Geographies of science and technology 1: Boundaries and crossings

In a world of accelerating environmental crises, global pandemics and seemingly unstoppable datafication of anything that moves, thinks or feels, the politics of science and technology are pervasive. In this first of three progress reports on the geographies of science and technology, I home in on some definitional questions which an account of anything like a new or emerging subfield must necessarily concern itself. I examine how geographers have addressed the spatial effects of the making and unmaking of boundaries between science, technology and their various outsides. While work on historical and contemporary geographies of technoscience has often pulled in slightly different directions, I identify some promising convergences around questions of political economy and on the topic of scale as an emergent property of technoscientific practices. New attention is also falling on the spatial practices through which technoscience gets plugged into wider worlds, such as politics and policymaking, while geographers have also been busy disrupting, in a more experimental mode, conventional boundaries and hierarchies of technoscientific practice. Finally, the report examines recent and welcome efforts to convene new conversations around the geography of technology but cautions against the potential seduction of the new, the innovative and the ‘disruptive’. Important recent work in cultural geography has purposively unsettled assumed hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ tech, new and old, and suggests that any nascent subfield of ‘geography of technology’ needs to reflexively attend to how boundaries get drawn around ‘technology’, and with what effects.

Conferencing Cuba's Geographies of Speleology: The Politics of Inclusion and Hospitality among Cave Explorers and Scientists

From the 13th to the 17th of April of 2015, Cuban cave explorers and scientists, or speleologists, gathered to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Sociedad Espeleológica de Cuba (SEC) in the city of Camaguëy. This organization, dedicated to the exploration, study, and conservation of the country's many caves, was founded in 1940, and was the first of its kind in the Americas. While scholars have examined the achievements of Cuba's biotechnology sector, Cuban science beyond academic institutes and laboratories has been overlooked. In this paper I present ethnographic and interview data obtained during the Camaguëy conference as an entry point into Cuba's “geographies of speleology” (Cant 2006). Such geographies emphasize the complex relations between geographic knowledge, individual and institutional identities, and the state. Moreover, these geographies, much like the sense of identification with and belonging to the Sociedad Espeleológica de Cuba, are at times conflicting and contested. I develop this argument by drawing on insights in cultural geography that emphasize the importance of presence of absence. Here I invoke absence in two senses, both in terms of those absent in the Camagüey conference and those deceased but whose memory live on embodied in the collective history and knowledge of the SEC. This research illustrates the importance of stepping out of the (biotechnological) laboratory, and even the formal spaces of institutionalized scientific practice, to assess the history and potential futures of a geographically-based amateur field science in Cuba. Moreover, this work contributes to the growing focus on Latin American geographies of science and, in particular, the importance of Science and Technology Studies in/ of Cuba that examine the fuzzy boundaries of science as practice in a complex spatial network. Finally, the ongoing dynamics of foreign scholars conducting research in Cuba are considered, dynamics that are intimately tied to the very geographies this project purports to analyze.

Epistemic geographies of climate change

Anthropogenic climate change has been presented as the archetypal global problem, identified by the slow work of assembling a global knowledge infrastructure, and demanding a concertedly global political response. But this ‘global’ knowledge has distinctive geographies, shaped by histories of exploration and colonialism, by diverse epistemic and material cultures of knowledge-making, and by the often messy processes of linking scientific knowledge to decision-making within different polities. We suggest that understanding of the knowledge politics of climate change may benefit from engagement with literature on the geographies of science. We review work from across the social sciences which resonates with geographers’ interests in the spatialities of scientific knowledge, to build a picture of what we call the epistemic geographies of climate change. Moving from the field site and the computer model to the conference room and international political negotiations, we examine the spatialities of the interactional co-production of knowledge and social order. In so doing, we aim to proffer a new approach to the intersections of space, knowledge and power which can enrich geography’s engagements with the politics of a changing climate.

Science Studies and Early Modern Ottoman Science

This short essay focuses on three issues: how science studies may facilitate the rapprochement between the philological study of scientific texts and Middle East history; how it may help us reconsider ambiguous if not “black-boxed” terms such as the “state,” “Islam,” and the “West”; and finally, how it may build thematic and theoretical bridges with other histories and geographies of science currently emerging from a more global, and not merely local, perspective.