I am participating in a digital workshop series titled How Do We Know What We Know? Integration, Translation, and “Right Relationship” Across Ways of Knowing in Civic & Tech Systems. It’s an interesting set of themes for sure. In this post I will keep track of some notes and ideas as they come up for me in the series.

Bridging between ways of knowing

Session one was about the Rights of Nature movement; it featured a presentation and some discussion.

Early on in the session, the organizers offered this prompt for reflection and discussion:

Have you ever had to translate or bridge between different ways of knowing, cultures, or institutions? What felt challenging, or meaningful, about that experience?

What came to mind for me on this prompt was my efforts during the PhD at bridging and translating back and forth across academic fields with very different perspectives and epistemologies. A few things that occured about the difficulty of this:

  1. The question of where I am grounded as a translator. Where am I positioned and coming from? Am “from” group A, translating for group B, or the reverse? Do I think of myself as somehow sitting outside of both groups? How does that work? Or maybe I think of myself as part of both groups or perspectives instead, even if that entails apparently incoherent commitments or identities. I think there is a tight connection between translation, accessing different ways of knowing, and one’s relationship to coherence and hybridity. I wrote about this a bit in the context of Donna Haraway’s work here. It’s hard to really inhabit different ways of seeing if one insists on (intellectual) coherence. How might we re-position our emotional and intellectual attitudes towards the value of “coherence”, and what might we gain from that?

  2. It takes a long time to really assimilate different ways of knowing, especially if they are different in meaningful ways. It is a paradigm-shift kind of thing – more similar to religious conversion than intellectual comprehension. Epistemic frames are encompassing and internally coherent; frame B will almost definitionally “not make sense” if approached from frame A. This underscores the importance of the kind of “unlearning” or space-clearing that the organizers mentioned in the setup discussion. But it’s often not something that happens overnight, and it may require extended periods of engagement with an approach that seems to obviously “not make sense” from the existing perspectives you are starting with. It would be interesting to think and learn more about religious and conversion experiences. I was remembering some of the discussion in James’ The Varieties of Religious Experiences, I think.

Notes on the Rights of Nature

I also captured a few more general notes and reflections on the “Rights of Nature” movement in general. Overall, it is not a perspective that I know a ton about in its applied forms, so it was interesting to hear more about. It seems to have an interesting and perhaps unsual theory of change as legal/policy interventions go. While it does have some practical dimension (e.g. offering new legal surfaces for advocates to bring suits), a big part of the goal seems to be more subjective / cultural. The idea is to reposition how people think about and relate to natural objects. The main goal is especially to help people think about natural objects as subjects rather than objects. The law is one site where we construct and culturally-enshrine subjectivity and agency, so I get the logic of pursuing change on the legal/policy front.

More conceptually, I find these themes interesting. They have strong STS resonances, especially in the Latour / Callon / Actor-Network Theory (ANT) vein of literature, which particularly emphasizes this kind of “symmetric” treatment of human- and non-human actors. I thought of this video of Latour discussing his “Parliament of Things” experiment, which is tightly connected to the Rights of Nature idea. I also thought of this influential paper from Callon which is a striking read.

Touching on the STS connections here also raises a conceptual question I was interested to have more discussion of in the session: namely, the crucial question of “translation”. Translation is part of the subtitle of the workshop series and is a heavy point of emphasis in the STS literature on these themes. Callon’s paper for example, is titled “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”, and is structured explicitly around different modes and moments of translation, and how actors (attempt to) enact and stabilize them (see the paper’s abstract for a summary).

Of course, it makes lots of sense to foreground “translation” when we think about different ways of knowing, seeing, and relating. When we talk about the voice of nature specifically, there is an obvious and foundational set of questions: if nature is to have a voice, who gets to articulate this voice, how, and on what terms? Who knows what is best for nature, and why?

Someone asked a version of this question in the discussion session. The response was roughly to recenter the political goals of these Rights of Nature policies. The goal is to change people’s perspective – encourage them to put themselves “in the shoes” of natural objects. These legal frameworks are “not perfect”, but still point us in the right direction politically, presenting legal surfaces for new sorts of challenges, and encouraging broader conceptual reframing.

I think that STS analyses tend to take a different approach to these sorts of questions. Rather than take an explicit stand in the political contestation about who gets to “speak for” this or that natural object, STS analyses instead step back and seek to analyze these processes of contestation and translation themselves as the object of study. How is it that different actors (e.g. scientists, policy advocates, indigenous voices) seek to position themselves as voice of nature? What conceptual, material, political resources are recruited in these processes? Why are or are not they received as “legitimate” or “objective” or “fair” by insitutions or publics?

In general, I think that this is something to keep an eye on in this workshop series in the future. Is the goal here to amplify some set of relatively-marginalized epistemic perspectives, and likewise dislodge more hegemonic ones? Or is it to do something more like the STS analysis: trying to more deeply understand the processes and resources through which different forms of “knowledge” are produced, legitimized, entrenched etc? Of course, these two sets of questions are related, and the answer could be some version of “both”; however, in practice I’ve noticed that these perspectives tend to yield fairly different kinds of conversations and insights.