Mandate

Text

With the intrinsic personal ambition to promote STS research that positions itself activistly, my research commences with a self-imposed mandate, namely: to critically investigate evidence as a socio-material constitution and representation of factual claims  based on knowledge production processes, i.e. practices of verification at the intersection of scientific and aesthetic practices.

Therefore, this research not only challenges current theoretical debates in STS, but is also  embedded in academic debates about practices of verification in the era of post-truth and fake news.

Consequently, this research bears a high density of ethical and normative implications which not only poses challenges to the investigation of the constitution of evidence, but also to the discussion about the political responsibility of scientific research in a post-factual environment.  

Lastly, deploying the term ‘mandate’ for the opening sequence of this master thesis, with its backdrop as a rather juridical and political term, should reinforce to frame the work as an activist statement. Arguing for a research approach that includes sensing capacities of human as well as non-human actors, it might tend to – from time to time – cry and hunt*, colored with a personal ambition to fathom out where to position myself as a researcher in a more than human, post-truth world.

*Like T.Ingold (2013) suggests, reasoning about his teaching methods: ‘The aims of the course were to train students in the art of inquiry, to sharpen their powers of observation, and to encourage them to think through observation rather than after it. Like hunters they had to learn to learn, to follow the movements of beings and things, and in turn to respond to them with judgement and precision. They would discover that the path to wisdom lay in this correspondence, not in an escape into the self-referential domain of academic texts’ (Ingold 2013: p. 11). 

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Contributed date

May 25, 2020 - 3:05am

Critical Commentary

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Cite as

Anonymous, "Mandate", contributed by , Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 25 May 2020, accessed 29 March 2024. http://www.centerforethnography.org/content/mandate