Summary
As crises multiply, the role of researchers is changing. Many of them are now stepping out of their academic reserve to engage in the public sphere, embracing new forms of commitment that may even extend to civil disobedience.
This book explores this turning point from two perspectives: first through an analysis of the changing relationship between science and politics, and second, through the journey of a researcher engaged in various public arenas —from campaigns against the use of plastic in school catering to the failure of the expertise on nitrate additives, the politicization of debates on persistent pollutants and the emergence of collectives such as Scientist Rebellion.
In light of these transformations, the book questions the way we relate to the world, too often reduced to an inanimate backdrop and/or a collection of resources to be exploited. It highlights some of the tensions within contemporary science: despite being increasingly precise and effective, scientific knowledge proved to be fragmented, standardized, and often disconnected from lived experience and collective concerns. Having become inaudible and illegible, it no longer enables us to build a dignified and sustainable way of co-living. Yet crises are not a curse. They offer an opportunity to question how we produce knowledge and to rethink our experiences and forms of understanding in order to reconnect with the world we inhabit - while there is still time.
Table of contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. Traces of engagement
1.1. Science and society: A very old story
1.2. An unprecedented situation
1.3. Scientific engagement and the reconfiguration of public sphere
1.4. Reconfiguration of the relationship between science and politics
2. Trajectories
2.1. Father, citizen, and scientist in the public arena
2.2. The collapse of public expertise in the regulatory arena
2.3. Influencing legislators in the political arena
2.4. Civil disobedience to bring scientific knowledge into the media spotlight
2.5. Why Engage - and to What End?
3. Crises
3.1. A lost world
3.2. Omelas
3.3. The crisis of knowledge and the crisis of science
3.4. An epistemic, social, and political crisis
3.5. Relating to crisis
4. Transformations
4.1. How crises transform science
4.2. The failure of the scientific institution
4.3. Kairos: another science is possible
4.4. Common, commons, and commoning
4.5. Shevek: reopening imaginations
Discussion
Bibliography
List of abbreviations
