Science & Justice Working Group Meeting
October 25, 2012
2:00-4:00 PM
Oakes Mural Room
This event brings together different accounts of salmon, some from social scientists and some from natural scientists who each will describe, and reflect upon how ‘their’ salmon is constituted, first in describing their particular research on questions of wild and domestic salmon in the US, and in then in a public conversation with each other and with the audience. We will hear from Robin Wapless, from NOAA in Seattle, from Rachel Barnett-Johnson from the Biology department at UCSC, from John Law a sociologist at the Open University in the UK, and from Marianne Liene, an anthropologist from the University of Oslo. Together, these scientists know salmon through widely different practices, from salmon hatcheries in California, to aquaculture sites in Norway, from laboratories, from textbooks, and from scientific articles and environmental regulation.
What are the defining traits of the salmon, and what distinctions do they look for? How were they attracted to salmon, and what are the practices through which they come to know salmon? What material, historical, and perhaps ethical entanglements are involved in the practices through which salmon is rendered known?
A special focus is on the notion of the wild; and its semi-domesticated other: What is a wild salmon, and how is it different from a hatchery salmon or a farmed salmon? How can we contribute to an environment that accommodates and nurtures different kinds of salmon?
This is not so much a debate about what salmon really is, as a dialogue across disciplines about all the different forms that are involved in our shared, but different, efforts to know the world we all inhabit.
Co-sponsored by the University of Oslo and the UCSC Environmental Studies and Anthropology Departments.