23,125 research outputs found
Rethinking Scientific Habitus: Toward a Theory of Embodiment, Institutions, and Stratification of Science
No full textPierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has been largely absent in Science and Technology Studies (STS) despite its potential usefulness. In this essay, I develop the concept of scientific habitus as a useful way to think about scientific practices. I argue that scientific habitus may offer three contributions that illuminate scientists’ own micro-practices in relation to meso- and macro-level dynamics in the scientific field. First, the concept enables us to think of scientists’ worldviews and bodily techniques as objects of STS analysis. While the majority of STS scholars have focused on the construction of knowledge, scientific habitus allows us to study the construction of the scientists’ body and mind. Secondly, scientific habitus links individual practices with institutional contexts; it highlights how the micro-practices of individuals in scientific laboratories reflect and reproduce macro-social structural power dynamics. Third, scientific habitus reveals mechanisms of stratification within the scientific field. It helps unpack scientists’ practical decisions surrounding research topics, ideas, and data. It also helps explain why and how certain scientific projects are preferred and others left undone. Scientific habitus, therefore, has the potential to contribute to a more encompassing explanation of the relationship between societal structures and the internal logic of the scientific field
Invisibilizing politics: Accepting and legitimating ignorance in environmental sciences
No full textAlthough sociologists have explored how political and economic factors influence the formation of ignorance in science and technology, we know little about how scientists comply with external controls by abandoning their prior research and leaving scientific innovations incomplete. Most research in science and technology studies (STS) on ignorance has relied on structural and historical analyses, lacking in situ studies in scientific laboratories. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the habitus of ignorance as a mechanism of the social production of ignorance. Scientists have a set of dispositions that establish practical contexts enabling them to ignore particular scientific content. Leaders of the organization repeatedly legitimate the abandonment of unfinished projects, while ordinary laboratory scientists internalize the normalized view that the scientific field is inherently opportunistic and that unfunded research should be left undone. A cycle of legitimation and acceptance of ignorance by actors at distinctive positions within the organization provides a mechanism of social control of scientific knowledge. As the mechanism is habitually self-governed by the rules of the game of current scientific institutions, the result is an indirect, although deeply subjugating, invisible and consolidating form of political and economic domination of the scientific field.
"I Don't Care Who Rules in the White House": Boundary-Training in Science and Everyday Politics of Knowledge
No full textHow do scientists construct the meaning of science as oppositional to politics? How do the institutional contexts of scientists' work environment, training processes, and peer-group interactions reflect scientists' understanding of scientific practices, rules of the scientific field, and themselves as scientists? I argue that scientists' practice of boundary-work between science and politics is institutionally nurtured by a series of processes, which I call boundary-training. Drawing on ethnographic research at a molecular biology laboratory, this article reveals various tactics of boundary-training. Scientists are trained to routinely consume material infrastructure and produce massive scientific data. They internalize productivity-oriented academic life and valorize controllability in science labs to achieve this goal. Individuals' self-reliance and survival become core virtues of scientific enterprise. All combined, scientists are trained to believe that their works are irrelevant to social and political circumstances. This mundane depoliticization of science contributes to the consequence that the scientific field becoming a more efficient apparatus of political and economic powers.
Sustainability transitions in agri-food systems: insights from South Korea's universal free, eco-friendly school lunch program
No full textGovernment-sponsored school lunch programs have garnered attention from activists and policymakers for their potential to promote public health, sustainable diets, and food sovereignty. However, across country contexts, these programs often fall far short of their transformative potential. It is vital, then, to identify policies and organizing strategies that enable school lunch programs to be redesigned at the national scale. In this article, we use document analysis of historical newspapers and government data to examine the motivating factors and underlying conditions that allowed South Korea's universal free, eco-friendly (UFEF) school lunch program to become a tool for advancing social justice and ecological goals at the national scale. We analyze the socio-historical evolution and current status of the Korean school lunch program, combining the multi-level perspective with insights from environmental sociology and critical food studies, in order to shed light on the factors that enabled the program to become an innovative niche and articulate the opportunities and challenges it now faces. We identify the state-sponsored creation of what we call "precautionary infrastructure" as a key anchoring mechanism between the school food niche and agri-food regime. Precautionary infrastructure includes new supply chains, certification standards, and sourcing policies that provide a stable market for eco-friendly farms and small-scale producers, while minimizing the environmental health risks of school lunch by delivering organic and pesticide-free ingredients to on-site kitchens that serve free lunches to all students. This analysis offers insight into how public school-lunch programs can become protected niches that help drive sustainability transitions within agri-food systems.
