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The persistence of long facts: truth and consequence in Costa Rica’s aquifers
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Nuevas particularidades de la ultraderecha en América Latina le han permitido ganar poder durante el último par de décadas. Si bien las ideas de fascismo y nazismo reflejaron adecuadamente el desarrollo de fuerzas ideológicas autoritarias, xenófobas y populistas durante la primera mitad del siglo 20, hoy son obsoletas para referirse a las tácticas e impactos de esta nueva ultraderecha. Aunque los marcos conceptuales sobre la cuestión invitan a (re)clasificar las nuevas vertientes ultra de la derecha, el artículo propone una perspectiva relacional que identifica dinámicas, evoluciones y posicionamientos de diferentes expresiones de ultraderecha. Luego de un recorrido conceptual e histórico por las relaciones entre la nueva ultraderecha y el fascismo, proponemos dos avenidas de investigación futuras. Primero, explicamos que el crecimiento de la nueva ultraderecha depende, en gran medida, de la evolución de las relaciones y disputas entre las expresiones institucionales de la derecha, en sus versiones más radicales y moderadas. Segundo, mostramos que explorar el desarrollo de la sociedad civil de ultraderecha en relación con la política institucional es fundamental para entender su reciente expansión.
Planetary awareness has become synonymous with awareness of large-scale temporal, geographic, and geologic events. Given the scalar multiplicities and instabilities of life on earth, concepts such as planetarity, the Anthropocene, and even the global have provided analytic reprieve. They name that which is difficult to objectify: the geographic and historical vastness of geological presence. But those concepts grow from knowledge habits inherited from imperial and Cold War logics and can presume the existence of an all-encompassing observer who can grasp the unity of the planet as such. This article explores alternative assumptions. It asks how other practices of the earth deal with planetary scales of sense-making. It conceptualizes those practices as forms of casual planetarity that, instead of drawing on preexisting scales such as the planet or the Anthropocene, produce senses of closeness and/or distance between everyday life and the geological implications of human presence. It follows the work of geologists in Costa Rica who rely on a 3D physical model to bring about scalar oscillations that connect human experiences with the vastness of underground worlds. This association is made possible by focusing on the movement of water as a hydro-geo-social choreography of everyday life. The article shows how the resonant power of the 3D model geologists use to enact these choreographies opens pathways for people to come to terms with their geological presence without having to see the planet as a whole or presume the capacity for total observation.
Cities face substantial water governance challenges, even more so when their activities are water-intensive, as global tourism is. As the lower-most level of government, municipalities face important challenges when dealing with water stress. Designing robust urban water policy thus may require us to challenge currently popular modes of governance by river basin councils, as predicated by the integrated water resources management (IWRM) paradigm. In this paper, I conduct a public policy analysis of a case study of intra-urban water conflict in the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende (SMA), an extremely popular tourist destination with substantive water scarcity challenges. I draw insights from an application of the Institutional Grammar Tool, IGT (as proposed by Ostrom and Crawford) on a series of textual datasets derived from ethnographic, qualitative longitudinal field research, document analysis, and elite interviews with stakeholders to explain the reasons underlying community concerns about urban water supply which have derived in conflict in San Miguel de Allende and increasingly manifested over the past few years (2017–2020). My analysis suggests that to tackle growing intra-urban antagonism derived from increasing water insecurity in San Miguel de Allende, a more localized, micro-watershed approach might be more fruitful than a traditional river basin council strategy.
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses.
You can download the digital open access file here https://doi.org/10.25611/egc8-n043
In the decades since the Science Wars of the 1990s, climate science has become a crucible for the negotiation of claims about reality and expertise. This negotiation, which has drawn explicitly on the ideas and techniques of science and technology studies (STS), has taken place in genres of fiction as well as non-fiction, which intersect in surprising ways. In this case study, I focus on two interwoven strands of this history. One follows Michael Crichton’s best-selling 2004 novel, State of Fear and its reception by neo-conservatives as a commentary on the mis-uses of facts to stoke fear about anthropogenic climate change. The other considers Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s 2010 publishing success Merchants of Doubt as the inverse, a demonstration of the forms of disinformation that have been used to undermine scientific consensus around climate change. I show that both Crichton’s as well as Oreskes and Conway’s approaches were critiqued by academic STS even as their accounts constituted the most high-profile performances of its stakes and the politics of knowledge since the Science Wars. In highlighting the STS practices deployed by each, as well as how those practices were differently linked to accusations of fear-mongering and a perversion of the purity of STS, I demonstrate the need for a reflexive history of STS. Such an approach, I argue, can better consider the social life of STS ideas and practices amidst calls for more politically-engaged approaches to knowledge production.
