Imaginary magnitude

This CFP just in through a mailinglist. Have a look at it. Or ignore it.

Call for Papers

Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and
Technology, Stanford University

“Agnotology:  The Cultural Production of Ignorance”
  
Professors Londa Schiebinger and Robert Proctor seek papers for the
preparation of a volume introducing a new theoretical perspective and
methodology - agnotology, the cultural production of ignorance-into
interdisciplinary science studies. Papers should explore how ignorance is
produced or maintained in diverse settings, through (for example)
deliberate or inadvertent neglect, secrecy and suppression, document
destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical
selectivity and forgetfulness. The point is to develop a taxonomy of
understandings and uses of ignorance, but also tools for understanding how
and why diverse forms of knowledge do not or did not “come to be” or are
delayed or neglected at different points in history. Examples include the
ignorance of cancer hazards caused by the “doubt” peddled by trade
associations (Brown and Williamson’s “doubt is our product”), the
non-transfer of birth control technologies from colonial outposts to
imperial centers (by virtue of successive chains of disinterest and
suppression), the non-development of certain technologies by virtue of
structural apathies or disinterest, impacts of disciplinarity on
agnotogenesis, etc.  The proposed volume is exploratory and open-ended,
with the purpose of coming to grips with how ignorance has been
understood, created, and ignored, linking this also to allied creations of
secrecy, uncertainty, confusion, silence, forgetfulness, etc - especially
as these pertain to scientific inquiries and outcomes. The idea is that a
great deal of attention has been given to epistemology (the study of how
we know), when “how or why we don’t know” is often at least as
interesting-and remarkably undertheorized by comparison.

While the volume will focus on science, the general approach will also be
taken up in other disciplines, including cultural studies, history,
literary studies, anthropology, and sociology.
Paper proposals should include a working title plus a 300 word abstract.
Please send to Londa Schiebinger at schiebinger@stanford.edu by August 30,
2005.

Anne Galloway is also commenting on Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s post on the present state of STS (related post here). Among other things, she argues about studying emerging tech, rather than other technology that “the primary advantage of studying emerging tech is to identity points of intervention before products are built and sold”. While that may be so, I think the critique about a pre-occupation with emergin technologies has something to it.

Presently, I am engaged in a study of the food industry sector from 1940 until today. In some ways, it is an emerging tech sector: irradiation, deep freeze, microwaves ovens, longer chains of transport, nutrition science entered the scene or became more useful. On the other hand, it is - at least in Sweden since the 1960’s - a quite stable sector. And I think it is important to analyze these things, even thought they are already made and sold (and how ’stable’ is a product, even after it has been designed and sold, that’s what I would like to know).

Even though the products - a package of sausages - are “built and sold”, the surrounding policy landscape can change, and in some cases such as the food sector it also ought to change, and perhaps faster than what is the case. Non-change plays into the hands of the big companies in this sector. Non-study of this “non-emerging tech” sector by STS people is not a very good thing. I do have the feeling that the STS heard that run off to the next new technology every once in a while is a bit too large.

The Prince of Wales seems to be advocating coffee enemas (what?) and carrot juice as cancer treatment, and the press gives him many chances of spreading the ideas. Michael Baum is pissed off, but in a gentle, British manner (BMJ).

Now, what should he be most angry about: The Prince or the uncritical media coverage?

Elizabeth Lane Lawley make some bold predictions about the use of blogs for creating contacts in the academic world. Blogs

are actually more important to us in terms of collegiality than the connections we have to people that we work with. I “know” Jill and Seb better (at least professionally) than I know most of the people in my hallway. I think this will be increasingly the case for academics—social software tools will foster and support collaborative networks that cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and those networks will become the important spaces in which creativity research develop.

(my emphasis)

A quite substantial claim, actually. One would like her to be right - naturally, since we are all bloggers here, but one would like some kind of data to support this kind of projections in to the future.

Sure, Liz knows Jill and Seb. Right. Fun for them. Perhaps they would not have met without blogging. But how many academic collaborations have come out of blogging, that would not have come out of the other arenas where academics mingle? Saying that social software is crucial for this thing is … well, a bit odd. In what way is it different to saying that email is responsible for me being able to co-author a paper with someone on another continent, or that paper, printing and pens were crucial in developing the new science in the scientific revolution? (As if truth had no social history, but just a tool history …)

Saying that blogging is of great importance is a bit like saying pen-and-paper was important to Henry Oldenburg. Sure it was, but the analys of the networks of communication that he constructed could not stop there.

I follow a lot of blogs run by other scholars. In that way I keep track of what they are doing, and sometimes get impulses for my own work. Some of these scholars, like Alex, I knew about before blogging, some, like Susanne, I met through blogging. Perhaps, I might even some day co-author a paper or develop a course with someone I met through blogging. But I communicate, mingle, gossip, publish in many other ways.

Elizabeth Lane Lawley is right about one thing: sometimes, we care more about our fellow comrades in our communities of practice, than we care about the people that happen to be available at our department. Such networks that cross various boundaries are sometimes where the important action is in the scholarly world. That is an interesting phenomenon in its own right. One that should be analyzed in detail. Why just study how blogging affects such communication?

I can’t see that it is really obvious that blogging will make such collaboration take a quantum leap in a way that did not happen when other forms of communication where introduced. Sure, blogging facilitate communication among scholars. But so did cheap international airplane tickets, e-mail, fax, telegraphy, scientific conferences, cafés and a whole group of other technologies and social meeting places used by scientists when they want to meet new or old collaborative partners. What makes blogging so different?

Scholars love to gossip. They communicate, they build up networks. They will use a whole range of tools in doing this. Blogging is just one of these tools.

I would not be surprised if things like Arxiv, PLoS, and the Berlin declaration are signs that tell us that other factors than blogging are important in the emergence of a new landscape of scholarly communications.

An alternative scenario is that blogging is instead used for connecting scholars with audiences in various places outside of the communities of practice that are important for us as scientists. Such connections are indeed important, but they are something else than the meeting of scholars that Elizabeth Lane Lawley envisions.

I have argued earlier that for the fields of technology studies and technology, not much inter-culture discussion is going on via blogs; blogs aren’t perhaps by automatic the trading zones some would like them to be.

I am still a bit sceptical about blogs being the revolution in scholarly communication some think it will be. I hope I will turn out to be wrong, since I’m a blogger myself.

Vinyl data

[Via Dabitch.]