AAG Conference, Las Vegas, 22-27 March 2009
Call for Papers
Modest Witnesses: Fieldwork, Indigenous Knowledges, and Truth-Making
Organisers:
Charlotte Chambers (University of Otago)
Innes M. Keighren (Edinburgh University)
Since at least the seventeenth century, claims to objectivity in science
have been linked to the presentation of the self as the modest and humble
witness of nature. As Steven Shapin, Simon Shaffer, Donna Haraway, and
others have shown, these affectations defined the role of the scientist as
the “legitimate and authorized ventriloquist for the object world”
(Haraway, 1997: 24). The conflation of modesty and objectivity was,
moreover, a situated concern—linked to the socially regulated space of the
laboratory, where the world was observed in abstract. What, though, of the
geographer, explorer, and traveller who acquired knowledge ‘in the field’?
How did (and do) geographers seek to establish the credibility of such
knowledge?
This session seeks to interrogate the epistemological bases of claims to
truth in the context of fieldwork and travel. How is it that geographers
evaluate the relative significance of direct observation, oral and textual
testimonies of informants, and indigenous or ‘local’ knowledges? How does
knowledge acquired in the field become, through a series of epistemic and
material translations, established as reliable? How is it that the
testimony of travellers, explorers, and geographers in the field continues
to serve as the basis for understandings of ‘out-of-the-way’ places (Tsing
1993: 27) and, through the published versions of work, establish their
accounts as ‘truth’?
Potential topics that papers could focus upon include (but are not limited
to):
- the social and disciplinary regulation of fieldwork practice
- evaluating ‘scientific’ perspectives and ‘indigenous’ knowledges
- historical perspectives on travel and truth-making
- mixing methodologies in the context of fieldwork and data collection
Potential session participants are invited to send an abstract of no more
than 250 words to Charlotte Chambers ([log in to unmask]) by 3
October 2008 at the latest.
References:
Haraway, D. J. (1997) [log in to unmask]
FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™, New York City: Routledge.
Tsing, A. L. (1993) In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an
Out-of-the-way Place, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Dr Charlotte Chambers
Lecturer
e Iho Whenua / Department of Geography
Te Whare Wanaka o Otago / University of Otago
email: [log in to unmask]
phone: +64-3-479-9126
fax: +64-3-479-9037
postal: P.O. Box 56, Dunedin
AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND
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