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Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

About: The article was published on 1994-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 718 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Science wars & Intellectual freedom.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a three stage Delphi questionnaire with 23 participants drawn from the communities of leading and acknowledged international experts of science educators; scientists; historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science; experts engaged in work to improve the public understanding of science and expert science teachers.
Abstract: Recent arguments in science education have proposed that school science should pay more attention to teaching the nature of science and its social practices. However, unlike the content of science, for which there is well-established consensus, there would appear to be much less unanimity within the academic community about which ideas-about-science are essential elements that should be included in the contemporary school science curriculum. Hence, this study sought to determine empirically the extent of any consensus using a three stage Delphi questionnaire with 23 participants drawn from the communities of leading and acknowledged international experts of science educators; scientists; historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science; experts engaged in work to improve the public understanding of science; and expert science teachers. The outcome of the research was a set of nine themes encapsulating key ideas about the nature of science for which there was consensus and which were considered to be an essential component of school science curriculum. Together with extensive comments provided by the participants, these data give some measure of the existing level of agreement in the community engaged in science education and science communication about the salient features of a vulgarized account of the nature of science. Although some of the themes are already a feature of existing school science curricula, many others are not. The findings of this research, therefore, challenge (a) whether the picture of science represented in the school science curriculum is sufficiently comprehensive, and (b) whether there balance in the curriculum between teaching about the content of science and the nature of science is appropriate.

988 citations

Book
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: Harding as discussed by the authors brings together the biggest names in the field to not only showcase the most influential essays on the topic but also highlight subsequent interrogations and developments of these approaches from a wide variety of disciplines and intellectual and political positions.
Abstract: Leading feminist scholar and one of the founders of Standpoint Theory, Sandra Harding brings together the biggest names in the field--Dorothy Smith, Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, Nancy Hartsock and Hilary Rose--to not only showcase the most influential essays on the topic but to also highlight subsequent interrogations and developments of these approaches from a wide variety of disciplines and intellectual and political positions.

947 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Scheper-Hughes as mentioned in this paper argued that cultural relativism is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded.
Abstract: CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June r995 ttl 1995 by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved oo32041~5136o3·ooo3S2..oo The Primacy of the Ethical Propositions for a Militant Anthropology! by Nancy Scheper-Hughes In bracketing certain Western Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoreti­ cally a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be suspending the ethi· cal in our dealings with the other. Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imag­ ine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged an· thropology might take. NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A.). Born in 1944, she was educated at Berkeley (Ph.D., 19761. She has taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, at Southern Methodist University, at the University of Cape Town, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her research interests include the application of critical theory to medicine and psychiatry, the anthropology of the body, illness, and suffering, the political economy of the emo­ tions, and violence and terror. Among her publications are Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ire­ land (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979l, the edited volume Child Survival: Anthropological Per­ spectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children [Dor­ drecht: D. Reidel, 1987), and Death Without Weeping (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992l. The pres­ ent paper was submitted in final form 25 x 94. I. This paper was originally presented as a keynote address at the Israel Anthropological Association Meetings, Tel Aviv University, on March 23, 1994, where the conference theme was Politically Committed Anthropology. On my return to South Afriea I pre­ sented the paper to my colleagues at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town, on May 13, 1994, where it achieved a certain notoriety and generated a strong response, aspects of which have worked their way into this revision. In No­ vember r994 parts of this paper were read at the AAA symposium Rethinking the Cultural: Beyond Intellectual Imperialisms and Parochialisms of the Past (see Winkler 1994:AI8). I am grateful to my Israeli, South African, and North American colleagues for their contributions and criticisms. Finally, at a crucial moment in my failed attempts to make sense of the useless suffering of the multitudes of Northeast Brazilian angel-babies, T. M. S. Evens introduccd me to certain key writings of Emmanuel Levinas [1986}. Although I originally rejected these with the vehemence of the For much of this century cultural anthropology has been concerned with divergent rationalities, with explaining how and why various cultural others thought, reasoned, and lived-in-the-world as they did. Classical anthropo­ logical thinking and practice are best exemplified, per~ haps, in the ~reat witchcraft and rationality debates of decades past. Ideally, modernist cultural anthropology liberated truth from its unexamined Eurocentric and Orientalist presuppositions. But the world, the objects of our study, and consequently, the uses of anthropology have changed considerably. Exploring the cultural logic of witchcraft is one thing. Documenting, as I am now, the burning or necklacing of accused witches, politi~ cal collaborators, and other ne'er-do~wells in belea­ guered South African townships-where a daily toll of charred bodies is a standard feature of news re­ ports-is another. 3 A more womanly-hearted anthropol­ ogy might be concerned not only with how humans think but with how they behave toward each other, thus engaging directly with questions of ethics and power. In South African squatter camps as in the AIDS sana­ toria of Cuba and in the parched lands of Northeast Bra­ zil, I have stumbled on a central dilemma and challenge to cuIrural anthropology, one that has tripped up many a fieldworker before me (for example, Renata Rosaldo [r989:r-2rl in his encounters with Ilongot headhunt­ ers): In bracketing certain Western Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoretically with a multiplicity of alter­ native truths encoded in our reiRed notion of culture, anthropologists may be suspending the ethical (Buber 1952:147-56) in our dealings with the ((other, espe­ cially those whose vulnerable bodies and fragile lives are at stake. Moreover, what stake can anthropologists expect to have in current political debates in rapidly de­ mocratizing nations in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa where newly drafted constitutions and bills of rights-and those of Brazil and South Africa are exem­ unreflexive cultural relativist, Levinas's notion of a pre-cultural moral repugnance toward unnecessary human suffering came back to haunt me with a vengeance, along with the specter of three-year­ old Mercea, who died abandoned by both her mother and her an­ thropologist during Brazilian Carnival celebrations in 1989. 2. Excellent reviews of these debates in anthropology can be found in Mohanty (1989), Hollis and Lukes (1982J, Wilson (1985), and Tambiah (1990J. 3- Here is how the death of suspected police collaborators and witchcs is described in the local white newspaper in Cape Town (my emphasis): Dozen Bodies Removed from Guguletu in Week­ end Casualties ; The charred bodies of seven people, including a 50 year old woman and her teenage daughter, were found in Tho­ koza hostel and Katlehong on Friday. . The burned and blackened bodies of two young men were found at the Mandela squatter camp in Thokoza and another body at Katlehong railway station (Cape Times, September 1993); Another 40 bodies found on the East Rand ; finally, Charred bodies of two witches found in Nyanga (Argus, January 21, 1994l. The women accused of witchcraft had been bound together with rope and were badly burnt. While white deaths counted -as, for example, in the extensive and personal coverage of the white victims of the St. James Church massacre in Cape Town in late July r994-the black victims of township violence were merely counted, recorded as body counts.

