience. The new symmetry of these orderings is more compelling than the actual results. Data science does not only make possible a new way of knowing but acts directly on it; by converting predictions to pre-emptions, it becomes a machinic metaphysics. The people enrolled in this apparatus risk an abstraction of accountability and the production of ‘thoughtlessness’. Susceptibility to data science can be contested through critiques of science, especially standpoint theory, which opposes the ‘view from nowhere’ without abandoning the empirical methods. But a counterculture of data science must be material as well as discursive. Karen Barad’s idea of agential realism can reconfigure data science to produce both non-dualistic philosophy and participatory agency. An example of relevant praxis points to the real possibility of ‘machine learning for the people’. (shrink)

To a packed audience in Clark Hall, Sheila Jasanoff, a distinguished scholar and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science, gave the plenary address for “Where has STS Traveled,” a commemorative gathering of the fortieth anniversary of the inaugural meeting of the 4S. Not only was this meeting located in the very same room as the first gathering, but also many of the original members had traveled from far and wide to Cornell University to reminisce and reflect (...) on the academic field they had established, as well as imagine the possibilities of the next forty years. In response to a question about the direction of STS, Professor Jasanoff suggested that the 4S had not turned its reflective gaze inward to examine the politics of its own society, nor had it spent much effort interrogating the society’s contribution to social policy or enduring social problems. As I heard Jasanoff speak about our collective need for reflection and reflexivity, I had to wonder whether, and to what extent, we were ready to reflect on the subject matter of race and racism in this mostly color-blind field of inquiry. (shrink)

A widely touted approach to involving laypeople in science and technology policy-related decisions is the consensus conference. Virtually nothing written on the topic provides detailed discussion of the many steps from citizen recruitment to citizen report. Little attention is paid to how and why the mechanics of the consensus conference process might influence the diversity of the participants in theses fora, the quality of the deliberation in the citizen sessions, the experiences of the participants and organizers, and other outcomes that (...) affect democratic decision making within the conference and more broadly over the long term. As an aid to those interested in utilizing the consensus conference format, the authors outline in detail how they set about organizing their consensus conference on nanotechnology in the spring of 2005. They discuss what specific aspects of their consensus conference worked, and why, and also consider what they learned of relevance to future application. (shrink)

This essay examines the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska as sharing key similarities with modern feminist practice in science. Szymborska’s poetry invites such an analysis because of its interest in anthropology and the natural sciences, and because of its preoccupation with the creation, limitations, and effects of knowledge. I argue that Szymborska’s privileging of uncertainty, of the personal, the particular, and the ‘insignificant’, as well as her process- and question-oriented method of creating meaning aligns her with feminist science. Szymborska’s poetry explores (...) such key feminist ideals as contextualization of all knowledge, relationship of equality and unity of scientist and subject (expert and non-expert), coexistence of contradictions, and an emphasis on process and questioning rather than on knowledge and findings. Wislawa Szymborska practises in poetry the very same decentring of the patriarchal standards of expertise, objectivity, and absolute truth that is taking place in feminist science. (shrink)

This paper argues for seeing in-depth news coverage of political, social, and economic issues as “public policy pedagogy.” To develop my argument, I draw on Nancy Fraser’s democratic theory, which attends to social differences and does not assume that unity is a starting point or an end goal of public dialogue. Alongside the formation of “subaltern counterpublics”, alternative media outlets sometimes develop. There, members of alternative publics debate their interests and strategize about how to be heard in wider, mass-mediated public (...) arenas. I address the normative implications of this non-unitary, multiple-publics model for news journalism, analyzing how current conventions in mainstream news journalism can restrict public debate and impoverish the public policy pedagogy on offer. I illustrate my arguments with a case study of media coverage of the creation and implementation of a social justice curriculum in British Columbia, Canada. (shrink)

Given what we know about the nature of knowledge and scientific work it no longer makes sense to think of scientific knowledge as demarcated from “ordinary” knowledge through its methods or the characteristics of the scientific community. As the social studies of science have shown, boundaries become ambiguous when viewed close up so that science merges with ordinary knowledge. But does this mean that distinctions between knowledge claims rest on nothing more than social conventions, powerful as these might be? The (...) articles in this special issue address this question from a variety of perspectives, while this introduction sets out this broader framework and highlights the themes that unite the individual articles. Our central argument is that although boundary work is difficult, complex, and contingent, it is too important to be left to chance or tradition. We need to rescue expertise from the antiessentialist consensus that there is nothing but attribution. (shrink)