The United States has entered an era of “post-truth” as even seemingly proven facts seem open to contestation. The contests over facts range from the existential (when conservatives deny climate change) to the trivial (when the Trump administration questions the audience figures of its own inauguration ceremony). This essay combines two literatures on post-truth that rarely speak to each other: institutional political science analyses of American political polarization and STS analyses of “objectivity” in science and public life. I argue that post-truth is the outcome of two interlocking processes that have transformed the American public sphere: (1) the re-configuring of American political identities around the Republican and Democratic parties, and (2) the establishment of an alternative media ecosystem around the Republican Party whose legitimacy derives from its questioning of the “objectivity” of mainstream media institutions. Drawing on STS theorizations of the construction of objectivity, I contend that to recreate an objective public sphere will require an institutional arrangement that is based not on demarcating facts from values—or right facts from wrong facts—but on demarcating people and institutions who seek to enter this public sphere.
How do we make the case for “knowledge democracy” in the face of the growing influence of right-wing figures and movements that denounce experts and expertise? While the threats to knowledge posed by these movements are real, it would be a mistake to return to a classic intellectual strategy––the politics of demarcation––in the face of this danger. Examining practical proposals for combatting fake news and opinion manipulation on the Internet, namely so-called "fact-checking" tools and services, I argue that they threaten to enroll us in a problematic normative project, one that aims to re-establish a hierarchy between knowledge and its presumed opposite, non-knowledge, or anti-knowledge. I list a number of shortcomings of this strategy. Most importantly, it distracts us from the role of technology in the crisis of public evidence in today's computationally-intensive societies. Social media are a truth-less public sphere by design. A politics of demarcation also puts us at risk of forgetting a key insight from the previous century that remains valid today: knowledge democracy is a re-constructive practice and an ideal. Instead of consolidating hierarchies of knowledge through facts that derive their authority form outside the public sphere, we need to recover the central role in public life of experimental facts: statements whose truth value is unstable. The experimental validation of public knowledge must happen in the public domain.
The paper deals with the emergence and development the STS field in Latin America, from the sixties on. After an introductory section containing some considerations on the maturation of and approaches
to STS in the region, the paper delves into cognitive, institutional, political and social dimensions of the development of this field. It gives then some background, mentioning policies as drivers of knowledge generation, the institutionalization of social studies of science and technology, and STS training. An individual section deals with journals and congresses as spaces for interaction. A chronology of the STS field’s development in Latin America is followed by a brief examination of the role of the STS field in contemporary Latin America. It is argued that researchers belonging to this community are in a good position to critically analyze the current relations between science and society, to assist decision-makers and help the public understand the implications of present-day technoscientific change, as well as to support the development of fairer, more equitable solutions to combat the challenges of today’s changing world. It goes
without saying that, far from having reached maturity, this is a space in a permanent state of construction.
Despite the central importance of water for human wellbeing and development, researchers and practitioners have few tools to quantitatively measure, assess, and compare the scope and scale of household and individual water insecurity across cultural and climatic variations. There are multiple definitions of water insecurity, and the analytical tools for measuring household‐level water insecurity are in their infancy. This paper provides an overview and systematic evaluation of current household and individual water in security metrics for human development. We seek to advance micro‐level metrics—attending to the considerations of dimensionality, temporality, unit of analysis, and comparability—because they will provide the research community with necessary tools to untangle the complex determinants and outcomes of water insecurity. Moreover, such metrics will support the translation of research outcomes into meaningful and useful products and results for stakeholders, communities, and decision‐makers. WIREs Water 2017, 4:e1214. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1214
This article is categorized under: Human Water > Methods
En este artículo se analiza el conflicto suscitado por la apropiación de agua del acuífero
Sardinal en Guanacaste, Costa Rica, cuyos puntos más críticos ocurrieron entre 2008 y
2010. El conflicto incluyó movilizaciones, controversias científicas y juicios en los que participaron
moradores de la comunidad, representantes del Estado, organizaciones no gubernamentales,
eclesiásticas y la empresa privada. Si bien en el ámbito judicial el conflicto se
resolvió a favor de la comunidad, queda pendiente aún superar sus causas estructurales:
inconsistente accionar de las instituciones estatales, falta de planificación territorial, y
exclusión espacial y económica de las comunidades locales para favorecer la inversión
turística.
