Scientific knowledge is often relied upon for informing crucial societal decisions. Where this knowledge is uncertain, and/or where these decision are made amidst a contexted political landscape, science tends to become the focus of intense scrutiny, as has been evident throughout the history of climate change politics. One consequence is that instead of "scientising" decision-making, science itself becomes more explicitly politicised. This thesis argues that in order to contribute to contemporary debates about the governance of science, it is essential to move beyond the question of whether or not policy-relevant scientific knowledge is credibly and to examine how scientific knowledge is made to be credible. Drawing upon the concept of co-production and other insights from Science & Technology Studies (STS), this thesis presents a detailed examination of how research into the health impacts of climate change (infectious diseases especially) gradually gained in prominence in both public health and climate change circles. Particular analytical attention is paid to an epistemic community of climate change and health (CCH) researchers, following the ways in which they interacted with global political entities such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). Based upon in-depth interviews with actors intimately involved in CCH research, this thesis documents how the rise of CCH research influenced and was influenced by particular scientific and political contexts related to the governance of climate change as well as emerging infectious disease. The examination of a longstanding controversy surrounding CCH research reveals many socio-economic and political assumptions embedded in it, further demonstrating its contingency. However, despite that CCH research is both uncertain and contested, actors in the political world often need to know what the state-of-the-art of the field is. To examine the implications of this, the CCH controversy as treated by the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) is explored. Although IPCC follows a complicated set of procedures aimed at ensuring scientific and political legitimacy, this thesis demonstrates that values and normative judgements are important components of scientific assessments, helping to co-construct particular science-policy orderings at the expense of alternative ones. Amidst ongoing debates about how to shore-up the credibility of climate change science and politics, this thesis argues that the way in which IPCC assessments are currently performed, as well as their tendency to present findings as "consensus", may undermine their political and scientific credibility.

The workshop on Poros which forms the basis of this collection of papers was entitled ‘Archaeological ethnographies: charting a fi eld, devising methodologies’. Both the workshop and the present volume that resulted from it constitute attempts to establish a new fi eld, with its own methodologies and its own contested practices, at the interface of several existing disciplines and fi elds of research. My comment takes the workshop on Poros and its results as a starting point but intends to raise some relevant wider issues concerning the dynamics of academic practice. / <p>The journal is available online at www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney</p>

This dissertation considers the future convergence between gothic studies and humanism in the age of posthumanism and proposes “cyborgothic” as a new literary genre that heralds that future. The convergence under consideration is already in progress in that an encounter between human and non-human consistently inspires the two fields, questioning the nature of humans and the treatment of such non-human beings as cyborgs. Such questioning, often conducted within the boundary of humanities, persistently interprets non-human beings as either representing or helping human shortcomings. Accordingly, answers are human-orientated or even human-centered in many cases, and “cyborgothic,” generated out of retrospective investigation into gothic studies and prospective formulation of posthumanism, aims to present different, nonanthropocentric ways to view humans and non-humans on equal terms. The retrospective investigation into gothic studies focuses on Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful to retrieve a gothic aesthetics of the beautiful, and in the second chapter, examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein against Kant’s aesthetics to demonstrate how this gothic aesthetics becomes obsolete in the tradition of the sublime. This dissertation then addresses Bram Stoker’s Dracula along with Bruno Latour’s Science in Action to reveal problems in fabricating scientific knowledge, especially focusing on sacrifices made in the process. In the forth chapter, I examine Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith with William James’s pragmatism, and consider the question of how moral complications inherent in science have been handled in American society. The last chapter proposes Marge Piercy’s He, She and It as a same cyborgothic text, which tries to develop a way to acknowledge the presence of the cyborg—one that is at once aesthetical and ethical—so as to enable humans and cyborgs to relate each other on equal terms. Thus, “cyborgothic” is being required as a literary attempt to present the age of posthumanism that is no longer anthropocentric.

