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For those interested in discussions of the
uses/perceptions/manipulations,,,, of knowledge, science and technologies
of science, here is a conference announcement.
G Hougham
*************************************************************
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 21:32:17 +0100 (BST)
From: Alberto Corsin-jimenez
<<[log in to unmask]>
Title: Aw(e)ful and Fearful Knowledge: Ethnographic Responses to
the
Industries, Machineries and Technologies of Science - Panel to be
held at
the Association of Social Anthropologists Decennial Conference, 14-18
July
2003, Manchester
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 November 2002
Description: This panel aims at exploring the extent to which science
can
be understood as a field of awful and fearful knowledge. The session
will
present fresh ethnographies of the rationales that are being mobilised
in
response to, and engagement with, specific deployments of scientific
knowledge, and will reflect on the dispersal and distribution of these
knowledge-forms as instrumental and utilitarian minutiae and
transformative capacities. In particular, we wish to examine how
science
becomes mundane, how is it transformed into concrete experiential and
social encounters with specific industries, machineries and
technologies
of scientific knowledge. We are intrigued by the fears and dreads that
lurk behind people’s ideas about the ‘rational’; the notions about
power,
authority and malevolence (and benevolence) that animate their
responses
to what they think of as ‘science’ and ‘scientific knowledge’. Our
interest lies in exploring further the forms that these responses take
and, in particular, the transformations in agency that they effect. We
are
not so much interested in the power-structures that impose fear as in
the
transformations that the fear of knowledge (and the knowledge of fear)
effect upon the agent and his moral world; that is, what value-maps
(positive and negative) does the agent draw upon confronting the awe of
science. What, for instance, does people’s eventual accommodation to
the
machineries of war in extreme conflict situations (tanks, helicopters,
gunfire) tell us about the scales of awe and fear that are in-built
into
the machinery (and its operators)? What capacities for surveillance and
control are being recognised in our encounters with government
databases
and information interfaces? What is dangerous about cloning? Is the
reverence for scientific knowledge an eclipsed and tacit
acknowledgement
of fear, a muted recognition of man’s capacity for evil making? How, in
sum, are the connections between awe and our fear of science and
scientific knowledge worked out in specific ethnographic situations?
And
finally, what role does science play in shaping and redefining our
field
of moral relations? When and how does our awe of science become
repugnant
and despicable, knowledge of the awful?
Contact: [log in to unmask],
[log in to unmask]
URL:
www.octagon-pictures.demon.co.uk/nomadit/asa/panels/corsin%20jimenez.htm
H-Net Announcement ID: 131344
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