EXCHANGEACTIV/ Exchange zones of epistemic resistance and alternative innovation: Activism, grassroots movements and expertise, 1970s-1990s
This project delves on the highly significant exchange zones between activists, grassroots groups and experts in the Iberian Peninsula during the last decades of the 20th century. Looking at them allow us to understand in a deeper historical perspective key current scientific debates that are strongly shaped by lay actors, such as green transitions, pandemics, gender identities and AI. It draws on the theoretical framework of the main project and focuses specifically on two intertwined domains:
Activism as an epistemologically active actor. Like users, consumers, patients, civic organizations and citizens exposed to envirotechnical risks, activist movements have played a decisive active role in the co-production of scientific knowledge and technological artifacts. When contesting specific innovations and scientific programs, activists have deployed a rich repertoire of epistemic resistance. As part of their local practices and transnational networks, the circulation of scientific knowledge has been crucial to their demands and arguments. In particular, scientific knowledge has often been appropriated in the making of what has been called activist knowledge and green knowledge, which, in turn, has been appropriated by (and shaped) technoscience. Alongside experts, activists have constituted exchange zones bridging different knowledge and standpoints, different political and epistemic practices, and different scientific languages and dreamscapes. In this sense, these exchange zones of epistemic resistance shed light on the multi-directional, multi-scale dimensions of the co-production of science and society.
Activism as a driving force of sociotechnical innovation. Economic historians have treated resistance as an external factor (and an independent variable) which has to take into account when writing the complex equation explaining echnological choice. However, there is no comprehensive framework to understand these processes in the perspective of the history of science. Scholars like S. Jasanoff and J.- P. Gaudillière have shown the multiplicity of efforts required to introduce a new artifact in society and authors such as D. Edgerton have reminded us that without present or imaginable alternatives, no activist resistance is understandable. Of course, not all the activist protests against science and technology have led to do scientific endeavors and innovative technologies. Nonetheless, social opposition to specific scientific and technological projects does have often triggered a fair amount of ingenuity and innovation. The heterogeneous practices behind what is labeled as Civic Science, Street Science and Citizen science are closely related to alternative pathways of doing science.
By bringing together several previous national and international projects of the researchers converge, this project focuses on the socially blurred epistemic zones where activists exchange knowledge, faces scientific ignorance and produces epistemic tools for political purposes in a wide range of scales. In particular, the project addresses three broad themes as main research lines: the environment, the city and the body. All these lines are articulated with the following intersecting dimensions: invisibilized actors, cognitive emotions, socio-technical imaginaries and transnational perspectives.
This project is part of the main project “Exchange zones in the production and regulation of technoscience in the Iberian Peninsula: Academics, activists and the industry, 1930s-1990s“.