Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Code, many of the communities that interest me in this topic are not at
all tight knit or geographically concentrated in one site. Their coherence
is much looser and more complicated than this. I offer one example in
Box 2.2
, out of many possible ones, from the world of academia that I
inhabit. This said, the
rhetoric
of 'community' (i.e. the word's routine use
as if
it refers to coherent, bounded groupings) remains important in a wide
range of debates and discussions.
BOX 2.2
COMMUNITIES: AN EXAMPLE
Like any 'community', an epistemic community doesn't exist until its
members come to regard themselves as engaged in a common endeav-
our. There is, therefore, a
nominal
as much as
practical
element to the
existence of epistemic communities. Even then, these communities
may take a somewhat protean form. Academia (the community of uni-
versity researchers, teachers and administrators) is a highly instructive
example of just how loose and complicated membership of epistemic
communities can be. At what level do epistemic communities exist
in the academic world? One answer is that academics, regardless of
their chosen subject areas, together form a single community in their
hundreds of thousands, for two reasons. First, they all occupy the
same institutional space (i.e. a university or its equivalent). Second,
they share some definite values and goals (e.g. the pursuit of 'truth',
'accuracy' or 'new knowledge' in an honest, systematic and rigorous
way); however, all academics are also members of definite disciplinary
fields, such as history, development studies or nuclear engineering.
This is reflected in the journals they choose to publish their research
in, the degree programmes they contribute to and the professional
conferences they attend (among other things). It is also reflected in
the numerous cases of non-communication between academics: for
instance physicists rarely have reason to conduct dialogue with liter-
ary critics and vice versa. But disciplinary fields, while real, are not
sharply defined and nor are they internally homogenous. As Theodore
Porter put it, 'In only a few disciplines is the dynamic of research activ-
ity so self-contained that interactions within the community are mainly
responsible for the forms of approved knowledge' (Porter, 1995: 230).
For instance, consider the sprawling subject area known as 'cultural
studies', molecular genetics and the discipline of geography (my own).
The first bleeds into and out of literary criticism, media studies, cultural
