Claire Waterton

Caught between the Cartographic and the Ethnographic Imagination: The Whereabouts of Amateurs, Professionals, and Nature in Knowing Biodiversity:

In this paper we document current research into new forms of public engagement presently taking place in UK biodiversity policy. This involves locating the main participants in such patterns of engagement; namely nature, amateur naturalists, and professional biologists and conservationists. Two interwoven and mutually interdependent perspectives or ‘imaginaries’—the ‘cartographic’ and the ‘ethnographic’—are presented in the paper to explore the shaping and interpretation of such new forms of engagement. However, in this context the interest lies in the ways in which either perspective is foregrounded or backgrounded by the different parties involved. The described shifts and movements of a range of actors and processes being studied demonstrate the fluidity and instability of networks of ‘knowing nature well’, whose stability is often assumed. The tracing of two constants— expertise and exchange—within networks inhabited by nature and by amateur and professional naturalists allows for an exploration of ways in which social/natural inclusions and exclusions occur in new participatory practices designed as part of biodiversity action planning.

Imagine complexity: The past, present and future potential of complex thinking

Given all the intellectual excitement surrounding the new ideas on complexity, it is easy to overlook the fact that the apparent simplicity of the past was often more a function of the constraints put on the framing of the issue or problem at hand, both conceptually and in policy making, than it was a reflection of any inherent properties. Revisiting several case studies helps to illustrate the point that complexity, now or in the past, resides especially in the social relationships within and between institutions and agents. Much current thinking about complexity is moving towards development of ever more sophisticated methodologies with which to probe complex systems, hence to facilitate their management and control. We argue that such methodological elaboration frequently acts as a direct substitute for institutional development and reflexivity, and we urge instead for exploration of new forms of institutional mediation.

Scientists' conceptions of the boundaries between their own research and policy

This paper explores qualitative research that aimed to understand how scientists encounter the science-policy boundary in the ordinary course of doing their research. In interviews, scientists sometimes referred to institutions whose role it is to stabilize the relationship between science and policy — boundary organizations as Guston (1999) has called them. Individual scientists, however, often engage in their own versions of ‘boundary work’ between science and policy. The paper suggests that it may be useful to explore the implications of this more individualized, less institutionalized boundary work to understand better the shifting identity of contemporary science. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Building the European Union: Science and the cultural dimensions of environmental policy

Abstract This article examines the role of scientific knowledge in European environmental policy. However, it docs so with a wider interest in mind, namely the putative building of a European political culture. In order to do so it attempts to identify some underlying cultural dimensions of scientific discourses for policy ‐ of standardization, comparability and objectivity. We analyse one case in detail, that of nature classification under the European CORINE1 environmental information system. We argue that some basic assumptions made in the construction of this environmental information system have implications not only for science and policy in the sphere of the environment, but for broader debates about identifications with European political culture.

Experimenting with the Archive: STS-ers As Analysts and Co-constructors of Databases and Other Archival Forms

This article is about recent attempts by scholars, database practitioners, and curators to experiment in theoretically interesting ways with the conceptual design and the building of databases, archives, and other information systems. This article uses the term ‘‘archive’’ (following Derrida’s Archive Fever 1998/1995 and Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences 2005) as an overarching category to include a diversity of technologies used to inventory objects and knowledge, to commit them to memory and for future use. The category of ‘‘archive’’ might include forms as diverse as the simple spreadsheet, the species inventory, the computerized database, and the museum. Using this protean concept, this study suggests that we are currently witnessing a time where close convergences are occurring between social theory and archive construction. It identifies a ‘‘move’’ toward exposure of the guts of our archives and databases, toward exposing the contingencies, the framing, the reflexivity, and the politics embedded within them. Within this move, the study examines ways in which theories of performance and emergence have begun to influence the way that archives of different kinds are conceived and reflects on the role of Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars in their construction.

Taxonomy, biodiversity and their publics in twenty-first-century DNA barcoding.

