Technological Encounters in a Knowledge Economy: An Epistemic X-Ray.

Abstract

Climate emergency is a planetary health and systems science challenge because human health, nonhuman animal health, and the health of the planetary ecosystems are coproduced and interdependent. Yet, we live in a time when climate emergency is tackled by platitudes and weak reforms instead of structural and systems changes, and with tools of the very same systems and metanarratives, for example, infinite growth at all costs, that are causing climate change in the first place. Seeking solutions to problems from within the knowledge frames and metanarratives that are causing the problems reproduces the same problems across time and geographies. This article examines and underlines the importance of an epistemological gaze on knowledge economy, an epistemological X-ray, as another solution in the toolbox of decolonial and other social justice struggles in an era of climate emergency. Epistemology questions and excavates the metanarratives embedded in knowledge forms that are popular, dominant, and hegemonic as well as knowledges that are silent, omitted, or erased. In this sense, epistemology does not take the "archives" of data and knowledge for granted but asks questions such as who, when, how, and with what and whose funding the archive was built, and what is included and left out? Epistemological choices made by innovators, funders, and knowledge actors often remain opaque in knowledge economies. Epistemology research is crucial for science and innovations to be responsive to planetary society and climate emergency and mindful of the social, political, neocolonial, and historical contexts of science and technology in the 21st century.