50667 - Challenging epistemic institutions: Unruly knowledge, outlaw technology, and fringe-mainstream relations

Description

We live in epistemically challenged, and challenging, times. The status of various forms of knowledge continues to be contested, as many social actors compete for epistemic authority. Institutions of knowledge production are underfunded and under suspicion. Alternative institutions, peer-to-peer networks, conspiracy communities and counter-knowledges are rife. Even amongst public institutions, dissenting voices seek to trouble the status quo. Since its earliest days, SKAT inquiry has addressed questions of lay expertise, non-knowledges, pseudo-sciences, alternative knowledge systems, and other heterogeneous constitutions of social facts. Today’s political context inspires a return to these core questions with fresh empirical and theoretical eyes. How do individual and collective actors manage the tension between mainstream and fringe ideas, ways of knowing, and other technoscientific constellations, and what can we learn through an examination of these practices?

This session invites empirically and theoretically engaged work that investigates defiant, oppositional, unruly forms of knowledge, undisciplined technologies, and their relation to more mainstream organizations and institutions. We also welcome work that contests these categories, tracking how powerful groups create or sustain unruly or deviant forms of knowledge and/or technologies. Projects may be contemporary or historical. Global, transnational, and comparative research is encouraged. Potential topics include but are not limited to: contested knowledges in science, technology, and/or medicine; evasive or alternative technologies; resistance to knowledge-making; creative forms of un-making knowledge and cultivating ignorance; citizen science/lay science; scientist-led movements of dissent maker and DIY communities of scientific and technological practice; open technology; democratic participation and inclusion; activism.

Sub Unit

• Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology / Challenging epistemic institutions: Unruly knowledge, outlaw technology, and fringe-mainstream relations

Presider

• Daniel Ray Morrison, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Individual Presentations

• Armchair science and gut feelings: How citizens use epistemological autonomy to keep expertise at arm’s length - Lars Thorup Larsen, Aarhus University; Luis Antonio Vila-Henninger, Aarhus University

• Conspiracy-fueled Challenges to Expertise and the State: How Professional Planners Respond to Unruly Publics - Steve G. Hoffman, University of Toronto; Ellen Berrey, University of Toronto

• Pro-Life Professionals: How Anti-Abortion Medical Experts Cultivate Credibility in the United States - Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès

• Shapeshifters & Starseeds: Curated Evidence Collection, Generous Epistemology, and Disinformation on Conspiracy TikTok - Alice Marwick, Data & Society; Courtlyn Pippert, Coker University; Katherine Furl, University of North Dakota; Elaine Schnabel, Weber State University

Discussant

• Joanna Kempner, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Session Organizers

• Janet Vertesi, Princeton University

• Daniel Ray Morrison, University of Alabama in Huntsville