Technologies of anticipationsuch as predictive analytics, forecasting, and modellingoffer appeali... more Technologies of anticipationsuch as predictive analytics, forecasting, and modellingoffer appealing promises to those governing risk. While previous work has challenged notions that such technologies are value neutral, we must attend to specificand subtleways that values are embedded and manipulated within these systems. Using the case of wildfire management, I propose the concept of predictive rebound to highlight two challenges: (1) that increasingly accurate predictive models do not always translate into the initially intended real-world gains, but rather can end up being applied to alternative ends and (2) that perceived accuracy of predictive models can be misunderstood as reducing the need for explicit debate about values within decision-making. Further analysis of predictive rebound in real-world contexts will help to inform more effective engagement with stakeholders about values, priorities, and risks; revealing situations where technologies of anticipation obfuscate value-laden decisions and facilitate unintentional drift in management priorities.
Why They’ve Immersed: A Framework for Understanding and Attending to Motivational Differences Among Interactional Experts
Springer eBooks, 2019
This chapter highlights four familiar case studies central to the development of interactional ex... more This chapter highlights four familiar case studies central to the development of interactional expertise. Essential types are summarized in a table and this chapter pays particular attention to potential asymmetrical knowledge transfer characteristics in each profile. It argues that accounting for this plurality of profiles is an important project both for improving the descriptive accuracy of accounts of interactional expertise and for ensuring that future research and normative projects understand the diversity of motivations among interactional experts. Further, it argues that attending to the diversity of motivations, situations, and experiences is relevant not only to interactional expertise but also to the study of expertise, collaboration, and socio-technical integration more broadly.
The 2019 Siberian Wildfires as a Turning Point for Environmental Decision-Making in Russia
Four decades ago, Dr Stephen J. Pyne published Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland an... more Four decades ago, Dr Stephen J. Pyne published Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982). He has since published some thirty books about fire-in America and around the globe-earning a richly deserved place as wildland fire's preeminent historian. Through this body of work, Pyne has helped a generation of fire managers, researchers, and publics understand wildfire's deep roots, long histories, and human stories. Amidst this incredible corpus of work, his recently completed To the Last Smoke series would stand out as a magnum opus. Clocking in at 2,328 pages across nine regional volumes, it is a treasure trove of stories-some big, some small-about the places, people, and fires that have shaped the United States of America. The nine core volumes consist of seven regional books (Florida; California; The Northern Rockies; the Southwest; The Great Plains; The Interior West; and The Northeast), followed by two broader volumes (Slopovers, addressing the Mid-American Oak Woodlands, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska; and Here and There, which includes a mix of scattered locales, non-geographic essays, and global vignettes). A tenth volume serves as an anthology (To the Last Smoke: An Anthology), collecting a handful of essays from each of the nine volumes, plus a new chapter on California. This format showcases Pyne at his best. Each book is made up of a series of short, focused essays, offering a very accessible format for readers. The vignettes feature compelling characters, concise analyses, and clever anecdotes, and their constrained length makes it easy to enjoy a few chapters, put the book down, and resume without losing the thread. It also yields a set of books that serves as an incredible resource for the fire community, from managers to researchers to casual observers alike. By preserving such a range of local stories while exploring the broader, important themes that emerge across them-barriers to embracing good fire; pressures facing future management; or the irony of internal combustion driving climate change's uncontrolled conflagration-Pyne has done a huge service to both current and future students of fire. The scale does, however, make it impossible to offer an exhaustive review of all the content within. Instead, in this review, I try to do two things. First, I offer a very brief summary of the volumes to help potential readers identify where they might wish to begin. Then, I turn to identifying themes that emerge from reading the collection as a whole: Pyne's fundamental project of ensuring the rightful place of people in the stories we tell about fire; his ongoing work to grapple with what natural means; fire's shapeshifting presence in internal combustion and climate change; and the need for a new approach to wildland fire science in the pyrocene. To the Last Smoke: an overview As Pyne describes in the series preface found in each volume, To the Last Smoke was originally conceived as a "colour commentator" that would "poke around in the pixels and polygons of particular practices, places, and purposes." This commitment to the "particular" is evident throughout the books: their chapters are grounded in the specific, from wildfire at the Kennedy Space Center and on Staten Island, to the influence of particular individuals like Bill Patterson (in the Northeast), Harold Weaver (in the Northwest), and Cliff White (in Canada). This arrangement offers a smattering of widely For full list of author affiliations and declarations see end of paper
The 2019 Siberian Wildfires as a Turning Point for Environmental Decision-Making in Russia
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2022
Why They’ve Immersed: A Framework for Understanding and Attending to Motivational Differences Among Interactional Experts
The Third Wave in Science and Technology Studies, 2019
This chapter highlights four familiar case studies central to the development of interactional ex... more This chapter highlights four familiar case studies central to the development of interactional expertise. Essential types are summarized in a table and this chapter pays particular attention to potential asymmetrical knowledge transfer characteristics in each profile. It argues that accounting for this plurality of profiles is an important project both for improving the descriptive accuracy of accounts of interactional expertise and for ensuring that future research and normative projects understand the diversity of motivations among interactional experts. Further, it argues that attending to the diversity of motivations, situations, and experiences is relevant not only to interactional expertise but also to the study of expertise, collaboration, and socio-technical integration more broadly.
