Vignettes@STS.Next.20

Smog obscures view of Chrysler Building from Empire State Building, New York City 1953 (Image Credit – World-Telegram photo by Walter Albertin)

“We are sustainable because we are poor,” Sunita Narain provocatively announced in her Science and Democracy Lecture at Harvard University. But that was just the beginning of the paradox she put to us. “Less than 20% of Delhi residents drive cars and yet the city is congested and polluted.” For Narain, this raises a question for Delhi’s future, “If only a small number created the phenomenally horrendous problem of population, is there space on the road and air shed for the remaining?” She continued, “This is also the question that we should ask in climate politics, but we don’t. But we certainly need to ask this question in Delhi. You can’t ask the poor not to get rich, so you have to rethink development. The only way to really deal with the pollution issue is to reimagine mobility, so that we do not get into a car first to then get back onto a bicycle.”

On December 4, 2017, the Program on Science, Technology & Society (ST&S) at Harvard hosted Sunita Narain, writer, environmentalist, and Director General of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, India. The thread that connected her public lecture and a number of conversations that followed was the need to “open up” our understanding of environmental and climate problems to a diversity of voices, competing identities, and value-positions.[1] Narain asked if India should—or could—follow the trajectory of the Western world in dealing with pollution, and, conversely, if there are lessons India holds for the global fight against environmental degradation and climate change. She discussed democracy and dissent; and she advocated for what she called an “environmentalism of the poor” that at once contends with questions of sustainability, affordability, and inclusiveness. In other words, Narain rearticulated who the stakeholders are in the global climate justice movement and, therefore, what kinds of problems we should talk about when we talk about the environment and climate.

By seeking out interlocutors such as Narain, the Program on ST&S at Harvard gives voice to two core principles of the field of science and technology studies—‘symmetry’ and ‘reflexivity’. First articulated in 1970s Edinburgh, these two principles began as specific methodological dictates in the “strong programme” of sociology of scientific knowledge, but they have since gained broader significance for the field. Over the past decade and a half, scholars affiliated with the Harvard ST&S Program have expanded the scope of the symmetry principle in terms of a more general theoretical framework, “co-production.” This analytic perspective entails not only mobilizing the same sorts of causes to explain true and false beliefs, as in the “strong programme,” but also studying the social and political orders within which science and technology are situated. Here, a symmetrical study of the natural and the social, of knowledge and power, calls attention to the actors, institutions, and processes that define public problems as being of a given kind or as requiring a particular disciplinary approach and specialized expertise. Who defines the nature of public concerns, and therefore what count as appropriate ways to address them, are historical and political projects that the co-productionist approach interrogates.

Yet in 2018, a temptation has arisen to discard this intellectual commitment to symmetry, thereby also sacrificing reflexivity in the process. There is talk in some academic circles of the need for an “asymmetry principle,” which I take to mean that we should refer to different types of causes to explain true and false beliefs. The symmetrical approach has been ineffectual—one hears at local and national conferences—in dealing with attacks on, and the dismantling of public knowledge regarding such urgent issues as the environment and climate. Worse, many believe there has been outright misappropriation of this core principle of our field by “merchants” who wish to spread doubt for the sake of political gain and private profit. “Asymmetry” is proposed as an antidote, to distinguish the good practices of knowledge-making from the bad practices of sowing doubt. But as revealing as it could be to study doubt-making in parallel to fact-making, such analyses can only kick in after our common problems have already been defined as being of “this” or “that” kind, say, of understanding climate change as a matter of atmospheric chemistry rather than of overconsumption or inequality. How do global public problems come to be understood in narrow, technical terms instead of as issues of global justice, as Narain proposed? Whose questions are answered and whose are not when climate change becomes only or mainly an issue of carbon emissions? An asymmetry principle that never looks beyond extant framings will not give us the answers.

Scholars in science and technology studies thus have a choice. Advocating for “asymmetry,” we may gain a more finely honed ability to distinguish good knowledge-making practices from bad (though it still leaves open the question “good” or “bad” from whose standpoint), but we fall into the trap of assuming particular, perhaps hegemonic, definitions of public concerns. Indeed such analysis may unwittingly aid in the work of turning that which is historically contingent and politically configured into seemingly inexorable formulations given by nature. Alternatively, if we extend the principle of “symmetry” to studying the social orders that support particular knowledge formations—if we mobilize our analytic resources to engage with such knowledge actors as Narain herself—we continue to focus on epistemic questions, only starting from an earlier analytical point in which alternative formulations of humanity’s problems have not been prematurely foreclosed. To remain open to these alternative imaginaries, and the social concerns that they represent, we must embrace symmetry all the way down.

Keywords: methodological symmetry; reflexivity; environmentalism; climate justice

Further Readings:

Jasanoff, Sheila. “Beyond epistemology: relativism and engagement in the politics of science.” Social studies of science 26.2 (1996): 393-418.

Agarwal, Anil, and Sunita Narain. Global warming in an unequal world: a case of environmental colonialism. Centre for Science and Environment, 1991.

[1] Following the lecture, Harvard STS Program Director Sheila Jasanoff moderated a discussion with panelists Sunil Amrith, Jody Freeman, and David Jones. The next day, Narain also participated in a public workshop with panelists Sheila Jasanoff, Janelle Knox-Hayes, Adil Najam, and Noelle Selin, and moderated by Gregg Macey, and had a private conversation with the fellows of the Harvard STS Program.