Science as culture

CURSO: 2º Breve descripción del contenido: La asignatura Filosofía de la ciencia como forma cultural está encaminada a proporcionar una presentación a la vez temática y operativa (metodológica) de las ciencias, que ofrece tanto conocimientos como procedimientos analíticos para la comprensión de la actividad científica en sus diferentes contextos históricos. Aunque la ciencia coexiste con diversas formas culturales, tiene, sin embargo, una relación especial con la tecnología y la filosofía en el complejo de racionalidad en el cual la ciencia puede ser analizada con relación con esas dos actividades racionales. En coherencia con lo anterior se elabora un contexto de análisis para las diversas ciencias, en el cual se obtiene una clasificación de las ciencias y un concepto de método científico. Conforme al mismo contexto analiza la relación entre la ciencia y los valores, siendo éstos de tres clases: valores comunicativos, económicos y sociales. Se consideran las ciencias en su relación con las concepciones del mundo, porque las revoluciones científicas contribuyen al cambio de aquéllas. El contexto próximo en su forma actual de " complejo tecnocientífico " , recibe un estudio tanto en lo referente a su forma presente como a sus perspectivas de futuro. Contenido: Bloque Tema

The study takes the perspective of the anthropology of science and the studies of science as culture, and relies on traditions of research into popular culture and new religions, to examine the theoretical, methodological, epistemological, logical, media and institutional mechanisms through which ufology seeks to legitimize its own system of beliefs, ideas and thought as scientific knowledge, and to secure authority over interpretative rights for its own discourse. It also takes a look at the importance of cultural construction of epistemology and of the socio-cultural context which has enabled the ongoing establishing of a contingent semantic matrix which tends to interpret "strange celestial occurrences" as extraterrestrial ships. In shedding light on the political, ideological and ethical climate in which UFO discourse first arose, and on broader debates reassessing the established scientific canons characteristic of the second half of the 20th century, ufology is not seen as a mere pop-cultural sensation, but rather as a potentially subversive amalgamation of claims challenging both the mechanisms traditionally seen as the only legitimate and reliable producers of truth, and the channels for the distribution of truth and knowledge. The main objective of the study is to analyze the mechanisms for the construction and use of "science" as a symbol of cultural legitimacy. UFO discourse − although originating on the fringes of popular culture and revolving around a purportedly nonexistent phenomenon − has become a very powerful and potentially dangerous system of beliefs/thought/knowledge defying the accepted knowledge, challenging the justification of the ways in which it is being produced as "objective", "real" or "existing", and the legitimacy of the mechanisms for the distribution and circulation of the knowledge as "true". It analyzes the rehabilitation of debates within the philosophy of science − obvious in scientific and public polemics about ufology − centred on demarcation bet-ween science and pseudoscience, in order to demonstrate that there is no such thing as universal and operational criteria for demarcating science from less valid epistemic achievements. It stresses that the demarcation issue is not only a theoretical problem of an internalist notion of science, but rather that these criteria are a playground for an incessant battle over who will set them up and thus acquire the epistemological credibility and social authority to speak from the position of science.

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The Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol and kindred carbon trading measures have usually been presented as a small but indispensable step forward to mitigate climate change. Are they? Or, as this article for the journal Science as Culture asks, do they amount to a stumble backwards and a block to the emergence of more constructive approaches?

How can science become more action-oriented? This is a concern that can be found in current political and academic debates. In this paper I take this question as an opportunity to reflect upon the practical and political usefulness of what is called ‘descriptive research’. The reflection starts from an apparent dilemma regarding the role of research—between participating in practical problem solving at the cost of neutrality, and describing practice from a distance at the cost of practical value. Analyzing a concrete invitation to carry out a ‘prospective ANT analysis’ in a hospital, where this dilemma emerged, I argued that it is mistaken. Both avowedly interventionist and descriptive research may be of practical value. Furthermore, they are both invariably confronted with resistance and politics.
This argument was then taken as an opportunity to examine how this is also the case for a descriptive ANT analysis.

Abstract In contemporary care institutions, accountability procedures and devices are increasingly pervasive and considered crucial for monitoring quality. Such accountability practices are based on the idea that accountability and care belong in two separate domains. The distinction between accountability ‘from nowhere and for everyone’ and accountability ‘from somewhere and for someone’ problematises this implicit split. Taking seriously the observations of everyday caring and accounting by care professionals, who resist splitting care and accountability from the outset, demands a reconceptualisation of the relation between care and accountability as reciprocal and co-emerging. Both accountability and care are highly circumstantial, emerging, relational notions and it is not clear-cut who or what cares or accounts for what, whom, where and how. Paying due attention to the generative interweaving of accounting and caring, that is, to the narrative work of care professionals, affords the potential to turn universal abstract norms of what good care should be into meaningful care. Creatively reconnecting care experiences, observations, records and relations generates accountability with care. Care professionals do this by daring to prioritise speculatively what matters most in a specific situation without falling back on the reassurance of clear-cut norms of good care and by daring to admit that even while prioritising a certain course of action, they might not know its consequences. Such a speculative commitment and the inclusion of the researcher's experiences in trying to be accountable are crucial for studying accountability as a matter of care and as relatedness in the making.

Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Albert Camus observed that an epidemic is not just a medico-social problem; it also represents a rupture and crisis in everyday existence and calls into question our beliefs, habits, values and pleasures (Camus, 1947/1948). This remains somewhat true in the case of a sexual epidemic, more specifically of HIV/AIDS—an infectious disease that ravaged many millions of lives all over the world within a few years of its emergence and immediately became a phantasmatic site of anxiety, intervention, surveillance, racial and sexual politics. In considering HIV/AIDS as a medico-sexual construct, the body appears as ‘an object or surface’ (Butler, 1989, p. 601) and equally as an ‘intentionally organized materiality’ (Butler, 1988, p. 521), in the sense that bodies and pleasures become a ‘strategic and discursive site’ (Butler, 1999, p. 16) with numerous possibilities of materiality as evident in the unregulated proliferation of scientific, sexual and racial epistemologies in the discourse of HIV intervention. Apart from being a ‘naturally given and utterly malleable’ entity (Waldby, 2000, p. 465), biomedicine treats the diseased body as an object of medical knowledge and, at the same time, a fleshy subject that experiences pain, agony, satisfaction and pleasure (Mol and Law, 2004, p. 43). Science as Culture Vol. 21, No. 4, 561–565, December 2012

... of violence dilutes the ethical space around representations of death by positing equivalencebetween imagery that ... slow-motion stare, seem to equate visibility with truth' (Chong, 20058. Chong,S. 2005. Restaging the war: The Deer Hunter and the primal scene of violence. ...