The Podcast for Social Research, Episode 21: Science and Society – Education, Access and the Question of Boundaries
Episode 21 of the Podcast for Social Research features a conversation between core faculty members Raphaële Chappe and Danya Glabau on science education in the contemporary moment. What does it mean to be scientifically or mathematically literate and what do these literacies have to do with the styles of critical inquiry at play in the humanities and social sciences? Raphaële and Danya ask what science pedagogy means right now, particularly in the American context, and how the question of education intersects with problems of access, disciplinarity, institutional politics, and the history of ideas.
Notations
Raphaële’s recent work and BISR courses: “The Supermanagerial Reich” (essay; with Ajay Singh Chaudhary), Chaos Theory (course), Rosa Luxemburg: Political Economy and Imperialism (course).
Danya’s recent work and BISR classes: “Necessary Purity” (essay), Anthropology and Ethnographic Theory (course upcoming in September 2017!), and Drugs and Society (course).
Editorial Note: In this episode the question of how certain forms of technical or instrumental reason came to dominate scholarly and political discourse is raised. The canon of critical theory has quite a lot on this question including some of the most central texts of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory” and Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. These critiques of positivism should not, however, be misconstrued as rejections of the empirical or empirical research or “science” more broadly. For more on this aspect, please see Adorno and Karl Popper’s debates on sociological methods and positivism. – Ajay