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Chapter 6: Democratizing Science as a Mechanism of Co-optation
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❖ C overed in dust from desertlike lands, Celia1 was born and grew up in the northern region of Minas Gerais. Since colonial times, Minas has held the promise of stone-colored riches born from the labor of workers subservient to mineral-hungry elites. Lack of water kept this wealth from reaching northern Minas, where poverty spreads across dry plains. Minerians, as they are termed by Brazilians, are often small and tanned and speak much faster than people from other regions. Celia is a unique Minerian, tall and oliveskinned because of Arabic parentage. The imposing nature of Celia’s physical appearance is only augmented by the strength and eloquence of her words. Her speeches are delivered in classrooms and government offices as she works with the movement of dam-affected people. Celia is in fact a unique combination of atingido and researcher. When a hydroelectric dam was built in the river adjacent to her home, Celia was temporarily uprooted. After earning her Ph.D. in sociology, Celia returned to her home state with an environmentalist husband, ready to fight a battle against dam building in Brazil. She recognized the power of corporations that were building dams and chose scientific study as a way to contest them. Celia has been visiting the poor, rural lands of potentially dammed people for several 1 Celia is a pseudonym used to protect the actual individual. Democratizing Science as a Mechanism of Co-optation 6 Democratizing Science as a Mechanism of Co-optation ▪ 127 years, conducting a research project with the locals. The project has already altered the course of dam building in Brazil. By pointing to the inadequacy of corporate assessments of environmental and social impacts, her studies led to governmental support of local people. Thus poor farmers have stood toe-to-toe with corporate engineers, demonstrating that their knowledge is deeper than any advanced degree. The collaboration that Celia led was one of the most deliberative and scientifically effective in all Brazil. Her project stands up to the qualifications of deliberative theorists and scholars on participatory research. However, the governmental pathways through which this knowledge could get used are not sufficiently participatory. Therefore , simply changing the research was not enough to make policy change. In fact, despite the good intentions of those involved and the benefits to movement development and organizing, such participation in research can serve as a mechanism of co-optation. In this sense, democratizing science is a double-edged sword. It does not necessarily result in the scientific outcomes that activists imagined, and it also does not always serve the political outcome that they had hoped for. As described in Chapter 1, activism can break down into cooptation during participation in research or in political institutions. In fact, in the modern, democratic state, science and politics are so closely intertwined that breakdown in one realm can lead to breakdown in the other. One of the most important findings of the two cases discussed in this book is that participatory research and deliberative democracy often cannot be separated from each other. Ineffectiveness in one realm causes ineffectiveness in the other. At the same time, effectiveness in one does not necessarily lead to effectiveness in the other. The last chapter described how DSMs deal with one of the three aspects of scientization—the biased production of expert knowledge. This chapter relates how movements often are unable to address the entrenched nature of political dependence on expert knowledge. DSM inability to successfully democratize knowledge production or policy making is often not caused by outright denial on the part of experts or public officials. Rather, it is a more nuanced and complex process through which DSMs’ interests are partially incorporated. On occasion this means that the movement is able to achieve partial success in changing science or policy. On other occasions, experts or policy makers are able to claim that they catered to movement needs, but in fact movement interests were perverted. [54.81.157.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:51 GMT) 128 ▪ Chapter 6 The two examples in this chapter represent scientific paradigms and government institutional functioning around the world. Participation in research is increasingly common and subsidized by large government institutions (McCormick et al. 2004). The Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project was the first such project instigated by the EBCM and possibly the most controversial. Part of the controversy revolved around its particular form of research engagement, which in fact resulted in movement co-optation. The environmental impact assessment and...