This is one of talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. My explanation of the context and my introduction to the panel are here.
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Thanks for having me, folks. I had been planning to devote my short presentation to an outline of the crisis facing STEM fields, and how understanding that crisis can make a difference for how we think about the assaults on the humanities. I’d be happy to talk about that in our conversation after this panel. But after listening to Professor Alondra Nelson’s fantastic opening keynote on Monday, I found myself wanting to pick up on her insights, and run with them a little bit.
As you recall, Professor Nelson walked us through a distinction between stochastic and epistemological frames for knowledge, where the stochastic names the random, unpredictable play of the material world, which nonetheless always holds out the promise of the predictability of phenomena, while epistemological language holds out a different promise, the knowledge of how and why things work the way they do. And she pointed us to the idea of agnotology, which if I followed right, describes both the production of obfuscatory anti-knowledge, and study of that obfuscation.
