Tweeting #LCTC2

#LCTC2 on the final day

The Second Legitimation Code Theory Conference finished yesterday - for those who weren't there, here is the social media buzz on Twitter and Instagram around the conference (& here):

Sociology of Deviance and Difference

Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, Church St Newtown, Sydney. (14th, June,2017)

Alex Page and I are coordinating a Unit for Winter School, the Sociology of Deviance and Difference, and we wrote a brief note for the Unit of Study to convey the ethos and importance of such a topic. Here it is:

A Brief Note From Your Course Coordinators:

We would both like to formally welcome you to the Winter School version of Sociology of Deviance and Difference for 2017! In this intensive unit over the next two and half weeks we – Mathew Toll and Alex Page – will be working with you to unpack the nature of deviance and difference and ask questions like:  what is deviance? Is it socially constructed? And if so, how and why is it constructed in certain ways? Who gets to set the rules? Who gets to label someone a deviant? How is deviance and difference experienced? And, what are the relations of power at play that determine constructions of normalcy? Why this way and not another? These questions will inform the discussion of various social fields of practice to see who wins and who is deemed bad/mad/different and in need of sanction, disciplining, or exclusion.

From the outset, we want you to understand the direction this course through three kinds of stories:

• Kinds of People Stories: deviance as rooted in the biological and psychological attributes of people.     
• Kinds of Society Stories: deviance as norm-breaking, labelling processes, and the social construction of deviance and difference.  
• Kinds of Power Stories: deviance and difference as an operation of power and struggle over who is considered normal.

Durkheim established a sociological understanding of deviance, kinds of society stories, and argues that norm-breaking rather than being a pathological aspect of society serve a set of key functions, not least norm-making. We always need to think about how the construction of deviance and difference are integral to a society, because even in a society of stains there are deviants: 

“Imagine a community of saints in an exemplary and perfect monastery. In it crime as such will be unknown, but faults that appear venial to the ordinary person will arouse the same scandal as does normal crime in ordinary consciences. If therefore that the community has the power to judge and punish, it will term such acts criminal and deal with them as such. It is for the same reason that the completely honourable man judges his slightest moral failings with a severity that the mass of people reserves for acts that are truly criminal. In former times acts of violence against the person were more frequent than they are today because respect for individual dignity was weaker. As it has increased, such crimes have become less frequent, but many acts which offended against that sentiment have been incorporated into the penal code, which did not previously include them.” 

- Emile Durkheim (1983, 100), Rules for a Sociological Method.

Foucault takes us further and argues that the disciplinary powers that act on people who are deviant or different are found in many institutions in modern society beyond formally punitive institutions.   He makes us think about how disciplinary and normalizing power spreads throughout the social body and impacts everyone: power is in all relations, forming and reforming people’s bodies and souls:

“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements. The carceral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modem society, of the normalizing power.”

 – Michel Foucault (1995, 304), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Our final quote comes from Vaneigem, who pushes us beyond the textbooks and into the reality of our own worlds:

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints - such people have a corpse in their mouth.”

- Raoul Vaneigem (2001, 26), The Revolution of Everyday Life.

This sentiment is vital for the Sociology of Deviance and Difference – vital for sociology. Vaneigem demands of us to connect theoretical tools and frameworks down to the social realities of lived experience. Not only is this a good use of your sociological imagination, we strive to do this because it also means you develop the skills to pull apart complex social phenomena in your own day-to-day lives! We believe is this the very foundation of a good sociological education. Maintaining norms and sectioning ‘deviants’ is a key way we ourselves exert power over others and this course aims to make us conscious of our own use of power.  

We would like to acknowledge Prof Karl Maton and Dr Nadine Ehlers for their help in constructing this course. Finally, we wish you the best throughout Winter School 2017, and are here to assist you in any way we can.

Mathew Toll and Alex Page

Way too Nice

University of Sydney's Eszter Szenes being way too nice. (I really wish I could have been more help). 

Second International Legitimation Code Theory Conference: Paper

The Second International Legitimation Code Theory Conference is happening at the University of Sydney, July 2017.  I have a paper in the conference: 

Title: Hyper-Knowledge Codes: Contesting Knowledge-Building on the Climate Sceptic Blogosphere.

Knowledge codes are not guarantees of knowledge-building; in fact, some may hinder it. This paper explores a ‘hyper-knowledge codes’ through a cosmological analysis of climate sceptic blogs. Studies of the field of production that employ Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) have principally focused on disciplines where the basis of legitimation is a knower code. Maton (2014: 38) identifies the potential of social knower codes to fragment disciplines and undermine knowledge-building. While studies of knowledge code disciplines, e.g. physics, chemistry and biology, have focused on impediments students face to educational attainment and the realization of legitimate knowledge and not the field of production.  Yet, outside knower code disciplines, LCT suggests that the relative emphasis on relations between knowledge practices and the known (ontic relations) or relations between knowledge practices and other knowledges (discursive relations) can produce divergent trajectories in knowledge code fields and impose costs on knowledge-building (Maton 2014: 175, 182).  As Maton (2014: 182) notes “knowledge codes are neither homogeneous nor royal roads to cumulative knowledge-building: stronger epistemic relations  do not by themselves guarantee intellectual progress.” Here a form of knowledge code is proposed that destabilizes knowledge-building by establishing idealized standards of legitimate knowledge and legitimate knowers which are difficult for actors to approximate.