This paper takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital
method, in the study of science, technology and society (STS) and beyond, and
outlines a distinctive approach to addressing a key challenge: the problem of digital
bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of
controversy in online settings, and this risks to undermine the substantive focus of
controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a
shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue mapping. The paper begins
by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the
development of controversy analysis as a digital method: demarcationist, discursive
and empiricist. While each of these frameworks has been adopted in STS, I argue that
the last one offers the best opportunities to further develop its distinctive approach to
controversy analysis and address the problem of digital bias: this last framework
allows us to digitally implement the “move beyond impartiality” in the study of
knowledge, technology and society. To clarify how, I distinguish between two
opposing solutions to the problem of digital bias in controversy analysis: a
precautionary approach that seeks to render controversy independent from digital
platforms, and an affirmative approach, which deploys specifically digital formats
such as hyperlinks and hashtags to map controversies. Endorsing the latter approach, I
argue that it needs to be developed further in order to secure the substantive focus of
digital controversy analysis. We must broaden the scope of digital controversy
analysis and examine not just controversies, but a broader range of issue formations,
including public relations campaigns and activist mobilizations. I explore the practical
implementation of this approach by discussing a pilot study in which we analyzed
issues of Internet governance with the social media platform Twitter.
Between 2006 and 2009, a group of Costa Rican NGOs, a Spanish aid agency, and local residents were entangled in the pursuit of transparency as a means to allocate funding for their “human right to water” project initiatives. Designed as a series of pedagogical activities to “build” local knowledge about water management, the aid agency conditioned their funding to the honest and correct implementation of the project as revealed by a system of indicators. Against orthodoxy, project leaders were put in charge of designing and implementing the auditing system, an arrangement that short-circuited the foundational separation between observers and observed that is customary in transparency-creation projects and gave the whole initiative an experimental quality. This article examines the building of that indicator system, my informants’ own fascination with producing “speaking numbers,” and the punctuated but constitutive role that laughter played in the process. I suggest that numeric indicators and laughter make the audit speak about intensity and emphasis rather than about the exclusive and discrete categories on which transparency is usually predicated. Here, the audit allowed political actors to rework the potential of water governance technologies, rather than limiting them to their explicit possibilities, in order to constitute what project participants imagine as an integral form of political agency. I argue that paying attention to the in-between process of creating the audit, before its final results are disclosed, highlights the self-referential, short-circuited, and productive uses of transparency as a political device.
Overview
The essays in this volume study the creation, adaptation, and use of science and technology in Latin America. They challenge the view that scientific ideas and technology travel unchanged from the global North to the global South—-the view of technology as “imported magic.” They describe not only alternate pathways for innovation, invention, and discovery but also how ideas and technologies circulate in Latin American contexts and transnationally. The contributors’ explorations of these issues, and their examination of specific Latin American experiences with science and technology, offer a broader, more nuanced understanding of how science, technology, politics, and power interact in the past and present.
The essays in this book use methods from history and the social sciences to investigate forms of local creation and use of technologies; the circulation of ideas, people, and artifacts in local and global networks; and hybrid technologies and forms of knowledge production. They address such topics as the work of female forensic geneticists in Colombia; the pioneering Argentinean use of fingerprinting technology in the late nineteenth century; the design, use, and meaning of the XO Laptops created and distributed by the One Laptop per Child Program; and the development of nuclear energy in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile.
Contributors
Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Morgan G. Ames, Javiera Barandiarán, João Biehl, Anita Say Chan, Amy Cox Hall, Henrique Cukierman, Ana Delgado, Rafael Dias, Adriana Díaz del Castillo H., Mariano Fressoli, Jonathan Hagood, Christina Holmes, Matthieu Hubert, Noela Invernizzi, Michael Lemon, Ivan da Costa Marques, Gisela Mateos, Eden Medina, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, Hugo Palmarola, Tania Pérez-Bustos, Julia Rodriguez, Israel Rodríguez-Giralt, Edna Suárez Díaz, Hernán Thomas, Manuel Tironi, Dominique Vinck
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/beyond-imported-magic
http://muse.jhu.edu/book/34700
La base de este artículo es una investigación realizada entre el 2017 y el 2018 desde la Cátedra de Sociología de la Escuela de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED). Uno de sus propósitos fue indagar dinámicas de conflicto sobre procesos de contaminación y acceso al agua potable en la zona atlántica y norte de Costa Rica, en determinados espacios territoriales en los cuales es notoria la interacción entre recurso hídrico, producción piñera y comunidades.