889 citations

Book
13 May 2005
TL;DR: In this article, Charis Thompson explores the intertwining of biological reproduction with the personal, political, and technological meanings of reproduction, and analyzes the "ontological choreography" at ART clinics using ethnographic data to address questions usually treated in the abstract.
Abstract: Assisted reproductive technology (ART) makes babies and parents at once. Drawing on science and technology studies, feminist theory, and historical and ethnographic analyses of ART clinics, Charis Thompson explores the intertwining of biological reproduction with the personal, political, and technological meanings of reproduction. She analyzes the "ontological choreography" at ART clinics -- the dynamics by which technical, scientific, kinship, gender, emotional, legal, political, financial, and other matters are coordinated -- using ethnographic data to address questions usually treated in the abstract. Reproductive technologies, says Thompson, are part of the increasing tendency to turn social problems into biomedical questions and can be used as a lens through which to see the resulting changes in the relations between science and society. After giving an account of the book's disciplinary roots in science and technology studies and in feminist scholarship on reproduction, Thompson comes to the ethnographic heart of her study. She develops her concept of ontological choreography by examining ART's normalization of "miraculous" technology (including the etiquette of technological sex); gender identity in the assigned roles of mother and father and the conservative nature of gender relations in the clinic; the naturalization of technologically assisted kinship and procreative intent; and patients' pursuit of agency through objectification and technology. Finally, Thompson explores the economies of reproductive technologies, concluding with a speculative and polemical look at the "biomedical mode of reproduction" as a predictor of future relations between science and society.

862 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A partir d'une analyse des aspects philosophiques et ideologiques de la mecanique quantique et de la relativite generale, l'A. as discussed by the authors etudie le developpement scientifique que constitue l'emergence des nouvelles theories de la gravite quantique and en mesure les consequences culturelles et politiques.
Abstract: A partir d'une analyse des aspects philosophiques et ideologiques de la mecanique quantique et de la relativite generale, l'A. etudie le developpement scientifique que constitue l'emergence des nouvelles theories de la gravite quantique et en mesure les consequences culturelles et politiques

831 citations