As a humanistic scholar within an interdisciplinary school, I’m often put in a position to distinguish how the humanities differ from the social and natural sciences. There is a long tradition of distinguishing between these “two cultures,” with the most frequent point of focus, for humanists, being that they concern themselves with human meaning and […]
Archive for the ‘Science & society’ Category
Hydroxychloroquine, and other things (an STS perspective)
Posted in Science & society, tagged COVID-19, Hydroxychloroquine, medicine, Norman Doidge, pandemic politics, public communication of science, replication crisis, science and technology studies, science controversies, STS on August 20, 2020 | 4 Comments »
The Covid-19 pandemic has offered all kinds of interesting case studies for those who study controversies in science, technology, and medicine. Hydroxychloroquine is one of them. It’s a bit unusual in that it highlights how the left-liberal mediasphere has sometimes followed similar trajectories as more commonly found on the (Trumpist) political right. But it’s interesting […]
Covid-19 conspiracies and the media: or, Toward an epidemiology of media trust
Posted in Media ecology, Science & society, tagged Anomalies, Bruno Latour, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, Coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, epidemiology of media trust, epistemology, fake news, information regimes, infovirology, media, media ecology, media politics, media theory, media trust, mediasphere, post-truth, Q, QAnon, Steve Fuller on May 17, 2020 | 4 Comments »
The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it […]
Pandemic epistemology 2
Posted in Science & society, tagged Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, frontier science, interdisciplinarity, pandemic politics, pandemic response, sociology of science, Thomas Kuhn, transdisciplinarity on May 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been haunted by Ed Yong’s description of science from the Atlantic article “Why Coronavirus is So Confusing,” which I shared a few days ago: “This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our […]
Pandemic epistemology
Posted in Science & society, tagged Anomalies, anomalistics, Atlantic Monthly, conspiracies, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, media, mediasphere, pandemic politics, pandemics, public communication of science, public trust, science communication on April 30, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
One of the silver linings about the coronavirus pandemic is that it has made some people, and even institutions, more generous (at least temporarily). Among them are popular and academic journals that have removed their paywalls and offered their publications for free. (I shared one of my own articles in that category yesterday. The irony, […]
Lyme & beyond: a bibliographic resource
Posted in Science & society, tagged alternative health, Anomalies, anomalistics, Anthropocene, bugs, chronic Lyme disease, complementary health, conspiracies, ecological syndrome, fear of nature, global hum, health scares, hysteria, infectious diseases, institutional trust, Lyme disease, Lyme wars, medical establishment, medicine, modern syndromes, public health wars, scientific controversies, uncertainty on July 31, 2018 | 7 Comments »
Last updated on November 11, 2018 Immanence sometimes dips into areas of controversial or “boundary” science, which means areas of science whose interpretation is both publicly and scientifically contentious. While I don’t consider climate science to be all that scientifically controversial (though it is certainly politically controversial), and the general topics of “fake news,” “information war,” and […]
Skipping an Earthbeat
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Science & society, tagged Aaron Wildavsky, Anthropocene, Bill McGuire, dynamic earth, Earthbeat, earthquakes, environmentalism, fragile Earth, Gaia, geology, Mary Douglas, risk as culture, volcanoes on June 15, 2018 | 4 Comments »
Reading Bill McGuire‘s 2012 book Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes, I came across this description of the annual “pulse” called an “Earthbeat,” which is supposedly responsible for Earth’s preference for volcanic eruptions between November and April (also known as “volcano season”): rather like a beating heart, the Earth changes […]
Returning to Sedona
Posted in Eco-culture, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged Arizona, Claiming Sacred Ground, Coconino National Forest, eco-pilgrimage, ecological management, environmental management, heterotopia, landscape, National Forests, political ecology, Red Rock Country, sacred landscapes, Sedona, Sedona Verde Valley Red Rock National Monument, U. S. Forest Service, vortexes, vortices on November 20, 2016 | 1 Comment »
Three things have drawn me repeatedly to the red rock landscape around the small north-central Arizona city of Sedona. First, and most obvious, is the landscape itself, which counts among the most distinctive and stunningly beautiful in the world. Second is the set of processes that landscape has set in motion in the conditions of late capitalist […]
More transgressions
Posted in Anthropocene, Science & society, tagged Anthropocene, planetary boundaries, Will Steffen on January 16, 2015 | 1 Comment »
The journal Science has just released more news of planetary boundary transgression. (This is related to my post from a few days ago.) Specifically, of nine such boundaries connected to “processes and systems [that] regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth System,” four have been crossed. Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are […]
Dupré on process biology
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Science & society, tagged biology, John Dupré, philosophy of science, process philosophy on September 1, 2014 | 1 Comment »
Writing in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science blog Auxiliary Hypotheses, widely published University of Exeter philosopher John Dupré recently announced a project entitled A Process Ontology for Contemporary Biology (PROBIO). According to Dupré, who is director of Egenis, the Center for the Study of the Life Sciences (formerly the ESRC Center for Genomics and Society), […]
Anthropocene: Too serious for postmodern games
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Philosophy, Science & society, tagged Anthropocene, Clive Hamilton, environmental humanities, geology on August 18, 2014 | 6 Comments »
The following is a guest post by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. It continues the Immanence series “Debating the Anthropocene.” See here, here, and here for previous articles in the series. (And note that some lengthy comments have been added to the previous post by Jan Zalasiewicz, Kieran […]
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