This dissertation seeks to articulate a framework for critiquing and reconstructing science education by fleshing out the relationships between science education, its ontological commitments to nature, and educational practices that promote justice and democracy. Drawing on theoretical and methodological resources from American Pragmatism and science studies, I offer a case study that evokes the practices of a residential outdoor science program in the Pacific Northwest. I suggest that these practices provide an opportunity to imagine how science education emerges differently when it abandons its commitments to a singular and authoritative Nature, and explore how this program provides empirical resources for building a theory of science education that is multinatural. Grasping the plurality of nature diminishes the tension between experiences and the world, recognizing the importance of the sciences to democratic action without positioning them as a singular source of authority. Multinaturalism then becomes an orienting concept for imagining and reconstructing more democratic and just practices of science education, practices that move away from the transmission of a cannon of white, Eurocentric knowledge, and towards the navigation of problems in dynamic worlds.

This dissertation examines the intersection between diasporic subjectivities and scientific knowledge production in the works of Shani Mootoo, Madeleine Thien, Larissa Lai, and Rita Wong. I read these authors as participating in a burgeoning scene of diasporic Canadian writing that draws on concepts and tropes derived from the life sciences to think through a broad constellation of issues relating to contemporary diasporic experience, from the role of biogenetic discourses in the diasporic search for ancestry, to the embodied dimensions of diasporic memory and trauma, to the role of diaspora communities in the decolonial struggle against the emergent forms of “biopower” that contemporary bioscience has enabled. As the first study to address this burgeoning topic in diasporic Canadian literature, this dissertation asks: Why are diasporic Canadian authors taking up bioscience as a key topos for the exploration of contemporary diasporic experiences? How is this engagement with the life sciences re-shaping current conversations about diasporic kinship, memory, and embodiment, and about the role of diasporic communities in contemporary struggles for environmental justice? Complicating frameworks that understand bioscience only as an instrument of what Foucault calls “biopower,” I argue that the works of Mootoo, Thien, Lai and Wong prompt us to rethink the ways in which queer, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental struggles might constructively interface with the life sciences to challenge emergent forms of biological essentialism and biopolitical control. I demonstrate that, by using bioscientific tropes to highlight the complex and open-ended life processes that shape the human body and the wider environment, these authors construct epistemologies that attend to the global networks of biopower through which neoimperialism operates while also acknowledging the interconnected ways in which living organisms and material substances destabilize these global flows. I argue that, in so doing, these authors position diasporic knowledge production as a crucial locus for the rethinking of relations between politics and ecology, and between humanist and scientific ways of knowing, that science studies scholars like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour and decolonial critics like Boaventura de Sousa Santos have identified as a central to contemporary struggles for environmental justice. Each chapter explores the work of one diasporic Canadian author in relation to a single, historically specific site of scientific knowledge production. Chapter one examines how Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night combines notions of gothic excess with a materialist emphasis on the material agencies that inhere through bodies and environments in order to disrupt the gendered and racial discourses propagated by imperial botany. Chapter two explores how Thien’s novels Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter draw on current debates around the neurobiology of memory and emotion to grapple, on one hand, with the fragmentation induced through diasporic trauma and, on the other, with the uncertainty of global risk culture. Chapter three examines how Lai’s Salt Fish Girl disrupts popular and scientific discourses concerning the genetic basis of diasporic ancestry to advance a model of kinship that is rooted not in a shared ethnic heritage, but in a shared immersion in a complex web of interactions that includes genetic, evolutionary, and environmental forces. Finally, chapter four examines how Rita Wong’s forage mobilizes contemporary debates around the spread of genetically modified organisms to stage a productive encounter between diasporic, Indigenous, and scientific knowledges. I argue that, in the process of engaging with these various scientific debates, these writers stage trenchant critiques of the colonial legacies and neo-imperial investments of contemporary bioscientific culture while also modeling more fruitful, ethical, and hopeful ways of engaging with scientific knowledge.

No description available.

