A home for science: The life and times of Tropical and Polar field stations

From Value to Valuation: Pragmatist and Hermeneutic Orientations for Assessing Science on the International Space Station

Based on a study of the International Space Station (ISS), this paper argues that - as a set of orientations for sociological inquiry - pragmatism and hermeneutics are confluent frameworks to examine valuation as a social process. This confluence is grounded on their common attunement to valuing as a problematic and relational process, their equally common updates with theories of institutions, and a further conceptual development regarding the temporalities of valuation. I advance the argument in four steps. First, looking at how the question about the "scientific value" of the ISS is far from settled, I show how valuation is always about something considered problematic and indeterminate. Second, characterizing the ISS at the intersection of different criteria of assessment, I stress the nature of valuation as a fundamentally perspectival and interpretive process, and show how a hermeneutic approach can complement some of the limitations of pragmatism in this regard. Third, I look at the question of institutions considering how some modes of assessment sediment more successfully than others. Fourth, I argue that, while providing insights towards it, pragmatist and hermeneutic approaches to valuation have not fully grasped its temporal nature as a process, and outline ways to open this line of inquiry. I conclude with some ideas for studies in sociology of science to re-entangle detailed case studies of scientific practice with the study of how institutions make claims of worth about the nature of science, I propose ways to extend these arguments to other studies of what I call iridescent institutions, and I make some considerations about our stance as sociologists in these valuation disputes.

The politics of a natural laboratory: Claiming territory and governing life in the Galápagos Islands

The Galápagos Islands are often called a natural laboratory of evolution. This metaphor provides a powerful way of understanding space that, through scientific research, conservation and tourism, has shaped the archipelago over the past century. Combining environmental histories of field science with political ecologies of conservation biopower, this article foregrounds the territorial production of the archipelago as a living laboratory. In the mid-twentieth century, foreign naturalists used the metaphor to make land claims as they campaigned to create the Galápagos National Park and Charles Darwin Research Station. Unlike earlier 'parks for science', these institutions were not established under colonial rule, but through postwar institutions of transnational environmental governance that nonetheless continued colonial approaches to nature protection. In the following decades, the metaphor became a rationale for territorial management through biopolitical strategies designed to ensure isolation by controlling human access and introduced species. This article's approach extends the scope of what is at stake in histories of field science: not only the production of knowledge and authority of knowledge claims, but also the foundation of global environmental governance and authority over life and death in particular places. Yet while the natural laboratory was a powerful geographical imagination, analysis shows that it was also an unsustainable goal.