Search results
9 Expertise Mark B. Brown The complex relations among publicity, legitimacy and expertise have long been central to modern science. From the 1660s onward, Robert Boyle and the natural philosophers at the Royal Society legitimated their work in part by portraying it as a distinctly public form of knowledge production. Employing a rhetoric of transparency, they wrote meticulous lab reports in a modest style and performed their experiments in public. They produced expert knowledge both in public and through the public. But their public was largely restricted to
5 Expertise and advice In 1864, an extraordinary meeting was organized by the Medical Society of Ghent. Its only agenda item was the latest study on the living conditions of Ghent’s workers population by Adolphe Burggraeve. In a plenary speech, Burggraeve seized the opportunity to reflect upon the social role of medicine. ‘It does not suffice for the physician,’ so he addressed his colleagues, ‘to engage in the medical sciences to keep abreast of their progress and of the discoveries that are of interest to him; it is necessary, in addition, to put these
Connecting centre and locality Chapter 9 Local expertise in hostile territory: state building in Cromwellian Ireland Jennifer Wells I n March 1655, eight men surveyed a field in Timolin, County Kildare, Ireland, not far from the Wicklow border. They worked on behalf of William Petty, an Oxford-based anatomist who became physician-general of Parliament’s forces in Ireland and later surveyor-general of the country. Petty’s ambition, and that of the parliamentarian government employing him, was to measure and record all lands forfeited by Irish Catholics
1 Class, gender and professional expertise: British military nursing in the Crimean War Carol Helmstadter Modern historians have suggested that nursing in the Crimean War was largely a form of housekeeping and that the only major contributions made by the female nurses whom the government sent to the East were the introduction of night nursing and small personal attentions to the soldiers.1 Certainly, the roots of hospital nursing did lie in domestic service but did military nursing in the 1850s really largely consist of household duties? War and other
that the influence of forensic psychiatric expertise on sentencing practices was considerable and that a high percentage of perpetrators was found (partially) unaccountable or benefitted from mitigating circumstances. In short, perpetrators of ‘crimes of passion’ in practice were sometimes judged more leniently on the basis of personality disorders, and often received treatment as punishment regardless
In discussions of conflict, war and political violence, dead bodies count. Although the politics and practices associated with the collection of violent-death data are seldom subject to critical examination, they are crucial to how scholars and practitioners think about how and why conflict and violence erupt. Knowledge about conflict deaths – the who, what, where, when, why and how – is a form of expertise, created, disseminated and used by different agents. This article highlights the ways in which body counts are deployed as social facts and forms of knowledge that are used to shape and influence policies and practices associated with armed conflict. It traces the way in which conflict-death data emerged, and then examines critically some of the practices and assumptions of data collection to shed light on how claims to expertise are enacted and on how the public arena connects (or not) with scholarly conflict expertise.
This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and them.
interpreted in local context and in their research they uncover alternative meanings of resilience which are social and relational. These meanings, embedded in networks of exchange and assistance, including both local and transnational support, challenge the imported humanitarian-development definition of resilience as ‘build back better’. While the approach taken to the concept of resilience by these first two pieces is oppositional, both are reactions to resilience as a discourse of power imported into a context through humanitarian expertise and which serves particular
staff workload and different levels of education and expertise, conducted training on IPC measures and assisted with the design of contingency plans and evaluation of facilities. MSF also donated personal protective equipment (PPE), and when supplies were unavailable, supported care home staff to develop alternative solutions. Advocacy. Throughout the intervention, MSF was lobbying the highest levels of authorities and wrote numerous letters, reports
about the political will, operational implementation and technical capabilities of humanitarians as about the perpetuation of colonial power relations in seemingly benevolent activities. Decoloniality asks: where do we start the story? Who has the microphone and who usually doesn’t? What do we consider expertise? What are the implications of Eurocentric bias in knowledge production? Do our practices and knowledge systems contribute to the struggle against colonial power relations? As we reflect on the potential end of liberal order