Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
history and cultural anthropology (among others). Molecular genetics,
similarly, is now quite hard to distinguish from fields of knowledge
it has both drawn upon and transformed, like informatics and bio-
chemistry. Likewise, computer science has emerged, since 1945, from a
combination of mathematics, military projects and commercial oppor-
tunism. Geographers, meanwhile, draw heavily on a very wide range of
cognate disciplines for their research and teaching. What's more, while
they may consider themselves Geographers (with a big G) for some
purposes (e.g. delivering degree courses to undergraduates), for others
they regard themselves as geomorphologists, economic geographers or
political ecologists. Some of these sub-disciplinary identities connect
geographers quite closely to specialist communities outside geography.
For instance, Quaternary science is a recognised branch of physical
geography yet the members of this epistemic community come from
several disciplines.
This is one example of the many centrifugal forces that keep human
and physical geographers apart, especially at the level of research, and
which have led to talk of geography as a fatally 'divided discipline'.
In their engaging book
Academic tribes and territories
, the sociologists
of knowledge Tony Becher and Paul Trowler (2001) tried to make
sense of this diversity and complexity of 'community' within the aca-
demic world, focussing in depth on several disciplines. The key point
is that many academics consider themselves to be members of multi-
ple epistemic communities simultaneously, and with varying levels of
commitment to each of them. I would suggest that much the same
applies to other epistemic workers. Think of journalists or nature poets
or wildlife photographers. These are definite groups, yet there's a lot of
internal diversity within each community. It is also perfectly possible
for different epistemic communities to occupy a single institution and
have a shared (though usually generic) mission - a university is a good
example of this, so too is a large public broadcaster like the BBC.
RE-PRESENTING 'NATURE'
Representation, reference and representatives
With the two previously mentioned clarifications about 'community' in
mind, it should be fairly obvious to readers how the ideas presented in the
previous section connect to those outlined in the second half of
Chapter 1.
For the most part, epistemic communities operate within the wider discur-
sive norms of any given society; however, in terms of the precise content
of their knowledge, and the particular ways it's presented (e.g. in specialised
vocabularies or using the mass media), these communities both develop
and employ discourses in the plural, count noun sense of the word. Within
