1st Edition

Evidence in Action between Science and Society Constructing, Validating, and Contesting Knowledge

Edited By Sarah Ehlers, Stefan Esselborn Copyright 2023
288 Pages 21 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

288 Pages 21 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

288 Pages 21 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This volume is an interdisciplinary attempt to insert a broader, historically informed perspective into current political and academic debates on the issue of evidence and the reliability of scientific knowledge. The tensions between competing paradigms, different bodies of knowledge and the relative hierarchies between them are a crucial element of the historical and contemporary dynamics of... Read more

1. Introduction: Evidence in Action

Sarah Ehlers and Stefan Esselborn

Part I: Establishing Evidence: The Formation of Disciplinary Cultures

2. War, Wheat, and Crop Diseases of the Late Enlightenment: Contesting and Producing Evidence in Agriculture in Great Britain

John Lidwell-Durnin

3. Presenting Chemical Practice in Court: Forensic Toxicology in Nineteenth-Century German States

Marcus B. Carrier

4. No "Mere Accumulation of Material": Fieldwork Prctices and Embedded Evidence in Early (Latin) Americanist Anthropology

Julia E. Rodriguez

Part II: Innovating Evidence: Contemporary Technoscientific Approaches

5. Prototyping Evidence: How Artifacts Demonstrate Technological Futures

Sascha Dickel

6. On Top of the Hierarchy: How Guidelines Shape Systematic Reviewing in Biomedicine

Alexander Schniedermann, Clemens Blümel, and Arno Simons

7. On the (Im)possibility of Identifying the Evidence Base of the Impact of Star Architecture Projects

Nadia Alaily-Mattar, Diane Arvanitakis, Martina Löw, and Alain Thierstein

Part III: Governing Evidence: Evidence-Based Practice and Politics

8. The Thing We Call Evidence: Toward a Situated Ontology of Evidence in Policy

Kari Lancaster and Tim Rhodes

9. "Drawing Thresholds That Make Sense": Diagrammatic Evidence and Urgency in Automatic Outbreak Detection

Steffen Krämer

10. Producing Migration Knowledge: From Big Data to Evidence-Based Policy?

Laura Stielike

Part IV: Contesting Evidence: The Politics of Heterodox Evidence

11. Fearful Narratives: Evidence Production in the Visual Rhetoric of the Historic Anti-vaccine Movement in the German States

Christiane Arndt

12. The Politics of Evidence: State Secrecy, Ambiguity, and Counterforensic Practice in "Missing Persons" Cases in Pakistan

Salman Hussain

13. Digital Ethnographic Art(i)Facts as Evidence: Anthropological Entanglements between Techne and Episteme

Anna Apostolidou

Biography

Sarah Ehlers is a postdoctoral researcher working on the global history of medicine, science and the environment at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Deutsches Museum and an affiliated researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Stefan Esselborn is a postdoctoral researcher at the Professur für Technikgeschichte at the Technical University of Munich. He is writing and teaching on topics in the fields of global and colonial history, the history of science and technology, the history of knowledge and expertise, and the history of risk and safety.