Critical social sciences and the humanities have typically framed the relation between science, state and society in a straightforward manner: science provides totalizing, universalizing truth claims that rewrite socio-ecological reality in abstract terms that facilitate dispossession, capital accumulation, and state rule. The role of critique, in this framing, is to demonstrate the partiality of these truth claims, and show that they reflect geo-historically specific interests and power dynamics. Science and critique become oppositional practices, with critique even taking on the character of an 'anti-science', and the veracity of critique often judged by the extent to which analysis questions and contextualizes scientific truth claims.
However, this opposition has become increasingly difficult to sustain with the emergence of the Anthropocene. In this workshop, we seek to problematize the relation between science and critique by exploring, through a variety of cases, how the problematic of the Anthropocene is transforming conditions of both science and critique.
We are particularly, although not exclusively, concerned with the way that the prospects for and perils of radical science are being worked out in the context of growing interest in resilience, posthumanism, new materialism, affects, speculation, indigenous knowledge, ontology (the material entanglements of interactive life), etc. This increased interest, we note, occur in the context of so-called global challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, sustainability, international migration, urban sustainability, and so forth.
https://www.uib.no/en/course/SANT908