Matthew Kearnes
I am an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Environmental Humanities Programme at UNSW Australia. You can access my research at technofables.wordpress.com and @mbkearnes
Location Sydney, Australia
Activity
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Matthew Kearnes made a comment
I think we need to connect this discussion to our earlier one around environmental determinism. In the climate case, we see a different form of determinism that suggests that social and political outcomes can be directly attributed to sea level rise, or to global warming. However, as we saw in Step 2.9, when we look in detail at the conflict in Darfur or to...
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Matthew Kearnes made a comment
Pt2: At the same time it seems to me that commitments to 'engaging the public in decision making' (which is a now commonplace feature of much environmental practice) can at times function to 'close down' the scope of public involvement to pre-determined political commitments. In a recent book the French sociologist Michel Callon and his colleagues suggest...
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Matthew Kearnes made a comment
There has been some great discussion here, that has covered many of the key issues around democratising environmental issues. We seemed to have honed in on two key problems.
The first is broadly a fact-value distinction - the assumption that science is value-free and speaks only in the language of propositional truth claims while we assume that various...
