Re: <nettime> Why I won't support the March for Science

[Flick Harrison <flick.harrison@gmail.com>]

Where I sit, I've been studying / promoting mixed-methods and
arts-based research with the ASC! project out of SFU, including the use
of dance with Parkinson's patients and the use of circus as a
social-work tool (social circus).  We need to legitimize this work, and
there's a broader need to legitimize non-quantitative tools and, for
instance, story-based knowledge transfer and alternative / indigenous /
non-western modes of knowing.

That said:  What Peter said rings true for me of the critiques of M4S:
"pointlessly fractious at best, and ally-denigrating, wheel-churning
self-destruction at worst. "

I would add to that, obscurantist!

Specifically, an attempt to discredit "science" from the left by
attaching it to technocracy and capitalism is really missing the point
that right now, technocracy and capitalism are stomping all over the
most Inconvenient Truth of climate change (to name just the biggest
current emergency); monetizing mass extinctions, resource depletion,
desertification etc; while their allies in the social far right reject
any scientific challenge to gender, creationism, etc. and dredge up
darker theories about racial superiority from the dustbin of science
history, or more easily distort newer social science to "prove" this or
that right-wing BS about crime or poverty in relation to single mothers
or black babies.

So when I hear people decrying the lack of non-positivist inclusion in
the march for science, I say, "why didn't you join?"

But: a need to open the floodgates to other ways of knowing shouldn't
just become a touchy-feely new-age exercise in equating every possible
contradictory theory into a unified field.  Anti-vaxxers and
lizard-people-hunters need not apply.

This nitpicking school of dissent, which sits back and flings pot-shots
at any emerging consensus on the left, strikes me as lazy
obstructionism rather than Bakuninist / anti-authoritarin.

--

* WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD? http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison
* FLICK's WEBSITE: http://www.flickharrison.com
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