This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica’s aquifers using LandSat imagery and a specialized algorithm. The project aims to make subterranean formations accessible for public agencies mediating recent environmental conflicts over underground water, which have been diagnosed as the country’s first “water war.” I analyze the presentation to the public of this project and the technology it uses to show how vision and touch are conceptual resources that people use to describe the technicalities of satellite imagery. Attending to the semiotic and technical power of vision and touch requires a nonessentialist understanding of the senses. It requires moving away from a narrow understanding of sensing as embodied, phenomenological practice. Focusing on the role of texture as that which operates in the interstices of vision and touch, I propose going beyond panoptic imaginaries in order to grasp the diverse social lives that technologies such as satellite imaging have.
This history of the concept of fact reveals that the fact-oriented practices of German physicists and historians derived from common origins. The concept of fact became part of the German language remarkably late. It gained momentum only toward the end of the eighteenth century. I show that the concept of fact emerged as part of a historical knowledge tradition, which comprised both human and natural empirical study. Around 1800, parts of this tradition, including the concept of fact, were integrated into the epistemological basis of several emerging disciplines, including physics and historiography. During this process of discipline formation, the concept of fact remained fluid. I reveal this fluidity by unearthing different interpretations and roles of facts in different German contexts around 1800. I demonstrate how a fact-based epistemology emerged at the University of Göttingen in the late eighteenth century, by focusing on universal historian August Ludwig Schlözer and the experimentalist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. In a time of scientific and political revolutions, they regarded facts as eternal knowledge, contrasting them with short-lived theories and speculations. Remarkably, Schlözer and Lichtenberg construed facts as the basis of Wissenschaft, but not as Wissenschaft itself. Only after 1800, empirically minded German physicists and historians granted facts self-contained value. As physics and historiography became institutionalized at German universities, the concept of fact acquired different interpretations in different disciplinary settings. These related to fact-oriented research practices, such as precision measurement in physics and source criticism in historiography.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the rapid growth of Peru's extractive industries has unleashed diverse forms of political resistance to an economic system dependent on ecological destruction and human harm. In the central highlands of Peru, a Catholic scientific project based out of the Archdiocese of Huancayo undertook six years of research on heavy-metal contamination in the Mantaro Valley. This included lead-exposure studies in the notoriously polluted city of La Oroya, home to the country's largest polymetallic smelter. How did the Catholic Church become an apt institution for the production of science in this region? Drawing on fieldwork with the Revive the Mantaro Project, this article conceptualizes the integration of religious and scientific practitioners and practices and the political landscape that necessitated, shaped, and limited them. Technocratic governance and anti-leftist sentiments made science a suitable political idiom for the Catholic Church to enact its ethos of abundance and demand the legitimacy of life beyond bare life. A state of endemic corruption and epistemic mistrust also obliged Catholic accompaniment to scientific practices to generate trust for the researchers and to provide ethical credibility as their knowledge entered the fray of national mining politics. Ultimately contending with entrenched systems of power, the Revive the Mantaro Project's significance extended beyond political efficacy; its practices enacted a world of democracy, rights, and legal protections not yet of this world.
Food and water shortages are two of the greatest challenges facing humans in the coming century. While our theoretical understanding of how humans become vulnerable to and cope with hunger is relatively well developed, anthropological research on parallel problems in the water domain is limited. By carefully considering well-established propositions derived from the food literature against what is known about water, our goal in this essay is to advance identifying, theorizing, and testing a broader anthropology of resource insecurity. Our analysis focuses on (1) the causes of resource insecurity at the community level, (2) “coping” responses to resource insecurity at the household level, and (3) the effect of insecurity on emotional well-being and mental health at the individual level. Based on our findings, we argue that human experiences of food and water insecurity are sufficiently similar to facilitate a broader theory of resource insecurity, including in how households and individuals cope. There are also important differences between food and water insecurity, including the role of structural factors (such as markets) in creating community-level vulnerabilities. These suggest food and water insecurity may also produce household struggles and individual suffering along independent pathways.
In the 1980s, anthropology set aside a focus on societies defined as radically ‘other’ to the anthropologists' own. There was little consensus at the time, however, about who might replace the other as the primary object of anthropological attention. In important respects, I argue, its replacement has been the suffering subject. Tracing this change, I consider how it addressed key problems of the anthropology of the other, but I also suggest that some strengths of earlier work – particularly some of its unique critical capacities – were lost in the transition. The conclusion considers how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses.
This article develops two arguments. The first revolves around the importance of studies of knowledge controversies, originally developed within the field of science and technology studies (STS), to accounts of innovation in transnational governance. Innovation in transnational governance, I contend, has catalyzed the emergence of transnational knowledge controversies, including controversies about the operation of transnational governance mechanisms. An argument turns on the need to supplement existing approaches to the study of knowledge controversies in STS. To this end I introduce the concept of the political situation. This concept highlights the ways in which the significance of a controversy needs to be understood in relation to a shifting and contested field of others controversies and events that have occurred elsewhere and at other times. The concept of the political situation also points to the part played by the social sciences themselves in the constitution and contestation of the situation within which knowledge controversies come to have significance.