We examine the crafting of publics in the global Barcoding of Life Initiative (BOLI)—seen as crucial for re-invigorating, and democratizing, early-twenty-first-century taxonomic sciences and hence for actually achieving biodiversity protection. Our approach to the issue of publics differs from that of conventional public understanding of or engagement with science work. Combining science and technology studies with critical political theory allows us to examine the discursive and material formation of publics occurring within the science of DNA barcoding. Co-productionist theory suggests BOLI to be actively crafting its prospective publics imaginatively, as an integral part of its self-composition as public science. Drawing on the work of Laclau’s On Populist Reason, we examine how such normatively weighted abstract publics are necessarily chronically incomplete, with an unavoidable tension between the universal and the particular.

Classifying, Constructing, and Identifying Life Standards as Transformations of “The Biological”

Recent accounts of “the biological” emphasize its thoroughgoing transformation. Accounts of biomedicalization, biotechnology, biopower, biocapital, and bioeconomy tend to agree that twentieth- and twenty-first-century life sciences transform the object of biology, the biological. Amidst so much transformation, we explore attempts to stabilize the biological through standards. We ask: how do standards handle the biological in transformation? Based on ethnographic research, the article discusses three contemporary postgenomic standards that classify, construct, or identify biological forms: the Barcoding of Life Initiative, the BioBricks Assembly Standard, and the Proteomics Standards Initiative. We rely on recent critical analyses of standardization to suggest that any attempt to attribute a fixed property to the biological actually multiplies dependencies between values, materials, and human and nonhuman agents. We highlight ways in which these biological standards cross-validate life forms with forms of life such as publics, infrastructures, and forms of disciplinary compromise. Attempts to standardize the biological, we suggest, offer a good way to see how a life form is always also a form of life.

Plant sciences and the public good.

Drawing on interviews and observational work with practicing U.K. plant scientists, this article uses Michel Callons work as a tool to explore the issue of collaboration between academic science and business, in particular, calls by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council for a return to “public good” plant science. In an article titled “Is Science a Public Good?” Callon contributed to the debate about the commercialization of science by suggesting that commercialization and the public good need not be incompatible. Moving away from arguments that center on the effects (positive or negative) of business involvement in science, he suggested that analysts use another model, centered on “diversity.” This model allows us to ask what society might want from science, what public good science might look like, and how public good science can be ensured while also recognizing that science cannot be easily separated from the market.

Anthropocene – a cautious welcome from environmental sociology?

This paper concerns the way in which environmental sociologists might approach the concept of ‘the Anthropocene’. As our title suggests, we extend in the paper a cautious welcome to this concept. Such a stance – an openness to ‘natural’ accounts accompanied by cautionary tales – has a long history within environmental sociology. In the paper, we document how the concept of the Anthropocene presents environmental sociology with a global environmental narrative that supports many of its own modes of thought. The concept of the Anthropocene reinforces, for example, the value of scholarship scrutinising ontological relationality, political-economic change, inter-disciplinary collaboration and cause-effect dynamics. At the same time, contemporary narratives of the Anthropocene seem to pose challenges for environmental sociology. We suggest that these narratives open up a need to think carefully about issues of naturalisation, difference, knowledge, agency and justice. We suggest that environmental sociology needs to draw on the full repertoire of its discipline in order to establish a critical-constructive relation between its own ways of thinking and those that are currently prominent within the narrative of the Anthropocene.

On the political nature of cyanobacteria: intra-active collective politics in Loweswater, the English Lake District

How can the politics of nature be envisioned for an age conscious of the complexity, contingency, and relationality of the world? What new practices are required to do justice to the recognition that the potential to act, shape, and change emerging worlds lies within complex epistemological and ontological relations? This paper describes an interdisciplinary study conducted between 2007 and 2010 in Loweswater, the English Lake District, that addressed these questions. Here, for three years, a ‘new collective’ as described by Latour emerged that carried out its own epistemological and ontological experiments: the Loweswater Care Project (LCP). The LCP was shaped by ideas about ‘new collectives’ and the commitment to understanding material ‘intra-action’ in situ. This inspired an appreciation of the radical relationality of people and things, and an approach to doing politics with things that we term ‘intra-active collective politics’. In this paper we highlight the consequences of this approach for knowing, but also for action and ‘management’. The research and the experimental forum of the LCP lie at a crossroads between the preoccupations of environmental management (particularly catchment management), the concerns of science and technology studies, and posthumanist thinking.