Nancy Tuana

This article gives an account of the paradox that happens when liberatory reforms bring with them, simultaneously and in addition to the reforming values and practices, oppressive customs, beliefs, and authoritative knowledges. How can activists become aware of the paradox? How can they transform oppressive practices and systems of power and not bring with them other oppressive practices and systems of power? In responding to these questions, the article emphasizes: the importance of animating the paradoxes instead of attempting to eliminate them; making transverse and transforming movements instead of direct attacks on oppressive formations; finding all “solutions” questionable; and in the absence of stable foundations advancing an approach Tuana and Scott call “hyper-activism.”

Convergence research is driven by specific and compelling problems and requires deep integration across disciplines. The potential of convergence research is widely recognized, but questions remain about how to design, facilitate, and assess such research. Here we analyze a seven-year, twelve-million-dollar convergence project on sustainable climate risk management to answer two questions. First, what is the impact of a project-level emphasis on the values that motivate and tie convergence research to the compelling problems? Second, how does participation in convergence projects shape the research of postdoctoral scholars who are still in the process of establishing themselves professionally? We use an interview-based approach to characterize what the project specifically enabled in each participant’s research. We find that (a) the project pushed participants’ research into better alignment with the motivating concept of convergence research and that this effect was stronger for postdoctoral scholars than for more senior faculty. (b) Postdocs’ self-assessed understanding of key project themes, however, appears unconnected to metrics of project participation, raising questions about training and integration. Regarding values, (c) the project enabled heightened attention to values in the research of a large minority of participants. (d) Participants strongly believe in the importance of explicitly reflecting on values that motivate and pervade scientific research, but they question their own understanding of how to put value-focused science into practice. This mismatch of perceived importance with poor understanding highlights an unmet need in the practice of convergence science.

To claim that “humans have become a geological agent,” to worry that “humans are interrupting, refashioning, and accelerating natural processes” is to reinforce metaphysical divides—humans and nature, the cultural and the natural. It is furthermore to reinforce all the narratives from which these divides are animated: modernity, colonialization, enlightenment with their attendant discourses of progress, control, and purity. In its place I advocate Anthropocenean sensibilities. Sensibilities in which our attentiveness to influences and exchanges becomes heightened, where we learn to live in the midst of change, with a new responsiveness to uncertainties that render not-knowing animating rather than paralyzing.

We provide an overview of a transdisciplinary project about sustainable forest management under climate change. Our project is a partnership with members of the Menominee Nation, a Tribal Nation located in northern Wisconsin, United States. We use immersive virtual experiences, translated from ecosystem model outcomes, to elicit human values about future forest conditions under alternative scenarios. Our project combines expertise across the sciences and humanities as well as across cultures and knowledge systems. Our management structure, governance, and leadership behaviors have both fostered and constrained our work and must be continuously responsive to changing group dynamics. Our project presents opportunities for substantial contributions to society, including insights and knowledge about complementary ways of knowing, skills training, and professional development, and opportunities for reflexive learning about effective transdisciplinary, translational, and transformative scientific processes.

For computer simulation models to usefully inform climate risk management, uncertainties in model projections must be explored and characterized. Because doing so requires running the model many times over, and because computing resources are finite, uncertainty assessment is more feasible using models that demand less computer processor time. Such models are generally simpler in the sense of being more idealized, or less realistic. So modelers face a trade-off between realism and uncertainty quantification. Seeing this trade-off for the important epistemic issue that it is requires a shift in perspective from the established simplicity literature in philosophy of science.

When developing computational models to analyze the tradeoffs between climate risk management strategies (i.e., mitigation, adaptation, or geoengineering), scientists make explicit and implicit decisions that are influenced by their beliefs, values and preferences. Model descriptions typically include only the explicit decisions and are silent on value judgments that may explain these decisions. Eliciting scientists’ mental models, a systematic approach to determining how they think about climate risk management, can help to gain a clearer understanding of their modeling decisions. In order to identify and represent the role of values, beliefs and preferences on decisions, we used an augmented mental models research approach, namely values-informed mental models (ViMM). We conducted and qualitatively analyzed interviews with eleven climate risk management scientists. Our results suggest that these scientists use a similar decision framework to each other to think about modeling climate risk management tradeoffs, including eight specific decisions ranging from defining the model objectives to evaluating the model’s results. The influence of values on these decisions varied between our scientists and between the specific decisions. For instance, scientists invoked ethical values (e.g., concerns about human welfare) when defining objectives, but epistemic values (e.g., concerns about model consistency) were more influential when evaluating model results. ViMM can (i) enable insights that can inform the design of new computational models and (ii) make value judgments explicit and more inclusive of relevant values. This transparency can help model users to better discern the relevance of model results to their own decision framing and concerns.

