Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens

Since the year 2000, artists have increasingly employed tools, methods, and aesthetics associated with scientific practice to produce forms of art that assert themselves as kinds of experimental and empirical knowledge production parallel to and in critical dialogue with science. Anthropologists, intrigued by the work of art in the age of its technoscientific affiliation, have taken notice. This article discusses bio art, eco art, and surveillance art that have gathered, or might yet reward, anthropological attention, particularly as it might operate as an allied form of cultural critique. We focus on art that takes oceans as its concern, tuning to anthropological interests in translocal connection, climate change, and the politics of the extraterritorial. We end with a call for decolonizing art–science and for an anti-colonial aesthetics of oceanic worlds.

The tale wagged by the DAG: broadening the scope of causal inference and explanation for epidemiology

'Causal inference', in 21st century epidemiology, has notably come to stand for a specific approach, one focused primarily on counterfactual and potential outcome reasoning and using particular representations, such as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and Bayesian causal nets. In this essay, we suggest that in epidemiology no one causal approach should drive the questions asked or delimit what counts as useful evidence. Robust causal inference instead comprises a complex narrative, created by scientists appraising, from diverse perspectives, different strands of evidence produced by myriad methods. DAGs can of course be useful, but should not alone wag the causal tale. To make our case, we first address key conceptual issues, after which we offer several concrete examples illustrating how the newly favoured methods, despite their strengths, can also: (i) limit who and what may be deemed a 'cause', thereby narrowing the scope of the field; and (ii) lead to erroneous causal inference, especially if key biological and social assumptions about parameters are poorly conceived, thereby potentially causing harm. As an alternative, we propose that the field of epidemiology consider judicious use of the broad and flexible framework of 'inference to the best explanation', an approach perhaps best developed by Peter Lipton, a philosopher of science who frequently employed epidemiologically relevant examples. This stance requires not only that we be open to being pluralists about both causation and evidence but also that we rise to the challenge of forging explanations that, in Lipton's words, aspire to 'scope, precision, mechanism, unification and simplicity'.

The molecular reinscription of race: a comment on "Genetic bio-ancestry and social construction of racial classification in social surveys in the contemporary United States"

In an article in the February 2014 issue of Demography, Guo et al. claimed that their research "establishes geographic genetic bio-ancestry as a component of racial classification" (p. 141). In doing so, they argued that their work has "a larger theoretical significance on identity studies" (p. 169) by providing racial classification categories with a concrete, "measurable," and "logical" basis against which social construction should be analyzed. Instead, I argue that their main accomplishment is the "molecular reinscription of race" (Duster 2011:104). In this article, I review the existing critiques of this type of work.