Can epistemologies anchor processes of social inequality? In this paper, we consider how epistemological dominance in science, engineering, and health fields perpetuates disadvantages for students who enter higher education with alternative epistemologies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Native American students enrolled at two US research universities who adhere to or revere indigenous epistemologies, we find that epistemological dominance in SE&H degree programs disadvantages students through three processes. First, it delegitimizes Native epistemologies and marginalizes and silences students who value them. Second, (...) in the process of imparting these dominant scientific epistemologies, SE&H courses sometimes require students to participate in pedagogical practices that challenge indigenous ways of knowing. Third, students encounter epistemological imperialism: most students in the sample are working to earn SE&H degrees in order to return to tribal communities to “give back,” yet, because the US laws regulating the practice of SE&H extend onto tribal lands, students must earn credentials in epistemologies that devalue, delegitimate, and threaten indigenous knowledge ways to practice on tribal lands. We examine how students navigate these experiences, discuss the implications of these findings for SE&H education, and describe how epistemological dominance may serve as a mechanism of inequality reproduction more broadly. (shrink)

Conventional, positivist science is not well suited for addressing the contemporary risk landscape. To address high-uncertainty, high-stakes risks, Funtowicz and Ravetz have called for a postnormal science. Two key characteristics of postnormal science are the involvement of an extended peer community and the deliberation of extended facts. The health research community has responded to the shortcomings of normal science with approaches to field research, known collectively as community-based participatory research. A review of case literature shows that although CBPR is not (...) inherently postnormal, it can be friendly to a postnormal approach. A postnormal CBPR practice would rely more heavily on a deliberative process, which engages a broad range of expertise, including experts in normal science, in decisions about data collection, analysis, and actions. (shrink)

Northern researchers and service providers espousing modernist theories of development in order to understand and aid countries and peoples of the South ignore their own non-universal starting points of knowledge and their own vested interests. Universal ethics are rejected in favor of situated ethics, while a modified empowerment development model for aiding women in the South based on poststructuralism requires building a bridge identity politics to promote participatory democracy and challenge Northern power knowledges.

Through exploring multiple contemporary conceptions of justice, this article illustrates that justice matters when considering outcomes in nongovernmental organization assistance. In environmental justice scholarship, the term justice has been underproblematized, assuming a tacit understanding of the concept as fairness or equitable distribution of environmental harms. Using the rebuilding of two heavily damaged poor and minority neighborhoods in post–Katrina New Orleans as case studies, this article makes evident the different conceptualizations of justice embedded within the strategies and techniques of NGOs and (...) community organizations. Examining both practices and outcomes, I argue that the definition of justice that NGOs implicitly or explicitly adopt in their strategies and technologies of assistance can lead to very different results in postdisaster neighborhood revitalization. For science and technology studies, conceptions of justice can help articulate a more critical social science that opens up the descriptive/normative divide. This is important in thinking about equitable social change and allied policy—as it applies not only to NGO assistance but also to other science and technology issues that intersect with marginalized communities as well. (shrink)

Analytic feminists are philosophers who believe that both philosophy and feminism are well served by using some of the concepts, theories and methods of analytic philosophy modified by feminist values and insights. By using ‘ analytic feminist’ to characterize their style of feminist philosophizing, these philosophers acknowledge their dual feminist and analytic roots and their intention to participate in the ongoing conversations within both traditions. In addition, the use of ‘ analytic feminist’ attempts to rebut two frequently made presumptions: that (...) feminist philosophy. (shrink)

I examine here Theory and Scholarship (taken to be formalized social scientific frameworks that seek to map out the real world and social actions in an objective fashion) via an autoethnographic lens. Chiefly, I ask how autoethnography as a research method reconfigures them: how may we extend knowledge using autoethnography? While much critique has centered on the "doing" (dispassionately?) versus "being" (going native?) of autoethnography, I argue that such a dichotomy is inherently false. Instead, doing is located within the ethnographer's (...) very being, so that a closer look at the autoethnographic research process is required, from conception to implementation to introspection. I attempt such a processual analysis here: drawing on an earlier social scientific project, I relate the intellectual and social process whereby it was translated into an autoethnography. Using a performative lens to illustrate the dialectical mode of doing and being in the research process, I intersperse portions of personal narrative with academic writing, to enable a disjunctural appreciation of the various layers of interpretation. While the epistemic framework I hold to here is indeed a poststructural one, privileging fragmentation and social situatedness, it also emphasizes continuity and interconnections in the research process. (shrink)