REPRESENTING NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 44

persuade us and win us over, while others present themselves as being in
the 'respectable' business of instruction, education or edification. Regard-
less of the differences between them, epistemic communities of all stripes
have important features in common: they are organised and have barriers
to entry (for the most part); they tend to be enduring (rather than tempo-
rary or ephemeral); they usually have a 'history' behind them (involving
founding figures, key contributors and formative institutions); they 'speak'
to each other and the rest of us in distinctive 'voices' and media; and they
actively solicit audiences, sponsors and patrons of various kinds. Exceptions
arise where a community is new (and thus nascent), where it's sponta-
neous or ephemeral, or where it's gradually disintegrated over time. 7 It's also
important to recognise that, these days, the Internet and social media have
allowed new voices to be heard that do not always belong to the epistemic
communities with which we're familiar.
Having said all this, I should clarify two things. First, as my last comment
implies, in order to share their representations with others all epistemic
communities require material infrastructures. Depending on the context,
these include laboratories, ICTs, transportation networks, university cam-
puses, measurement devices, fibre-optic cables, gallery spaces, monitoring
technologies, telescopes, electricity networks, printing presses and much
more besides. The infrastructures may be funded privately, by the state, or
by 'third sector' bodies. They may be highly specialised and expensive, or
used relatively every day and affordable. Regardless, their role (though not
exclusively so) is to sustain the production, circulation and consumption of
the ideas, knowledge, images or insights characteristic of different epistemic
communities - be they cognitive, moral or aesthetic (or a blend of the three).
Indeed, without these infrastructures most modern epistemic communities
could scarcely be said to exist at all. As David Morley notes, 'a community is
not an entity that exists and then happens to communicate. Rather, commu-
nities are best understood as constituted in and through their changing patterns of
communication ' (Morley, 2005: 50, emphasis added).
STS scholar Paul Edwards (2010) provides a marvellous example of how
infrastructures we made over time and across space. His study of how mete-
orologists and climatologists have come to know the global atmospheric
system, appropriately entitled A vast machine , reveals the astonishing com-
plexity of many knowledge infrastructures, their highly specialised character,
and the tremendous effort involved in creating and then sustaining them . 8
As current ICTs demonstrate, however, once created these infrastructures
allow epistemic communities to become based ever less on physical prox-
imity. They can exist successfully as geographically dispersed communities
because communication at a distance is relatively easy and affordable.
Second, and with this last point in mind, I'm well aware that the language
of 'community' is potentially misleading. It suggests a spatially concentrated
grouping of individuals possessed of a 'common culture' or shared interests,
ones whose identities are - in Lorraine Code's sharp words - 'seemingly