Environmental Science and Technology Studies

SCOTT FRICKEL; ARANCIBIA FLORENCIA

International Handbook of Environmental Sociology

Springer

Lugar: Cham; Año: 2021; p. 457 - 476

Nearly thirty years ago Steven Yearley (1991) drew attention to the ?uneasy alliance? existing between environmentalists, who claimed political authority in protecting nature, and environmental scientists, who claimed epistemic authority in knowing nature. A similar tension exists within the overlapping fields of environmental sociology and science and technology studies (STS). Both fields are proudly interdisciplinary and both claim jurisdiction over ?nature? as a central topic of research. Both fields gained legitimacy as academic social movements in the 1970s aimed at toppling central tenets of sociological inquiry. Environmental sociology?s emergence challenged the discipline to recognize ecological limits and the ?study of interactions between environment and society? (Catton and Dunlap 1978; Scott and Johnson 2016). STS rose on the claim that the intellectual contents of science were not off-limits to sociological analysis as many, following Robert Merton (1973), assumed, but were best viewed as cultural and political objects that warranted close empirical study (Barnes 1977; Bloor 1976). From their inception, both academic social movements have held deep political commitments toward science and technology. Yet those political commitments have tended to run in different 2 directions, often leading practitioners to ask different questions and nourish different theoretical traditions and methodological preferences.In this chapter, we will not enumerate the ways in which environmental sociology and STS undeniably diverge. That is all well-trod ground. Instead, our goal is to map some less familiar but mutually held territory. We will train our attention on bodies of empirical work where STS research engages questions about the material environment, environmental movements, and environmental knowledge. Our hope is that by paying less attention to philosophical differences among certain scholars, and more attention to empirical research and practice, we can help persuade readers that STS provides an important set of connections to ? and has the potential to help advance ? what we take to be one of environmental sociology?s central projects: a deeper materialist understanding of nature-society interactions. In order to do this, we have chosen to focus more in-depth on three areas of research: resource extraction and sustainable development, epistemic inequality and the social production of environmental ignorance, and the political mobilization of environmental scientists and other experts. All three topics have attracted significant interest in STS, especially over the past decade and thus offer multiple points of interconnection.