Back in May, on a very sunny day when a few of us OxGrowers were out foraging for some nettles down at Hogacre Common, we welcomed a group of visitors to the site for something a little out of the ordinary… Some researchers from the university came down to hold a special seminar sitting in the long grass at OxGrow! Why ever would they do that?! Aren’t Oxford academics happier in stuffy stuccoed studies?!
Well no, not all of them, it seems. Researchers in the field of Science and Technology Studies like to get out of the classroom, out of the library, out of the lab, and explore the social dimensions to science and technology. They investigate the social processes which allow scientific and technological knowledge to come into being and to get taken up in society. They ask big questions like these: What makes facts credible? Who counts as an expert? Who should participate in scientific decision-making? What are the implications of new technologies for community, for democracy, for sustainability, and for human values?
The people asking these questions in Oxford (The Science and Technology Studies Reading Group) took a pretty wild approach this summer. Rather than discussing readings in the confines and comfort of a seminar room, they held Situated Seminars, immersing themselves in special places that helped to make their questioning come alive in new ways. They met up to deliberate on quantum physics (and “the entanglement of matter and meaning”, ooh!) in an astronomical observatory, they plotted an “algorithmic walk” through the streets of Oxford, they discussed “humanized mice” in the Natural History Museum, they talked taste and ethnography in somebody’s kitchen, they pondered medical imaging software in a pitch black lecture theatre and… they came to OxGrow!
At OxGrow we debated Material Publics – politics, inclusion, experimentation and the “material world” (as in, the very palpable, physical, mucky world that we inhabit). We asked: Is foraging for food political? Is it a public act? How does a garden – tools, seeds, fruit and veg – help us to think about the material world and its relation to politics? All of these questions were flung wide open by our surroundings; by the wind generator producing energy, the bee hive, the raised garden beds and the compost toilet. And so, what could have ended up as just another dry and disengaged academic discussion was enlivened by the signs of collective work and its fruitfulness.
Through our explorations of these themes, the group came to the same conclusion that we do every Sunday down at OxGrow – that planting, weeding, harvesting, composting, foraging and feasting builds community. And that participation can be a form of politics that works through doing rather than talking.
Yes!
If you’re into this kind of thing, you can read more about the finer (and geekier) details of our discussions on the Science and Technology Studies blog!
Blog by Cath Montgomery (sometime OxGrower, sometime researcher) and Doireann
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