Objectivity As Displacement: The Case of the Rotten Ice Project

• In Event: Making Objectivity in Data-Centric Knowledge Practices

Abstract

This paper draws on anthropological fieldwork from 2014 to 2016 with scientists from the Polar Science Centre in Seattle, WA as they studied ‘rotten ice,’ a type of heavily melted sea ice that appears at the end of the Arctic summer. Over the course of their research, the team’s object of study—rotten ice—was continually destabilized by equipment mishaps, technical challenges, and theoretical misunderstandings. These breakdowns brought into focus ‘rotten ice’ as a slippery scientific object that required careful, intricate, and coordinated choreography for its production. On the flip side, these breakdowns made apparent that rotten ice is not fully reducible to disciplinary assumptions, conceptual frameworks, or technical protocols. My paper makes visible a series of displacements that continually nudged scientists into epistemic spaces ‘outside’ to their presuppositions and practices as usual. Emergent from this continual process of displacement, I argue, was not only rotten ice as an object but a practice of objectivity. In the case of the rotten ice project, to be objective was to be open to the possibility that things can, and often will, be otherwise. Put more strongly, being objective was not only a sensitivity to the ways in which objects, such as rotten ice, exceed disciplinary differences or technical protocols, but an effort to actively orchestrate escapes from the already known. In this manner, my paper contributes to ongoing discussions about what ‘objectivity’ looks like today as a historically contingent ideal that guides scientific knowledge production (e.g., Daston and Galison 2007).

Author

• Julianne Yip, McGill