Practicing Epistemologies: Knowledge Work in Everyday Environmental Management and Governance

Abstract

This panel offers space for critical practitioners researchers consider the knowledge practices that go into the everyday governance of emerging environmental hazards, new environmental technologies, and new socio-environmental institutional collaborations. It does so by drawing upon the concept of “practicing epistemologies” – that is, epistemologies produced in the course of the mundane, everyday work of management and governance (Stoler 2008).

The panel intervenes in existing STS approaches to “epistemic cultures” that provide powerful tools to consider elite contexts of scientific or medical knowledge production (Latour and Woolgar 1979, Traweek 1988, Knorr-Cetina 1999, Bowker and Star 2000). In considering contexts of environmental management and governance we locate and theorize epistemic labour in the everyday, asking: What kinds of epistemic labour are performed when government officials must implement new environmental codes decided upon by scientists? How do ordinary practices of deciding where and how to collect data define a conception of “crises”? How does the mundane labour that goes into processes of institutional collaboration affect environmental management outcomes?

This panel includes papers that explore the critical, conceptual, and aesthetic resources that are mobilized to situate the on-going labour of practically engaging with ever-emergent environmental or crisis phenomena. In exploring these questions, we also consider how we, as researchers and practitioners of such work, perform this epistemic labour alongside our interlocutors, contributing to understanding emergent phenomena both theoretically and practically.

Referenced:
Bowker GC, Star SL. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Knorr-Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B and S Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stoler, AL. 2008. “Epistemic Politics: Ontologies of Colonial Common Sense.” Philosophical Forum 39(3): 349–61.
Traweek, S. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Discussants

• Jennifer J Henderson, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

• Tyson Vaughan, Institute for Water Resources, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Individual Presentations

• Energy, Technology, Infrastructure: Governing Solar’s Sociotechnical Scales - Nandita Badami, UC Irvine

• Discordant Scales: Federal Environmental Governance and Standardization - Chandra L Middleton, UC Irvine

• Practicing with Data to Understand Crises: Mapping Diverse Environmental and Societal Data to Situate Transboundary Crises - Katrina G Petersen, Trilateral Research

• Hypothetical Earthquake on an Empirical Border: Building a Seismic Scenario in the USA and Mexico - Elizabeth A. Reddy, Colorado School Of Mines

Session Organizer

• Elizabeth A. Reddy, Colorado School Of Mines