Upwellings: Towards a sociology of science desde abajo

• In Event: 3165 - Sociology of Science: Facing the Epistemic Crisis

Abstract

Drawing from 12 months of historical and ethnographic data collection, I use the 1973 collapse of the Peruvian anchoveta fishery—the world’s largest marine fishery—as an empirical opportunity to develop a more global understanding of knowledge production. What was, at first, a socio-ecological crisis led to an epistemic crisis, with local and global actors working to comprehend how the collapse happened and how to prevent it from happening again. Instead of focusing on global actors and their response, as much of the literature does, I focus on how local actors reacted. By borrowing from Sandra Harding’s (2008) treatise on ‘sciences from below’ and from Peruvian academic work on grassroots mobilization, or mobilization desde abajo, I employ the term science desde abajo to study the connectivity between local science and social movement activism.

Throughout this theoretical paper, which also serves as the introductory chapter to my dissertation, I show that epistemology and organizations are inextricable when addressing socio-ecological crisis and make three important contributions to a global scholarship on the state-civil society-science relationship. First, it is well understood that science is shaped by changing political structures. However, in a low- to middle-income country, like Peru, those structures are especially vulnerable to two contradictory forces: the immediate needs of working people and the external pull of foreign scientists, financing, and epistemologies. Second, states face internal difficulties in building research programs when there is division over fundamental economic models, in this case between anti-dependency and neoliberal approaches. Third, within the state-civil society-nexus scholarship, science is treated as either a homogeneous entity or as a singular academic field. In this study, I analyze the sharp variations in what “from below” means across different research fields—sociology, oceanography, and fisheries engineering—within the same country. In sum, a focus on how scientists and social movements interact on a local level demonstrates that practitioners of “science from below”—producing research for immediate public needs and working with or founding NGOs—act as crucial mediators between global networks of knowledge production and national politics of science funding and regulation.

Author

• Apollonya Maria Porcelli, Brown University