The advantages of uncertainty? Toward new principles for

cooperation between divergent practices from ‘above’ and ‘below’

Saurabh Arora

Science Policy Research Unit, and STEPS Centre, Sussex

s.arora@sussex.ac.uk

I am going to tryto exploit the recognition that uncertainty, of various kinds, characterises all practices of knowing, aiming to

– Pluralise what/who is considered as capable of knowledge production

– Propose new terms of engagement between modern scientific and other diverging practices

– Flag the centrality of ‘common words’ and their inventors to facilitate this engagement

Ingredients1. Complexity and difference

2. Practices: understanding agency relationally

3. Uncertainties, in knowledge production (and use)

4. Socio-ecological resilience: distributed, democratic and connected

• A risky masala mix!

Complexity and difference• Natural/social world complicated and

complex

– Exceeds human understanding: all our knowledges partial and situated (Haraway 1991)

• Plural ways of making knowledge, differently

– Produce complementary rather than substitutable knowledges

– Knowledge produced in activities that are not ostentatiously knowledge-making: doing knowing (Stirling 2015)

Practices I• Action as a relational process (“action is

overtaken”: Latour 2005)• All action collective, even when it appears

individual– Distributed in webs of humans and nonhumans– Avoiding methodological individualism

Practices II• Action not simply the implementation of

ideas/intentions, nor always the following of rules

– Ideas encounter material friction as they are enacted

– Rules are bent (improvised) or circumvented as often as they are followed

• Collapsing the structure-agency dichotomy

– Structural inequalities (e.g. of gender and caste) performed within everyday practices

Uncertainties• Distinct from risk that is calculable based

on an event’s probable occurrence (Callon et al. 2009)

• Possible (future) states of the world unknown

• Ignorance: the ‘unknown’ unknowns;

• Indeterminacy: causal chains unidentified; outcomes unpredictable (Wynne 1992)

• Feature of knowledge as ‘output’ and of its practices

Socio-ecological resilience• The sum of various distributed and

decentralized initiatives always more than its parts

– Contributing practices of citizens, households, street vendors, small farmers, ‘traditional’ medical practitioners etc.

• Democratic: capacity to raise voice (of dissent) by the most marginalized

• Connected: cooperative engagement between different practices

Cooperative engagement: how?

• All practices present to each other as ‘minority practices’

– Applies especially to modern scientific practices that have historically disqualified practices branded irrational (e.g. ideological, shamanic, magical, religious, affective)

– Minority practices not the same as practices of minorities

– ‘Minority’ here is a category of doing-knowing (relational process) rather than of people or entities

What are minority practices?

• They admit vulnerability, uncertainty, indeterminacy and ‘lack of control’

• They do not identify with a general (or normal) model that they were the first ones to ‘discover’

• They present themselves to the world from the vantage point of their ignorance

Terms of engagement• Minority practices (modern scientific and

vernacular) engage with each other on the basis of

– Commitment, to sharing cognitive and moral authority

– Tactfulness, by taking each other’s “self-determination” seriously

– Learning from each other, in ways that do not subsume the other practice

– Affinity, built not on commonality of characteristics between practices but rather on their irreducible difference

For learning together• Invention of mutually accessible ‘common

words’ (a shared language)

– That “resist time and space” and produce relevance in settings that are as yet unformed (Stengers 2011: 327)

• Construction of abstractions

– Centrality of philosophy for the ‘free creation of concepts’ and of literature (including bards and storytellers) in an ecology of minority practices