RSOC 375 Midterm 1

• developed in response to the new conditions of science in its social context
• goes beyond the traditional assumptions that science is certain and value-free
• makes systems' uncertainties and 'decision stakes' the essential elements of its analysis

see notebook

• public people talking about public issues
• historical basis for public engagement
• realm of influence created when individuals engage others in communication (conversation, argument, debate, questions) about subjects of a shared concern or topics that affect a wider community

public engagement can become a setting for power structures (ex. state, corporate actors) to develop legitimacy by instilling motivations in public actors that conform to the needs of the system dominated by these power structures

• various forms of public involvement where people (individually or in organized groups) can exchange information, express opinions, articulate interests, and have the potential to influence decisions or the outcome of specific issues 
• (this was from a forestry perspective)

• focus of research
• scale
• data does not match conclusions
• non-neutrality/bias
• funding
• uncertainty

• linear model
• political model

• Sarewitz, 2004
• linear formulation of the role of science in society
• ex. more science -> less uncertainty -> political action
• "scientific facts form the appropriate foundation for knowing how to act in the world"
• need for science to be free from the political process

• Sarewitz 2004
• science (large amounts of it) can lead to controversies and gridlock instead of clarity
• huge array of scientific approaches and methods that can create/support different points of view
• competing understandings instead of one overarching scientific understanding

• determines the rightness or wrongness of an action, policy, or social arrangement by its consequence
• a norm in the normative sense means a standard for evaluating or making judgements about behavior or outcomes

• SMOs
• a network of informal interaction bw a plurality of individuals, groups, and/or organizations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict on the basis of a shared collective identity

• diagnostic framing
• prognostic framing
• motivational framing

• source of problem
• often injustice frame
• boundary framing, delineating good and evil

• solution to problem
• reflecting the logic of opponants

• call to arms
• agency component of collective action frames
• vocabularies of severity, urgency, efficiency, propriety

• problem identification and direction/locus of attribution
• flexibility and rigidity, inclusivity and exclusivity
• variation in interpretive scope and influence
• resonance

• credibility
• salience

• frame consistency (lack of contradictions)
• empirical credibility (not about facts, whether references are being read as "real" indicators of the diagnostic claims)
• credibility of the claimsmakers (persuasiveness)

• centrality (how essential are the beliefs and values)
• experiential commensurability (congruence with everyday experience, to what extent do we feel the problem?)
• narrative fidelity (resonance with dominant assumptions, myths, inherent ideology, cultural resonance)

the tendency of individuals and groups to construct versions of reality on the basis of their place within a socially organized situation

tendency of groups on one side of a debate to change the subject from the actual complaints of their critics

a story that is presented as a reason for why the issue at hand matters

• a threat to collective action
• a "disease" that knowledge must cure
• must be reduced at any cost

• reflect on the sources of ambiguity, indeterminency, and complexity
• reframe problems so their ethical dimensions are brought to light
• alleviate known causes of people's vulnurability to harm
• pay attention to the distribution of risks and benefits
• reflect on the social factors that promote or discourage learning

convinced himself through stats that the environmental conditions were getting better, not worse

• they all share the idea that scientific facts build the appropriate foundation for knowing how to act in the world
• so how then can we understand the radical differences of supposedly science-based views?

the obstacle to achieving some kind of scientific understanding about what the issue/complex environmental problem "means" and thus what it may imply for human action isn't a lack of scientific knowledge, but a huge body of knowledge whose components can be legitimately assembled and interpreted in different ways to give competing views of the "problem" and how society should respond

• global warming
• climate change

• Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) Experiment (values of oceanographers vs biologists)
• GMO foods (the values and views of plant geneticists vs ecologists or population biologists make them sensitive to different problems, they think differently and have different focuses so they can identify different problems)