Friday 21 February 2014

Bruno Latour on war and peace in a time of ecological conflicts

By Martin

Update: audio and video now available here

Bruno Latour delivered a lecture at the London School of Economics last night in which he outlined some of his recent thinking on the relationship between science and politics in a time of accelerating environmental change and policy stagnation.

Latour has cut an interesting figure in the climate debate in recent years. A key target of attacks against ‘relativism’ and irrationality in the 1990s ‘Science Wars’, he has since speculated as to whether the insights of science studies concerning the social constitution of scientific knowledge have inadvertently contributed to the ‘artificial extension’ of the debate over the reality and severity of anthropogenic climate change. More recently, Latour has sought to cast himself as an ally of the climate scientists and the activists who seek a political solution to climate change. He even related last night how climate scientists, in France at least, have even started to seek out his advice on how to conduct a ‘debate’ against a well-funded, smartly coordinated campaign to sow doubt and ignorance about the causes and consequences of climate change.

Monday 10 February 2014

New paper - 'Organizations in the making: Learning and intervening at the science-policy interface'

By Helen

I am very excited to announce that my first official publication from my PhD has appeared online, in Progress in Human Geography. Entitled 'Organizations in the making: Learning and intervening at the science-policy interface', it is a review paper which synthesises insights from my early literature reviews on organisational learning and reflexivity. It's been a long process (almost 18 months) between initial submission and publication, during which my supervisor and I have refined and streamlined the argument of the paper a lot, hopefully making it more relevant and interesting to geographers with diverse interests. I'll offer a short summary of the paper below and try to outline where I think it can contribute to the current debate. If you don't have access to the journal and would be interested to read my paper then do get in touch.