The Contemporary Crisis of Science
Thursday October 31st, 2019
The Contemporary Crisis of Science: Panel and Round Table
Arts Senate Chamber 4pm-6pm
Science as an authoritative way of knowing depends upon Science, the social institution of practices, procedures, intermediations, materials, valuations, economies, desires, directives and even collective emergencies. Now, when we seem to need science as never before, science seems to be an institution in crisis on every front. The power of big money over science combined with a pedagogical failure in confronting science’s historical entanglements with political power, war, racism, colonialism, patriarchy and the enclosure of commons has led to a crisis of legitimacy and trust in the eyes of more and more people, especially as formal education becomes harder to access.
This panel brings together members from the Intermedia Research Studio’s Critical Theory of Technology Working Group and the Space and Culture Research Network for a conversation on science, popular culture, crises, populist politics, elitism, power, enclosure and reification. Panelists will each briefly present their own perspective on such issues in order to open up a free ranging round-table discussion on the contemporary crises of science involving those interested in exploring these issues together.
PANELISTS
Dietlind Bork, Department of Anthropology
“What’s in a name? Exploring the roles of psychiatric classification in the mental health crisis”
Joao Victor Krieger, Department of Sociology
“Coloniality, Science, and Bolsonaro’s Crusade Against Universities”
Jim Morrow, Kule Institute
“If a Tree Falls in the Forest, the Earth Dies Screaming”
Rob Shields, Department of Sociology
“TBA”
Charles Stubblefield, Department of Sociology
“Apolitical Science and Ecological Crisis”
Sourayan Mookerjea, moderator
Maker Research
Intermedia Research-Creation Workshops
Friday November 1st, 2019
Education South Rm 367
9:00AM Coffee
9:15AM Introduction
Workshop 1, 9:30am-11:30am
When There is No Antidote: Toxic Media Ecologies + Strati-Tactical Intervention
Led by Jessie Beier
This interactive workshop starts from the premise that situated amidst seemingly omnipresent crises and ongoing toxic shocks, the question of “critical” academic research has itself become de/limited by the search for common cures and standardizable solutions. At the same time that research methods have expanded and proliferated in order to dilate what counts as “legitimate” study, opting for more “creative” methods and/or “non-traditional” approaches, scholarly inquiry nevertheless remains committed to methodocentrism, or the belief that with the right method, an antidote to today’s toxic media ecologies is both possible and of the utmost imperative. In this workshop, we will work together to interrogate such solutionist demands by developing a series of collaborative strati-tactics that do not aim to provide pre-determined models and methods, but instead work as provisional platforms from which future research trajectories may (or may not) emerge.
Jessie Beier is an Edmonton-based teacher, artist, writer, and conjurer of weird pedagogies for ‘the end times.’ Beier is currently a PhD student at the University of Alberta, a research fellow with the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory (University of Alberta) and a contributor to Speculative Energy Futures (University of Alberta). Jessie’s current research — Teaching at the End of the World — investigates how education systems produce resources for thinking ‘the future’ in light of the various impasses facing both students and teachers today, with the aim of fabulating alternative speculations on how pedagogical life might be thought otherwise.
Workshop 2, 2pm-4pm
Experiments of the Outside
Led by Kim Smith
Kim Smith recently moved back to Edmonton after a too-long sojourn on the west coast for grad school. Having a complex relationship within and beside the academy, most of her creative and experimental contributions happen to have taken place outside the purview of institutions. Rather, the experiments Kim has been a part of have been intensely collective, emerging from experiences, conversations, reflections, and experiments with friends & bystanders that build and build into something larger, with some sort of gravitational field. She will draw upon and expand on some of these experiments as a basis for this research spore, also building upon the experiments started in the morning’s workshop with Jessie Beier.