Assembling Exclusive Expertise
Assembling Exclusive Expertise

Author: Anna Leander

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-06

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1351136720

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This book looks at the worlding of the Global South in the process of assembling conflict resolution expertise. Anna Leander, Ole Wæver and their contributors pursue this ambition by following the experts, institutions, databases and creative expressions that are assembled into conflict resolution expertise in the Global South. Expertise shapes how conflicts in the Global South are understood and consequently dealt with. Yet, expertise is always and necessarily exclusive. The exclusivity of expertise refers both to the fashionable, the sophisticated and what counts, and also to the exclusion of some people or views. Assembled from a wealth of competing knowledges expertise is always both knowledgeable and ignorant. The ambition of the volume is to explore how this exclusive expertise is assembled and in what ways it is therefore knowledgeable and ignorant of knowledges in/of the Global South. This work will be of significant interest to advanced students and scholars of conflict resolution, peace research, mediation and international relations and scholars of expertise.

The Crisis of Expertise
The Crisis of Expertise

Author: Gil Eyal

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-10-24

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 1509538879

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In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change, and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites? In this new book, Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided “mistrust of experts” but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance on science and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased skepticism and dismissal of scientific findings and expert opinion, on the other. The current mistrust of experts is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The “scientization of politics,” of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture. This timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and to anyone concerned about the political uses of, and attacks on, scientific knowledge and expertise.

Incomplete Archaeologies
Incomplete Archaeologies

Author: Emily Miller Bonney

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2016-03-31

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1785701169

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Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept – assemblages – and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists – and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to reassert an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasize the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artifacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology’s seeming-seamless epistemological objects.