녹색 화학의 형성과 학계, 산업, 정부의 Triple-Helix
No full text학위논문(석사) - 한국과학기술원 : 과학기술정책대학원, 2011.2, [ ii, 33 p. ]Green chemistry is a new scientific field which focuses on the design, manufacture, and use of chemical processes that could prevent pollution and at the same time improve yield efficiency. Since its creation in 1991, green chemistry marked a radical departure from previous EPA initiatives in emphasizing the prevention of pollution instead of cleaning it up after the fact. The few who have written on the emergence of green chemistry have not shed light on the political and economic motivations of green chemistry. As a new study of the emergence of green chemistry, this paper focuses on the triple helix of academia-industry-government which has been critical in the emergence of green chemistry. This article shows the relationship among governmental environmental policy, industrial participation, and academic activities by green chemists to deliberate on the implications of the emergence of green chemistry. This paper argues that academia, industry and government created a common ground during the emergence of green chemistry under the common goal of sustainable development. Green chemists produced the knowledge to improve the synthetic efficiency to prevent pollution, and the chemical industry used green chemistry research to increase the economic profitability of production system. This specific form of alliance was supported and maintained amid a changing national environmental policy toward pollution prevention and a self-regulatory framework. The story of green chemistry shows the exemplary case that confrontational triple helix entities could make the common ground by making a new scientific field.한국과학기술원 : 과학기술정책대학원
to Believer: What Leads People to Change Their Climate Views
No full textStudies have highlighted the political, economic, and psychological factors in the debate over anthropogenic climate change-a hegemony approach-but have rarely focused on the stories and possibilities of people's transitions from climate change non-believer to climate change believer. Based on publicly accessible narratives, this study examines the stories of those who have switched from non-believer to believer-a narrative approach-and the dilemmas involved in those switches. Our investigation illuminates that a transition to climate change believer is a cultural and moral matter based on changing social relations of knowledge and what people regard as ignorable. We find that narratives of transition commonly describe interrelated shifts in three social relational factors: the narrator's notions of self, material reality, and justice. We term this contextualized transformative experience a relational rupture. Our narrative approach thus contextualizes climate change denialism within a person's web of social relations, not the hegemony of climate change communication alone. Moreover, we suggest that, since public debate and polarization on scientific topics such as climate change, vaccination, and COVID-19 are socially situated, they may potentially be socially bridged.
A critical appraisal of diversity in digital knowledge production: Segregated inclusion on YouTube
No full textDiversity in knowledge production is a core challenge facing science communication. Despite extensive works showing how diversity has been undermined in science communication, little is known about to what extent social media augments or hinders diversity for science communication. This article addresses this gap by examining the profile and network diversities of knowledge producers on a popular social media platform-YouTube. We revealed the pattern of the juxtaposition of inclusiveness and segregation in this digital platform, which we define as "segregated inclusion." We found that diverse profiles are presented in digital knowledge production. However, the network among these knowledge producers reveals the rich-get-richer effect. At the intersection of profile and network diversities, we found a decrease in the overall profile diversity when we moved toward the center of the core producers. This segregated inclusion phenomenon questions how inequalities in science communication are replicated and amplified in relation to digital platforms.
Portrait of author David Foster at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 8 June 2011 /
No full textTitle from acquisitions documentation.; Part of the collection: Portraits of author David Foster at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 8 June 2011.; Acquired in digital format; access copy available online.; Mode of access: Online.; Photographed by a staff member of the National Library of Australia
Author David Foster with academic Jeff Doyle at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 8 June 2011 /
No full textTitle from acquisitions documentation.; Part of the collection: Portraits of author David Foster at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 8 June 2011.; Acquired in digital format; access copy available online.; Mode of access: Online.; Photographed by a staff member of the National Library of Australia
Author David Foster and academic Jeff Doyle at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 8 June 2011 /
No full textTitle from acquisitions documentation.; Part of the collection: Portraits of author David Foster at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 8 June 2011.; Acquired in digital format; access copy available online.; Mode of access: Online.; Photographed by a staff member of the National Library of Australia
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