Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
environmental change' research agenda going back 20-plus years. This bespeaks
an admirable capacity to set their sites on big agenda issues, while refusing to be
corralled into intellectual orthodoxies of a theoretical, methodological or policy-
political kind.
It is no accident that environmental geography's diversity and vitality is coinci-
dent with its basis in the university system. Despite being subject to varying degrees
of 'corporatisation', Anglophone universities remain, for the most part, publicly
funded and public in their identities. Though managerialism has, to some extent,
eroded its potency, 'academic freedom' remains a critical ideal and reality for
researchers, teachers and consultants based in university geography departments -
so too for all those other academics whose work constitutes the 'discourse of envi-
ronmental geography'. A refl ection of the relative autonomy of academics from
outside interests and their historical claim to self-government, such freedom is pre-
cisely what - even today - allows environmental geographers and those working in
cognate fi elds to determine how and why they will do the work that they do. Con-
trast this with knowledge producers and disseminators working in the 'knowledge
society's' many other institutions, like think tanks, privately funded foundations
(and even NGOs). In these institutions, the sort of environmental knowledge created
is very much determined by the specifi c agendas of patrons, benefactors, sharehold-
ers and owners. This does not render it illegitimate of course. But it does circum-
scribe its likely interest and relevance to the enormous array of people and groups
who have some stake in the drama - as well as the quotidian course - of human-
environment relations.
This raises some critical questions about who is authorised to produce and
validate particular sorts of environment-society knowledge today. In relation to the
so-called 'expert' knowledge, the days of ivory-tower elitism are thankfully behind
us. Universities are no longer recognised as being dispensaries of indisputable truth
and wisdom. But they still play a vitally important role in our 'knowledge societies'.
There is much debate about the nature of this role and how it might be sustained or
altered. One well-known view is that academic experts 'enter the fray' as part of a
new epistemic condition that Michael Gibbons and colleagues (1994) termed 'mode
2 knowledge'. 'Mode 1' knowledge has, historically, been produced by those (like
academics) inhabiting a few 'authorised' institutions. By contrast, a mode 2 society
(in Gibbons et al.'s view) is one where many knowledge workers in a range of sites
come together to create robust knowledge about issues and problems of common
concern (like climate change). This mode 2 way of operating is not beholden to
old expert-lay distinctions and nor is it interested in the preservation of academic
disciplines - unless the members of those disciplines can contribute meaningfully to
the many, changing epistemic collectives that produce mode 2 knowledge.
In contrast to this vision of where universities sit within a wider knowledge
society, others suggest that we update older ideas of academic expertise and non-
partisanship. For instance, in his topic
The Governance of
Science
, Steve Fuller
(2000) suggests that universities are becoming 'clearing houses' for the airing, testing
and encounter between diverse knowledges. In his view, basic and applied research
should in future be undertaken
outside
universities in all those other institutions
mentioned earlier in this section. The role of university experts is then, in his
view, to scrutinise these knowledges according to an array of criteria (cognitive,
moral, aesthetic, etc.). These experts will not seek to eliminate knowledges on the
grounds of their 'falsity'. Instead, they will undertake both 'translation work'
