Workshop on climate change and uncertainty from below and above, Delhi. http://steps-centre.org/2016/blog/climate-change-and-uncertainty-from-above-and-below/

1. The advantages of uncertainty? Toward
new principles for cooperation between
divergent practices from ‘above’ and
‘below’
Saurabh Arora
Science Policy Research Unit, and STEPS Centre,
Sussex
s.arora@sussex.ac.uk

2. I am going to try
to exploit the recognition that uncertainty, of various kinds,
characterises all practices of knowing, aiming to
– Pluralise what/who is considered as capable of knowledge
production
– Propose new terms of engagement between modern scientific
and other diverging practices
– Flag the centrality of ‘common words’ and their inventors to
facilitate this engagement

3. Ingredients
1. Complexity and difference
2. Practices: understanding agency relationally
3. Uncertainties, in knowledge production (and use)
4. Socio-ecological resilience: distributed, democratic and
connected
• A risky masala mix!

4. Complexity and difference
• Natural/social world complicated and complex
– Exceeds human understanding: all our knowledges partial and
situated (Haraway 1991)
• Plural ways of making knowledge, differently
– Produce complementary rather than substitutable knowledges
– Knowledge produced in activities that are not ostentatiously
knowledge-making: doing knowing (Stirling 2015)

5. Practices I
• Action as a relational process (“action is overtaken”:
Latour 2005)
• All action collective, even when it appears individual
– Distributed in webs of humans and nonhumans
– Avoiding methodological individualism

6. Practices II
• Action not simply the implementation of ideas/intentions,
nor always the following of rules
– Ideas encounter material friction as they are enacted
– Rules are bent (improvised) or circumvented as often as they are
followed
• Collapsing the structure-agency dichotomy
– Structural inequalities (e.g. of gender and caste) performed
within everyday practices

7. Uncertainties
• Distinct from risk that is calculable based on an event’s
probable occurrence (Callon et al. 2009)
• Possible (future) states of the world unknown
• Ignorance: the ‘unknown’ unknowns;
• Indeterminacy: causal chains unidentified; outcomes
unpredictable (Wynne 1992)
• Feature of knowledge as ‘output’ and of its practices

8. Socio-ecological resilience
• The sum of various distributed and decentralized
initiatives always more than its parts
– Contributing practices of citizens, households, street vendors,
small farmers, ‘traditional’ medical practitioners etc.
• Democratic: capacity to raise voice (of dissent) by the
most marginalized
• Connected: cooperative engagement between different
practices

9. Cooperative engagement: how?
• All practices present to each other as ‘minority practices’
– Applies especially to modern scientific practices that have
historically disqualified practices branded irrational (e.g.
ideological, shamanic, magical, religious, affective)
– Minority practices not the same as practices of minorities
– ‘Minority’ here is a category of doing-knowing (relational
process) rather than of people or entities

10. What are minority practices?
• They admit vulnerability, uncertainty, indeterminacy and
‘lack of control’
• They do not identify with a general (or normal) model that
they were the first ones to ‘discover’
• They present themselves to the world from the vantage
point of their ignorance

11. Terms of engagement
• Minority practices (modern scientific and vernacular)
engage with each other on the basis of
– Commitment, to sharing cognitive and moral authority
– Tactfulness, by taking each other’s “self-determination”
seriously
– Learning from each other, in ways that do not subsume the
other practice
– Affinity, built not on commonality of characteristics between
practices but rather on their irreducible difference

12. For learning together
• Invention of mutually accessible ‘common words’ (a
shared language)
– That “resist time and space” and produce relevance in settings
that are as yet unformed (Stengers 2011: 327)
• Construction of abstractions
– Centrality of philosophy for the ‘free creation of concepts’ and
of literature (including bards and storytellers) in an ecology of
minority practices