Worldviews of Ice

Foundations for Empirical Analysis

This book refers to the foundations for the empirical analysis by grounding the inquiry into the circle of Arctic knowledge production and the science/politics interface in a theoretical background that we establish on the basis of various approaches primarily drawn from the fields of International Relations (IR) and Sociology.

While at the core we look for the formation and re-production of worldviews in and between science and politics, we also pay particular attention to important boundary processes and boundary organisations in order to explore how Arctic knowledge is validated, shared and transferred both within and between science and politics.

In doing so, we also need to tie back these concepts to the even broader (and older) debates on the operative autonomy of different (functionally differentiated) social systems and the resulting problems of communication.

After all, to put it bluntly, the often-heard frustration on the side of scientists (‘we have all the results, but the politicians won’t listen’) is not a frustration that would be peculiar to, for example, glaciologists working on the mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet.

Rather, it points to rather basic issues of the autonomy of social systems as well as the possibilities and limits of directed steering.

We will draw from these extensive debates in order to inquire how, and to which degree, the ‘boundary work’ between science and politics in our circle could be improved.

We deliberately take such a conceptually rather ‘deep’ approach in order to forestall assumptions according to which the problem of hand might be reduced to a problem of simply ‘communicating science better’ (and, most notably, hiring more communications staff or training scientists to become better communicators).