scholarly journals Policing the Fluff: The Social Construction of Scientistic Selves in Otherkin Facebook Groups

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devin Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Knowledge Construction ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
Human Identification ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Extraordinary Experiences ◽  
Scientific Facts

The Otherkin are a group of people who identify as other-than-human. Primarily gathering in online spaces, they discuss and debate the origins and parameters of this identification and try to make sense of their extraordinary experiences. This article traces how the Otherkin deploy scientific facts and theories during this process, arriving at Otherkin science, a carefully curated compilation of abstract physics, psychology, metaphysics, and ancient belief that renders other-than-human identification thinkable in a contemporary Western paradigm. Drawing on five years of ethnographic engagement with the Otherkin, this article examines this social knowledge construction through the processes of “questioning” and “grilling” on Otherkin Facebook groups. In continuously negotiating their own identities through scientific reasoning, they create what I am calling scientistic selves—frameworks of identification created by lay scientists whose adherence to specific scientific facts and theories is fundamental to their continued existence.

Labory Life. The Social Construction of Scientific Facts

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 156
Author(s):  
Dominique Adenot ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Steve Woolgar
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Facts

scholarly journals Has Latour Real-ly Unravelled the Real: The Journey from Laboratory Life to Down to Earth?

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-41
Author(s):  
Charles Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
The Real ◽  
Truth Claim ◽  
The Social ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Scientific Facts ◽  
Laboratory Life

This article traces Bruno Latour’s answer to the question ‘what is real?’ from Latour and Steve Woolgar in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) through to Latour in Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Change (2018). This intriguing question arises because Latour’s hypothesis in Down to Earth presumes that climate change is ‘real’, while in Laboratory Life, hard facts were considered constructions. The journey reveals Latour’s own ‘real’ lies between the extreme science realists (facts are either true or false) and extreme social relativists (facts are a social construction), although favouring the relativists. A closer analysis, however, shows that Latour’s project is really about truth claims and that the real question is couched in terms rejecting the modernist settlement of ontological assumptions and basing truth on credibility determined by the strength of associations; the more associations, the more ‘real’ the truth claim. Ultimately, Latour elegantly sidesteps the real question and how he does this is real-ly unrivalled.

Social Construction of Technology

Entanglements ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Tosoni ◽  
Trevor Pinch
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social Construction Of Technology ◽  
Technological Artifacts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relevant Social Groups ◽  
Scientific Facts ◽  
Nonhuman Agency ◽  
Interpretative Flexibility

The chapter focuses on the Social Construction of Technology approach (SCOT) by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, introducing the reader to its initial formulation (1984), and to the subsequent extensions – and sometimes reformulations – elaborated in more than 30 year of empirical research. It first clarifies how the Empirical Programme of Relativism, elaborated by the Bath School to address the social construction of scientific facts, was adapted to technological artifacts. In particular the concepts of relevant social groups, interpretative flexibility, closure or stabilization are in-depth discussed. Regarding relevant social groups, the chapter dedicates a peculiar attention to users, sellers and testers, all understudied in the original formulation of SCOT. The chapter then clarifies SCOT’s take on materiality, and discusses its main differences with the idea of nonhuman agency proposed by Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Finally, it goes back to the Golem Trilogy to discuss with the author the specific take on politics implied by SCOT.

Latour’s Prosaic Science

1991 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Robert Brown
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Sociology Of Science ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
The Social ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Scientific Facts ◽  
Laboratory Life ◽  
Work First

The most embarrassing thing about ‘facts’ is the etymology of the word. The Latin facere means to make or construct. Bruno Latour, like so many other anti-realists who revel in the word’s history, thinks facts are made by us: they are a social construction. The view acquires some plausibility in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (hereafter LL) which Latour co-authored with Steve Woolgar.1 This work, first published a decade ago, has become a classic in the sociology of science literature. It is in the form of field notes by an ‘anthropologist in the lab.’ This may seem an odd place for an anthropologist, but Latour finds his presence easy to justify. ‘Whereas we have a fairly detailed knowledge of the myths and circumcision rituals of exotic tribes, we remain relatively ignorant of the details of equivalent activity among tribes of scientists … ’ (LL, 17).

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