We are concerned with borders and their crucial importance in people's lives. Throughout we place emphasis on liberatory critique and knowledge and on the importance of the forces lineages exercise in the ways we live. How might we speak of whatever is bordered and allow that of which we speak its manifest differences? How are we able to engage differences and maintain our own differences? How might we, as philosophers, speak philosophically about what is beyond philosophy? Such speaking would constitute an art, a philosophical art, that is guided by unspeakable differences. After developing the concepts of border, in-between, sensibility, and mutations of lineages, we turn to Gloria Anzaldúa's accounts of border awareness and her experiences of it. Through an engagement with her account of nepantla, we offer reflections on the force that “beyond” can have in the happenings of liberatory philosophies. In doing so, we emphasize her conceptions of border arte and her manner of bringing it to expression. In that process we find parts of Alejandro Vallega's work helpful in elaborating radical exteriority, fluid margins, and “ana-chronic” sensibilities. We are engaging a philosophical understanding that gives us bridges that provide thresholds beyond philosophy.

We begin at the site of borders, the demarcations between us, between: my body and your body, humans and nonhuman animals, habits of thought and institutional structures, nature and culture, subject and object. We find ourselves between the devil and the deep blue sea. Differences, distinctions, and borders are key to knowing and acting responsibly. Yet we are “held captive” by particular habits of understanding that police such borders with unbecoming fervor. We desire to trouble these borders with the aim of transforming habits of thought and embodied dispositions, to give rise to new appreciations of difference through the deep, ongoing play of the in-between. Ours is an ontology of the in-between...

In recent years there has been a rebirth of interest in the philosophy of Pierre Duhem. Although I applaud the spirit of this movement, one finds the critics of Duhem frequently lacking in a basic understanding of Duhem's tenets, sometimes to the extent that one doubts a familiarity with the Duhemian text. One of the few papers which is designed to remedy this state of affairs is that of Philip Quinn entitled “What Duhem Really Meant.” Quinn is to be applauded for his meticulous and rigorous exegetical work on the Duhemian text. Unfortunately, Quinn's characterization of the logical relations of two of the central Duhemian theses is erroneous. I shall endeavor to correct these errors in this paper.

The goal of this paper is to articulate and advocate for an enhanced role for philosophers of science in the domain of science policy as well as within the science curriculum. I argue that philosophy of science as a field can learn from the successes as well as the mistakes of bioethics and begin to develop a new model that includes robust contributions to the science classroom, research collaborations with scientists, and a role for public philosophy through involvement in science policy development. Through an analysis of two case studies, I illustrate how philosophers of science can make effective and productive contributions to science education as well as to interdisciplinary scientific research, and argue for the essential role of philosophers of science in the realm of science policy

The National Science Foundation's Second Merit Criterion, or Broader Impacts Criterion , was introduced in 1997 as the result of an earlier Congressional movement to enhance the accountability and responsibility as well as the effectiveness of federally funded projects. We demonstrate that a robust understanding and appreciation of NSF BIC argues for a broader conception of research ethics in the sciences than is currently offered in Responsible Conduct of Research training. This essay advocates augmenting RCR education with training regarding broader impacts. We demonstrate that enhancing research ethics training in this way provides a more comprehensive understanding of the ethics relevant to scientific research and prepares scientists to think not only in terms of responsibly conducted science, but also of the role of science in responding to identified social needs and in adhering to principles of social justice. As universities respond to the mandate from America COMPETES to “provide training and oversight in the responsible and ethical conduct of research”, we urge institutions to embrace a more adequate conception of research ethics, what we call the Ethical Dimensions of Scientific Research, that addresses the full range of ethical issues relevant to scientific inquiry, including ethical issues related to the broader impacts of scientific research and practice

Physically frail, badly educated girls, brought up to lead useless lives as idle gentlewomen, married to dominant husbands, and relegated to "separate spheres" of life—these phrases have often been used to describe Victorian upper-middle-class women. M. Jeanne Peterson rejects such formulations and the received wisdom they embody in favor of a careful examination of Victorian ladies and their lives. Focusing on a network of urban professional families over three generations, this book examines the scope and quality of gentlewomen's education, their physical lives, their relationship to money, their experience of family illness and death, and their relationships to men (brothers and friends as well as fathers and husbands). Peterson also examines the prominent place of work in the lives of these "leisured" Victorian ladies, both single and married. Far from idle, the mothers, wives, and daughters of Victorian clergymen, doctors, lawyers, university dons, and others were accomplished and productive members of society who made substantial public and private contributions to virtually every sphere of Victorian life.