Dear friends,
Let me whisper this out to the list and see if it reverberates at all
with heading in the direction of discussing "the crisis" (of xmca
variety). And let it fade echoless away if it does not.
As I frame this, I may be a little off, but I trust you'll get my drift.
In looking (a little) into the social contructivist versus scientific
realism debates related in part to hard science versus "science studies"
(drawing on cultural, sociological, humanities paradigms), I've come
across a book chapter by Karen Barad entitled "Reconceiving Scientific
Literacy as Agential Literacy." Is anyone familiar with it? I get the
sense that this notion of "agential literacy" the basic study of
"agential realism" is of her own coinage, but I may be wrong.
She contrasts "scientific literacy" which she sees as a traditional
disciplinary approach to hard sciences with something that takes into
account social/cultural factors+ within which scientific knowledge
production is embedded (or vice versa ;-)), in order to help point the
way to "responsible science." Aspects of what she writes sound to me
closely akin to CHAT, but perhaps without the "H" (which is significant
and telling, given two or so recent e-mails on this list about putting
the "H" back in CHAT). But anyway, Barad describes "agential realism"
as inspired by Niels Bohr's epistemological framework, and writes:
"Agential realism is an epistem-onto-logical framework that takes as its
central concerns the nature of scientific and other social practices;
the nature of reality; the role of natural, social, and cultural factors
in scientific knowledge production; the contingency and efficacy of
scientific knowledge; the nature of matter; the relationship between the
material and discursive in epistemic practices; the material conditions
for intelligibility and for objectivity; the nature of causality; and
the nature of agency."
This paragraph is a bit rambly as a description, but is the one place
she kinds of lays it all out in the chapter. The Bohr argument she
focuses on is that "theoretical concepts are defined by the
circumstances required for their measurement." She describes
*phenomenon* as embracing of subject, object and apparatuses that are
parts of "intra-actions," which I take to be a way of contrasting these
to "inter-actions" which would suggest the subject-object dichotomy she
is trying to theorize away. So "objectivity" is possible within the
situatedness of phenomenon (defined and limited by the apparatuses
employed).
And despite the lack of an "H" in her description of what the
theoretical frame entails, she does open her article by discussing
things like the renaissance of interest in scientific literacy as
deriving from concern about democratic decision-making regarding the
disposition and use of nuclear weapons, and then as an outgrowth of that
the crop of "science studies" type courses for humanity majors - like
"Physics for Poets."
Part of the meat of this chapter is her description of an undergraduate
course she created on "agential realism" that is meant to be an antidote
to these other courses that she sees as being neither good for the
sciences nor the humanties.
Part of her approach is to put her students in touch with hard science
and "hard scientists" but to also provide affordances for examining
and/or understanding political, social, cultural factors of science
practice. How do apparatuses emerge? How do they define "knowledge
production?" And then how are these apparatuses recursively designed
and defined in turn by the socio-cultural context of "knowledge
production" and scientific communities? What does an ethnographic study
of the high-energy physics community reveal? She also has her students
read some difficult "hard science" accounts of scientific ideas to
compare/contrast with popular accounts of the same scientific ideas.
More might be said, but the chapter was interesting, and the application
of the ideas in the design of an undergraduate course was provocative.
She includes many written course evaluations that suggest some students
not headed for the study of science might change their minds based on
participation in the course.
Any other knowledge of, experience with "agential realism?" Worth
pursuing in the context of the "crisis," or not?
In Peace,
K.
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