Suchergebnisse

---

Attempt of demonstrating whether social scientists agreed with their respective governments on the issues generated by the Falklands/Malvinas conflict of 1982. The sample consisted of 377 social scientists from 48 different countries who attended two international social science conferences held in 1982. The sample was broken down nationally and regionally: the UK, the US, Western Europe, Argentina and Latin America. Disagreement among the subgroups extended to the characterization of the conflict, thus calling into question the objective nature of social science typologies

The Fukushima nuclear catastrophe of March 2011 created a boom in independent radioactivity monitoring among citizens in Japan. Drawing on three case studies of monitoring stations in Tokyo, Kanagawa, and Fukushima, this paper analyzes citizens' practices of monitoring radioactively contaminated food from the perspective of citizen science (CS). It explores if and how the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe challenges lay-expert relations, and assumes that there is difference between expert and lay knowledge. It does so not because the terms "lay" and "expert" are static features of those individuals involved in science, but rather because of the different contexts in which knowledge production takes place. The paper argues that lay-expert relations in Japan have changed to certain degree since Fukushima, because independent monitoring was first initiated by lay people - thereby empowering nonprofessional scientists. At the same time, independent monitoring offers professional scientists new contexts for the production of "alternative knowledge". Although it is not included in the Japanese government's policymaking decisions, this alternative knowledge has a transformative potential because it is employed by civil society organizations and the antinuclear movement in Japan. Independent monitoring therefore has a (perhaps unintended) subversive character, and should be considered when evaluating the transformative potential of independent monitoring organizations and when talking about civil society and advocacy with regard to scientific issues.

This paper provides a preliminary examination of some of the late eighteenth-century bases for the reception of liberalism and debates on slavery, specifically the Luso-Brazilian engagement with natural science and the work of the Lisbon Royal Academy of Sciences. The Academy's work most directly concerned with the question of slavery and the slave trade appealed to economic principles of utility, efficiency and productivity to identify ways to reform the practice of enslaving Africans in the interest of increasing the wealth generated within the colonial and imperial economies. Thus, even as slavery was being assailed internationally on both philosophical and religious grounds, Luso-Brazilian Academic writing insisted it was an economic rather than moral problem. At the same time, however, Academic inquiries into the question of human difference often undercut claims about Africans that were invoked elsewhere in the Atlantic world to justify the perpetuation of slavery and the slave trade. As Academic reformism thus grappled with the humanity of Africans, civilization and barbarism emerged as privileged categories of analysis for discerning the future of slavery, reasserting the moral dimensions of the institution. The paper was presented at the conference on The End of the Old Regime in the Iberian World sponsored by the Spanish Studies Program and the Portuguese Studies Program of UC Berkeley on February 8-9, 2008.