Objectivity in science has normally been defined by scholars as almost synonymous with realism. It may be advantageous to think of it instead in terms of impersonality, an ideal that would replace arbitrariness, idiosyncracy and judgment by explicit rules. Accounting is an exemplar of this aspect of objectivity. More important than the true representation of deep underlying financial identities is the maintenance of a system of rules that blocks self-interested distortion. Otherwise, tax codes and corporate reports would lose their credibility. From this standpoint, quantification appears as a strategy for overcoming distance and distrust. This pertains also to the natural sciences, where measurement and statistics have been crucial in transforming local experimental skills into public knowledge. We need to understand quantification as a response to a set of political problems, part of the moral economy of science. Its use in science is analogous in important ways to the explicitly political and administrative purposes served by accounting.
Reflecting on conversations between geography and science and technology studies (STS) over the last 15 years or so, this paper addresses their shared interest in knowledge controversies as generative political events. It explores how such events give rise to new ways of practising relations between science and democracy focusing on the case of environmental knowledge claims and technologies. This exploration interrogates three mobilizations of environmental knowledge controversies that have different implications for redistributing expertise, including that of (social) scientists, in the composition of knowledge polities. The first version sets out to map the language commitments of contributors to a controversy with the aim of enabling interested citizens to trace the ‘partisanship’ of scientific knowledge claims. The second is also a cartographic exercise designed to teach students how to account for the political force of technoscientific controversies by mapping the intense entanglements of scientific knowledge claims with legal, moral, economic and social concerns on the web. The third is concerned less with mapping knowledge controversies from an analytical distance than with an experimental research methodology that sets out to intervene in extant controversies in ways that map researchers’ own knowledge claims into what is at stake.
I use the example of the 2000 US Presidential election to show that political controversies with technical underpinnings are not resolved by technical means. Then, drawing from examples such as climate change, genetically modified foods, and nuclear waste disposal, I explore the idea that scientific inquiry is inherently and unavoidably subject to becoming politicized in environmental controversies. I discuss three reasons for this. First, science supplies contesting parties with their own bodies of relevant, legitimated facts about nature, chosen in part because they help make sense of, and are made sensible by, particular interests and normative frameworks. Second, competing disciplinary approaches to understanding the scientific bases of an environmental controversy may be causally tied to competing value-based political or ethical positions. The necessity of looking at nature through a variety of disciplinary lenses brings with it a variety of normative lenses, as well. Third, it follows from the foregoing that scientific uncertainty, which so often occupies a central place in environmental controversies, can be understood not as a lack of scientific understanding but as the lack of coherence among competing scientific understandings, amplified by the various political, cultural, and institutional contexts within which science is carried out.In light of these observations, I briefly explore the problem of why some types of political controversies become “scientized” and others do not, and conclude that the value bases of disputes underlying environmental controversies must be fully articulated and adjudicated through political means before science can play an effective role in resolving environmental problems.
How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge? How did description come to seem separable from theory in the precursors of economics and the social sciences? Mary Poovey explores these questions in A History of the Modern Fact, ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from the publication of the first British manual on double-entry bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in the 1830s. She shows how the production of systematic knowledge from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government, how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for generating useful facts, and how beliefâwhether figured as credit, credibility, or credulityâremained essential to the production of knowledge. Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern social and economic knowledge possible, A History of the Modern Fact provides important contributions to the history of political thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary and cultural criticism.
Procesos de organización y participación comunitaria en el conflicto por el agua y la sequía en la comunidad de Nosara Guanacaste
- Solís Montoya
- R P Navarro
Poder y Participación Política en la Gestión del Agua en Costa Rica
- Alpízar Rodríguez
- Alpízar Rodríguez F.
Protección del Agua Subterránea: Caso Acuífero Nimboyores y el Conflicto entre Comunidades Costeras y Desarrollos Hoteleros de Guanacaste S.A. (Hotel Conchal)
- Angulo Angulo
- Bleichmar D.
Why are Facts Short?” In A History of Facts
- L Daston
- Daston L.
Implementación del derecho humano al agua en América Latina
- Mora Portuguez
- V. Dubois Cisneros
Travelling Facts.” In How Well Do Facts Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge
- M S Morgan
- Morgan M. S.
A Culture of Fact: England
- B J Shapiro
- Shapiro B. J.
El legado colonial en la producción documental de Costa Rica
- F Valverde Hernández
- Valverde Hernández F.