Science Interrupted: Rethinking Research Practice with Bureaucracy, Agroforestry, and Ethnography (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge) - Softcover

McLellan, Timothy G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 150177333X ISBN 13: 9781501773334

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Science Interrupted examines how scientists in China pursue environmental sustainability within the constraints of domestic and international bureaucracies. Timothy G. McLellan offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the formal procedural work of Chinese bureaucracy―work that is overlooked when China scholars restrict their gaze to the informal and interpersonal channels through which bureaucracy is often navigated.

Homing in on an agroforestry research organization in southwest China, the author takes the experiences of the organization's staff in navigating diverse international funding regimes and authoritarian state institutions as entry points for understanding the pervasiveness of bureaucracy in contemporary science. He asks: What if we take the tools, sensibilities, and practices of bureaucracies seriously not only as objects of critique but as resources for re-thinking scientific practice?

Extending a mode of anthropological research in which ethnography serves as source of theory as well as source of data, Science Interrupted thinks with, and not only against, bureaucracy. McLellan shows that ethnographic engagement with bureaucracy enables us to imagine more democratic and more collaborative modes of scientific practice.

About this title

About the Author

Timothy G. McLellan is a Lecturer in Anthropology at The Australian National University. He has published articles in Social Studies of Science, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 150177333X
• ISBN 13: 9781501773334
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 174