Responsible innovation requires that scientific and other expert practices be responsive to socie... more Responsible innovation requires that scientific and other expert practices be responsive to society. We take stock of a variety of collaborative approaches to socio-technical integration that seek to broaden the societal contexts technical experts take into account during their routine activities. Part of a larger family of engaged scholarship that includes inter-and trans-disciplinarity as well as stakeholder and public engagement, we distinguish collaborative socio-technical integration in terms of its proximity to and transformation of expert practices. We survey a variety of approaches that differ widely in terms of their integrative methods, conceptions of societal context, roles, and aspirations for intervention. Taking a handful of "communities of integration" as exemplars, we then provide a framework for comparing the forms, means, and ends of collaborative integration. We conclude by reflecting on some of the main features of, and tensions within, this developing arena of practical inquiry and engagement and what this suggests for integrative efforts aimed at responsible innovation.
Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2015
Introductory environmental studies and sciences (ESS) classes can be powerful and formative exper... more Introductory environmental studies and sciences (ESS) classes can be powerful and formative experiences for undergraduates. Indeed, instructors likely aspire towards influencing and enhancing the perspectives, analytical tools, and critical-thinking skills their graduates carry forward into careers in and beyond environment-related fields. This task, however, is doubly challenging: not only to meaningfully engage students with environmental issues but ideally also to think critically about the at-times competing ideologies and perspectives in ESS. This requires that courses be taught in ways that further critical thinking, develop metacognitive skills, and introduce students to a diversity of environmental discourses. In this paper, we present the results of a brief empirical survey of a small sample of North American ESS undergraduate programs. Using discussions of climate change as an example, we pay particular attention to the explicit goals, diversity of literature presented, and organization of the courses, using typologies e.g., Nisbet (Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Chang 5(6):809-823, 2014) to highlight the prevalence of particular environmental discourses and not others. We highlight a handful of promising practices and potential blind spots in the pedagogical design of these courses, while arguing for the importance of instructor reflection, iterative improvement, and further research into potential common weaknesses in ESS instruction.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 2014
the use of translation memories, corpora, or machine translation (e.g., FRÉROT 2016), a pattern w... more the use of translation memories, corpora, or machine translation (e.g., FRÉROT 2016), a pattern which Byrne (2006) observed over one decade ago.
Managing the COVID-19 pandemic—and other communicable diseases—involves broad societal uptake of ... more Managing the COVID-19 pandemic—and other communicable diseases—involves broad societal uptake of vaccines. As has been demonstrated, however, vaccine uptake is often uneven and incomplete across populations. This is a substantial challenge that must be addressed by public health efforts. To this point, significant research has focused on demographic and attitudinal correlates with vaccine hesitancy to understand uptake patterns. In this study, however, we advance understandings of individual decision-making processes involved in vaccine uptake through a mixed-methods investigation of the role of timing in COVID-19 vaccine choices. In the first step, a survey experiment, we find the timing of vaccine rollout (i.e., when a vaccine becomes available to the respondent) has a significant impact on public decision-making. Not only is there a higher level of acceptance when the vaccine becomes available at a later time, but delayed availability is correlated with both lower levels of ‘desi...
Introductory environmental studies and sciences (ESS) classes can be powerful and formative exper... more Introductory environmental studies and sciences (ESS) classes can be powerful and formative experiences for undergraduates. Indeed, instructors likely aspire towards influencing and enhancing the perspectives, analytical tools, and critical-thinking skills their graduates carry forward into careers in and beyond environment-related fields. This task, however, is doubly challenging: not only to meaningfully engage students with environmental issues but ideally also to think critically about the at-times competing ideologies and perspectives in ESS. This requires that courses be taught in ways that further critical thinking, develop metacognitive skills, and introduce students to a diversity of environmental discourses. In this paper, we present the results of a brief empirical survey of a small sample of North American ESS undergraduate programs. Using discussions of climate change as an example, we pay particular attention to the explicit goals, diversity of literature presented, and organization of the courses, using typologies e.g., Nisbet (Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Chang 5(6):809-823, 2014) to highlight the prevalence of particular environmental discourses and not others. We highlight a handful of promising practices and potential blind spots in the pedagogical design of these courses, while arguing for the importance of instructor reflection, iterative improvement, and further research into potential common weaknesses in ESS instruction.
The concept of interactional expertise – characterized by sociologists Harry Collins and Robert E... more The concept of interactional expertise – characterized by sociologists Harry Collins and Robert Evans as the ability to speak the language of a discipline without the corresponding ability to practice – can serve as a powerful way of breaking down expert/non-expert dichotomies and providing a role for new voices in specialist communities. However, in spite of the vast uptake of this concept and its potential to fruitfully address many important issues related to scientific expertise, there has been surprisingly little critical analysis of it. We seek to remedy this situation by considering potential benefits of interactional expertise and the ways in which the current conception can – and cannot – realize those benefits. In particular, we argue that interactional expertise hasn't reached its full potential for addressing who ought to be involved in scientific research and decision-making, largely owing to an unnecessarily restrictive way of operationalizing the concept. In its place, we offer a broader, more pluralistic account of interactional expertise – one that is in line with the original spirit of the concept, but also captures the diversity that we see as being an important aspect of interactional experts and the value they can bring to the table.
While it has been readily acknowledged that complex global problems typically require interdiscip... more While it has been readily acknowledged that complex global problems typically require interdisciplinary solutions, infrequently is adequate attention given to the diversity of paradigms and types of knowledge that may also come into contact while conducting research and generating policy solutions. In the Canadian context, researching and addressing scientific challenges often requires collaboration between Western academic communities and the long-term Indigenous inhabitants of the land. Research in feminist and social epistemology could contribute a great deal to this discussion, both in terms of affirming the importance and legitimacy of Indigenous voices as absolutely essential to the dialogue, and in addressing failures in current approaches to collaboration. In this paper, I offer a brief overview of such potential epistemic contributions, attempts at communication through co-management regimes, and opportunities for the future.
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Papers by Eric Kennedy