The contentious topic of female circumcision brings together medical science, women's health activism, and national and international policy-making in pursuit of the common goal of protecting female bodies from harm. To date, most criticisms of female circumcision, practiced mainly in parts of Africa and Southwest Asia, have revolved around the dual issues of control of female bodies by a male-dominated social order and the health impacts surrounding the psychology of female sexuality and the functioning of female sex organs. As such, the recently-evolved campaign to eradicate female circumcision, alternatively termed "Female Genital Mutilation" (FGM), has formed into a discourse intertwining the politics of feminist activism with scientific knowledge and medical knowledge of the female body and sexuality. This project focuses on the ways in which this discourse constructs particular definitions of bodies and sexuality in a quest to generalize the practices of female circumcision as "harmful" and therefore dangerous. Given that the discourse aimed at eradicating practices of female circumcision, referred to in this study as "anti-FGM discourse," focuses mostly on harm done to women's bodies, this project critiques the assumption of universalism regarding female bodies and sexuality that is explicitly/implicitly embedded in such discourse. By questioning such universals, I look at the ways in which different stories regarding bodies and sexuality can emerge at the gaps of the anti-FGM discourse regarding female circumcision practices. I.e., are there other possible avenues for envisioning bodies which are subjugated and hence eliminated from the view by their rhetoric? While the main assumption within anti-FGM discourse is that bodies and sexuality are naturally given and therefore universal, contemporary theories in STS and feminism have stressed that bodies and sexualities are figures of historical and political performances, and that knowledge about them is locally situated. These perspectives redirect the typical assumption of bodies and sexuality as simply "biological" to a view of bodies as products of cultural imagination. This project shows that such perspectives have profound implications for understanding female circumcision practices by allowing different body narratives to emerge in the gaps of already established "truths." / Ph. D.

Esta dissertação é fruto de uma pesquisa realizada em uma enfermaria feminina de clínica médica de um hospital universitário público da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Nesta pesquisa, busquei uma compreensão sobre as relações e articulações do trabalho médico e de enfermagem. Partindo da perspectiva hermenêutica, busquei estabelecer conversações com, e entre, sujeitos de pesquisa, grupos profissionais, o próprio estabelecimento hospitalar, a biomedicina - seus fatos e artefatos. Ademais, foram inspiradores para a desejada compreensão os science studies e seus exemplos de como acompanhar e interpretar especialistas em seus campos de prática. A pesquisa, especificamente, foi construída e desenvolvida com o uso de métodos qualitativos, como a observação etnográfica e entrevistas semiestruturadas, tendo a primeira servido de fundamentação para a segunda. O exercício interpretativo posto em curso desde a projeção da pesquisa não se esgotou com o seu término: teve continuidade e se fez presente na produção desta dissertação, ao modo de uma narrativa. Para sustentar a opção pela narrativa, assumo-a como um relato de risco, da maneira como sugere Latour para se descrever as redes e seus atores. Assim, pretendi incluir no texto a intensa movimentação e toda a sorte de eventos que se colocam como desafio às práticas destes profissionais, além de conferir agência aos sujeitos e às coisas. Dentro desta proposta, a narrativa traz um prólogo em que se posiciona entre os trabalhos do campo da Saúde Coletiva; em sua introdução, oferece um resumo ampliado de sua construção; no capítulo um, discorre sobre como o pesquisador negociou a existência da pesquisa com a instituição hospitalar, e trata também de um de seus fundamentos, a hermenêutica filosófica, em conversações com Rorty e Ayres. No segundo, traz um relato sobre a constituição coletiva de médicos e enfermeiros a partir de Fleck. Convida, ainda, um dos sujeitos da pesquisa a oferecer um conceito que ilumina as tensões das relações cotidianas entre enfermeiras e médicos; apresenta, a partir do conceito oferecido, alguns retratos destas relações. No terceiro, o caso de uma usuária que teve o prolongamento de sua vida decidida em uma reunião e um telefonema, é usado com o conceito de paradigma, em Kuhn, para dizer sobre as visões de mundo de médicos e enfermeiras. No quarto, tenta tornar dinâmica a constituição coletiva de médicos e enfermeiras ao relacioná-la às suas visões de mundo, aos processos de enculturação dos dois grupos profissionais; para isso recorre ao conceito de conhecimento tácito e às distintas categorias de expertise, como desenvolvidas por Collins e Evans. Diz sobre o que médicos e enfermeiras sabem do que estão falando/fazendo. Por fim, propõe duas possibilidades de desfecho para a dissertação: a primeira, que as práticas de médicos e enfermeiros são incomensuráveis entre si; a segunda, que médicos e enfermeiros dividem uma zona de troca forçada. Há ainda um encerramento. Nele, através da descrição de uma médica virtuosa, convida os leitores a uma conversa sobre os sujeitos contemporâneos e sobre o mundo em que vivemos.

