Apologies for cross-posting
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Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual International
Conference
London 1-3 September 2010
Call for papers
Science, politics and the nature of environmental debates
The recent attention given to scientific discourses and
practices in providing effective guidance to global
environmental policies has shown that expert knowledge is
not exempt of politics. On the contrary, scientific
knowledge is the resulting product of continuous
epistemological negotiations occurring amongst scientists
as well as between scientists and non-scientists on what
scientific data mean.
The very recent controversy generated by the possible
manipulation of climate data by several climate scientists
a week before the Copenhagen summit can be seen as an
explicit demonstration of how politics and science are
intertwined and cannot be thought independently. Although
this event raised the awareness of non-scientists about
the uncertainties of climate sciences, how the interplay
between politics and science occurs is still largely
unquestioned and misunderstood. This miscomprehension has
significant impacts on the formulation and application of
environmental policies but also on how the non human world
is imagined. For example, the epistemic realm through
which scientific discourses and practices are produced and
articulated makes it possible for scientists ?to provide a
voice? (as a material semiotic approach suggests) to the
biophysical environment that is generally considered as
external to human societies and apolitical. In turn, the
predominance of scientific discourses and practices in
environmental NGOs and policy makers? circles when
engaging with the non-human world makes it rather
difficult to reorganise and challenge the power
relationships constituting environmental sciences and
politics.
By not engaging with the politics at the centre of the
production of knowledge as well as acknowledging its
impact on the comprehension of the non-human world,
environmental politics are building on shaky foundations
that can result in important local and international
policy failures, widely addressed by the
post-environmentalist critiques.
Thus, this session aims at bringing together contributions
that are seeking to interrogate and re-conceptualise the
relationships between politics, ?the political? and
science in environmental governance. Topics may include,
but are not limited to:
? How non-scientific epistemologies can give voice to
nonhumans and thus being part of a renewal of
environmental politics, as a non-foundationalist and
non-normative political view?
? What are the different relationships occurring in the
process of making scientific subjects political?
? How scientific practices and discourses could inform us
about the essence of the political?
? How knowing about the politics of science would improve
policy making and application?
Abstracts (250 words max) should be submitted, by email,
to session organisers Sébastien Nobert
([log in to unmask]) and Chiara Certomà
([log in to unmask]) by 1st of February at the latest.
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Chiara Certomà
Junior Research Fellow
Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies
Piazza Martiri della Liberta' 33
56127 Pisa, Italia
[log in to unmask]
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