Marine biologist Daniel Pauly’s TED talk gives us one example of how scientific practices are normative: establish, relate to, or can be derived from accepted standards. We’ve already talked about this using Bourdieu’s model of accumulating scientific cultural capital, but Rouse approaches the same issue from a philosophical perspective. Rouse’s main question is how does the […]

Ten minutes for the good of the order (Brent Maher). Before we get to Rabinow, we need to understand some Michel Foucault. Foucault’s ideas lie at the heart of contemporary critical thought, and anthropologist Paul Rabinow extended Foucault’s thinking in his concepts of biosociality, biopower, and biopolitics. For Foucault, knowledge is a power structure, disciplining […]

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Google Doc In this chapter, Edwards explains how to build a stable, reliable body of knowledge on climate change, a process that he refers to as infrastructural inversion: “constantly unpacking, re-examining, and revising both historical evidence and predictive models” (Edwards 2010:398).  This involves: 1) making knowledge work – testing […]

Parameters and Tuning In terms of models, especially the global climate ones, it’s all about the parameters: the “fuzzy boundary between data, theory, and algorithms, a place deep within the practical, everyday work of general circulation modeling where modelers combine measured quantities with code to calculate the effects of processes too small, too complex, or […]