Esta dissertação é fruto de uma pesquisa realizada em uma enfermaria feminina de clínica médica de um hospital universitário público da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Nesta pesquisa, busquei uma compreensão sobre as relações e articulações do trabalho médico e de enfermagem. Partindo da perspectiva hermenêutica, busquei estabelecer conversações com, e entre, sujeitos de pesquisa, grupos profissionais, o próprio estabelecimento hospitalar, a biomedicina - seus fatos e artefatos. Ademais, foram inspiradores para a desejada compreensão os science studies e seus exemplos de como acompanhar e interpretar especialistas em seus campos de prática. A pesquisa, especificamente, foi construída e desenvolvida com o uso de métodos qualitativos, como a observação etnográfica e entrevistas semiestruturadas, tendo a primeira servido de fundamentação para a segunda. O exercício interpretativo posto em curso desde a projeção da pesquisa não se esgotou com o seu término: teve continuidade e se fez presente na produção desta dissertação, ao modo de uma narrativa. Para sustentar a opção pela narrativa, assumo-a como um relato de risco, da maneira como sugere Latour para se descrever as redes e seus atores. Assim, pretendi incluir no texto a intensa movimentação e toda a sorte de eventos que se colocam como desafio às práticas destes profissionais, além de conferir agência aos sujeitos e às coisas. Dentro desta proposta, a narrativa traz um prólogo em que se posiciona entre os trabalhos do campo da Saúde Coletiva; em sua introdução, oferece um resumo ampliado de sua construção; no capítulo um, discorre sobre como o pesquisador negociou a existência da pesquisa com a instituição hospitalar, e trata também de um de seus fundamentos, a hermenêutica filosófica, em conversações com Rorty e Ayres. No segundo, traz um relato sobre a constituição coletiva de médicos e enfermeiros a partir de Fleck. Convida, ainda, um dos sujeitos da pesquisa a oferecer um conceito que ilumina as tensões das relações cotidianas entre enfermeiras e médicos; apresenta, a partir do conceito oferecido, alguns retratos destas relações. No terceiro, o caso de uma usuária que teve o prolongamento de sua vida decidida em uma reunião e um telefonema, é usado com o conceito de paradigma, em Kuhn, para dizer sobre as visões de mundo de médicos e enfermeiras. No quarto, tenta tornar dinâmica a constituição coletiva de médicos e enfermeiras ao relacioná-la às suas visões de mundo, aos processos de enculturação dos dois grupos profissionais; para isso recorre ao conceito de conhecimento tácito e às distintas categorias de expertise, como desenvolvidas por Collins e Evans. Diz sobre o que médicos e enfermeiras sabem do que estão falando/fazendo. Por fim, propõe duas possibilidades de desfecho para a dissertação: a primeira, que as práticas de médicos e enfermeiros são incomensuráveis entre si; a segunda, que médicos e enfermeiros dividem uma zona de troca forçada. Há ainda um encerramento. Nele, através da descrição de uma médica virtuosa, convida os leitores a uma conversa sobre os sujeitos contemporâneos e sobre o mundo em que vivemos.

Today, climate change and rapid ecological change are impacting our ecosystems and landscapes in numerous, often surprising ways. These changes result in social, cultural, ecological, and economic shifts, as exemplified in the climate-exacerbated mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreak in British Columbia. Recently, scientific communities have boosted calls for “usable science.” By interviewing leading MPB scientists, I ask, “How are scientists and their institutions responding to rapid ecological change?” Numerous factors shape MPB science—institutional support, funding, and values—and these factors enable and constrain effective relationships and ultimately, useful science, in response to the outbreak. Results suggest that while science and scientific institutions change slowly, and while relationships between MPB science and policy are characterized as tenuous, there are signs that crossing institutional boundaries (such as the TRIA Network) contributes to producing science that is more effective for responding to rapid ecological change. / Graduate