Disputing Environmental Futures: The Role of Ethnography in Multidisciplinary Scientific Work

• In Event: Future of Politics and Politics of the Future - II

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss knowledge production and the role of ethnography in thinking through politics at the science-policy interface. Based on previous ethnographic fieldwork with a project doing work on modelling of deforestation patterns in the Amazon, the paper debates the role of ethnographers in producing multidisciplinary knowledge, and how this role’s epistemic and political aspects can be better conceptualized. As ethnographers and social scientists increasingly integrate large multidisciplinary teams, they begin to also dispute the way knowledge is produced and the policies that are informed by such science. This paper argues that ethnography, usually relegated a secondary place in such cooperative projects, could have a much more active role in both knowledge production and in discussions around results emerging from the projects. This becomes a crucial issue in environmental research in countries like Brazil where scientific knowledge is being increasingly pressured by far-right extremism in alliance with various economic interests. Understanding the role of science in such political disputes can help to also better conceptualize the dynamics of the politics of natural resource use and management, which in Brazil are violently disputed.

Author

• Marko Alves Monteiro, State University of Campinas - UNICAMP