Thesis (Ph. D.)--Johns Hopkins University, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-210).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of San Diego, 1999. / "List of publications:" leaves 99-101. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-106).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton University, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 413-421).

This thesis takes a theoretical framework constructed for transdisciplinary research within different natural science disciplines and investigates what kind of new knowledge is produced when this framework is applied to projects at the interface of art and natural science. The main case study is “Sauti ya Wakulima – The Voice of the Farmers”, which involves collaboration with another intervention artist, and with natural scientists and farmers. This is a collaborative knowledge project with small-scale urban as well as rural farmers in Tanzania who have created an online community archive of their farming practices by using mobile phones to upload images and sounds onto a website. The research uses an open-ended participatory methodology that gives the participants as much creative agency as possible within the given power structures and practical and technical parameters. A second work examined is the Climate Hope Garden, an installation by the author in collaboration with ecologists and climate scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETHZ). The installation consisted of a garden grown in climate-controlled chambers based on the climatic conditions proposed by IPCC climate scenarios. The project aimed to enact these scenarios on a spatial and temporal scale to which visitors could relate. Transdisciplinary research has become a key reference point in funding proposals. Despite many references in the literature, and calls for research involving both the natural sciences and humanities to solve complex world problems such as adaptation to climate change, there seems to be little consensus about exactly what kind of knowledge might be produced from such projects, and how transdisciplinary research proposals might be evaluated, especially those at the interface of art and the natural sciences. Several theoretical frameworks have been suggested for designing transdisciplinary research between and within scientific disciplines, or between the natural and social sciences and humanities. The present study applies the framework proposed by Christian Pohl and Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn (2007) to a real-world transdisciplinary art-science project in a development context in order to examine the balance between the collective, locally embodied experience and the nomothetic knowledge that arises from it. This thesis found that transdisciplinarity is a different question from that of types of knowledge on the nomothetic-idiographic scale. Transdisciplinarity is a pragmatic question of definitions and inherited boundaries of disciplines. The framework categories do not differentiate between nomothetic and idiographic, just to which part of the problem-solving puzzle they fit. This is perfectly valid for goal-oriented, problem-solving research and can be applied to art-science research, but there are other ways of describing this work, such as using a philosophical description of the knowing process which comes closer to encompassing the richness of the knowledge produced. It is in this sense that the new type of knowledge generated by the transdisciplinary projects required an expansion of the given theoretical framework.

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This research examines scientific productivity among authors in natural scientific reference groups. A broad literature review surveys models of knowledge production, including measures of scientific products at different levels of abstraction. Data is drawn from authors in ten specialty areas, elites identified by co-citation analysis. These co-citation clusters are analyzed in general, in disciplinary sets, and as specialty groups. Results show that variance in the productivity of elite authors is not predictable on the basis of stratification variables. Descriptive differences in disciplines and specialties reflect contextual diversity in the social production of scientific knowledge. Differences in average annual paper publication, citation and highly cited paper publication do not correspond to differences in career age, job sector or prestige of highest degree. In general, stratification by experience and affiliation is not reflected in the variation of bibliometric measures of scientific productivity. This suggests that co-citation clusters are partially comparable to general populations of science, since author productivity is not simply predicted on the basis of social stratification for either type of population. Co-citation cluster authors are heterogeneous, like scientists in general, and their bibliometric differences do not correspond to variation in experience or affiliation. / Master of Science

The legitimation of science is an increasingly important issue in science studies. In this thesis, I examine the legitimation issue in a non-Euroamerican setting within the context of the Islamization of knowledge debate. The Islamization of knowledge debate emerged within the context of the perceived crisis of Islamic civilizational and concomitant crisis the intellectuals. Within the Islamization of knowledge, I describe three distinct approaches which I label traditional, indigenization, and nativization approaches. The legitimation used by the advocates of the Islamization of knowledge changed over time. The change is due to the increasing legitimacy and power the Islamization of knowledge gained in the last two decades. This increasing legitimacy has led to the exclusion the most traditional views on science and to disciplinary infighting between advocates of the different Islamization strategies. Each approach to science uses different legitimation strategies and has different objectives. The advocates of traditional approach are trying to maintain the status quo. The advocates of the indigenization approach are trying to change power relationships in their favor by constructing themselves as the modern ulama who would make policy-decisions based on their possession of knowledge relevant to Islamic civilization. The advocates of the nativization approach are trying to change power relationships in their favor by reconstructing science from its epistemological foundations using Islamic concepts. / Master of Science