STS Circle at Harvard [cid:[email protected]] Zoe Nyssa Harvard, HUCE/STS Fellow
on Ecologies of Paradox: A Typology of Scientific Surprise in the Anthropocene Monday, October 27 12:15-2:00 pm Room 100F, Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street [cid:[email protected]] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to via our online<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HbdY3j1fVcUeE-UqQ7pN5clAxQtaQX7Ux6Y0tRMM9E8/viewform> form<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1HbdY3j1fVcUeE-UqQ7pN5clAxQtaQX7Ux6Y0tRMM9E8/viewform> before Thursday morning, October 23. Abstract: With species going extinct one thousand times the natural rate, the study of global biodiversity for conservation scientists has become a professional, moral, and practical imperative. Yet as a new biological and political category of risky existence, species endangerment has material consequences that often oppose scientists’ aims. Insiders call these the “unintended consequences” of their work: preserving habitat incentivizes development; calling species endangered fuels their consumption, moving species to captivity threatens their long term survival. I argue that the failures of science-based conservation are not only due to well-documented discordances between the commitments and practices of academic scientists and other conservation partners and communities. Rather, these paradoxical effects exhibit a consistent pattern related to how the science of conservation parses up and engages with the world. This paper provides a typology of the unintended consequences of conservation, the ways that scientists, their allies, and other stakeholders are surprised by the effects of biodiversity science. I argue that this element of surprise is an epistemic artifact of the limits of our ecological thinking. Further, conservation as a case study affords insight into wider processes of scientific serendipity and rupture in the Anthropocene. Biography: Zoe Nyssa earned her Hon. B.Sc. in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Toronto, an M.A. at the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation research examined the rapid growth of conservation science from the 1980s to the present through quantitative and qualitative analyses of environmental research, collaboration, and academic curricula. Her work has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including an Andrew W. Mellon dissertation year fellowship in 2013-2014 from the University of Chicago, a Predoctoral Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and a Student Fellowship from the University of Minnesota Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment and the Life Sciences. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/ Follow us on Facebook: STS@Harvard<http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS>
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