The substantive case study for this theorization is the construal and contestation of legitimate knowledge and knowers on the climate sceptic blogosphere.  Bloggers question the core-set of experts, the assessment reports and statements of leading scientific institutions. Normative literature on the blogosphere either positions it as a positive intervention into the climate change debate as an “extended peer community” (Ravetz 2011: 149) or, more typically, a component of the “denial machine” (Dunlap and McCright 2011: 147) that echoes doubt and misinformation about climate science.  This raises the question of how to describe the knowledge practices of the climate sceptic blogosphere and how bloggers construct, construe and contest knowledge around climate change.  While the importance of the blogosphere for the circulation of climate scepticism is widely acknowledged, and the discourses of the blogosphere have affected the public debate on climate change, there has been comparatively little empirical examination of this sphere (Dunlap 2013).  LCT provides a language of description to unpack the knowledge practices of these actors and assess their engagement in processes of legitimation.  

To address this, a cosmological analysis and analysis of the Specialization codes was conducted. Cosmological analysis provides a means to see how, form a standpoint, the different practices or stances of a field can be arranged, condensed with meaning, and positively charged or negatively charged (Maton 2014: 149-150) and thus allows for an analysis of what knowledge and knowers climate sceptic construe as legitimate.  Blogposts from high-value climate sceptic blogs identified through their centrality in the hyperlink network of the blogosphere are used as the primary data in this paper.  Thematic analysis was first conducted to identify the reoccurring patterns of the climate sceptic discourse after which a constellation analysis and an analysis of the Specialization codes was applied to the themes generated from the data.  The analysis reveals a constellation of stances, from the positively charged climate sceptics, to lukewarmers, and negatively charged alarmists.  Evaluation of these relative positions in the field is based on an idealized conception of science and scientists as disinterested, sceptical and falsificationist.  Technical competence is emphasised as the basis of achievement (ER +) and indications of the gaze of scientists or potential axiology is negative evaluated (SR-).  Open puzzles, interpretative latitude, semantic density or tight social networks of scientists can become the basis of contestation.  From this idealized conception of science, bloggers critique mainstream climatologists, scientific institutions, and boundary organisations that deviate from their ideal of a hyper-knowledge code.  The trouble of maintaining this ideal, provides a basis to contest knowledge without providing alternative explanatory power, and thus aims to impedes knowledge-building. 

References. 
Dunlap, R. (2013). "Climate Change Skepticism and Denial:  An Introduction." American Behavioral Scientist 20(10): 1-8.
Dunlap, R. E. and A. M. McCright (2011). “Organized Climate Change Denial.”, The Oxford Handbooks of Climate Change. J. S. Dryzek, R. B. Norgaard and D. Schlosberg. London, Oxford University Press: 144-160.
Maton, K. (2014). Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education. London, Routledge.
Ravetz, J. (2011). "‘Climategate’ and the maturing of post-normal science." Futures 43(2): 149-157.

Giving the talk at #LCTC2, 7th of July, 2017

TASA Conference 2016: Paper

Author/s: Mathew Toll

Affiliation/s:  Postgraduate member, LCT centre for Knowledge-Building, University of Sydney.

Title: Unpacking the Black Box:The Climate Sceptic Blogosphere and the Idealization of Knowledge.

Abstract: Discussion of the role of the blogosphere in propagating climate scepticism echoes the focus on misinformation implicit in the deficit model. This characterization of the climate sceptic blogosphere suggests an arena without rules or evaluative logics. Yet this is not borne out by a cosmological analysis of climate sceptic blogs. In this paper, preliminary research is presented on the legitimation codes that underpin how ideal knowers and legitimate knowledge are construed on the climate sceptic blogosphere. On the blogosphere there is a commitment to unpacking the black box of science and evaluating it from the position that can be characterized as a toxic knowledge code, a schema for the legitimation of knowledge that emphasises the procedural component of knowledge and deems illegitimate the trained gaze of contributory experts that involve tacit insights and judgements. From this idealization of science evidence of the social relations that underpin knowledge practices, interpretive latitude in the construction of knowledge or tacit semantic density can undermine the legitimacy of knowledge. The strength of epistemic relations advocated impedes knowledge-building rather than strengthening it. Understanding these idealizations of knowledge production can allow for a more complete understanding of alternative modes of knowledge production and contestation online. Ultimately allowing for more effective strategies of engagement with online counter-movements.

Sam Harris by Zoe Young.

Sam Harris by Zoe Young.

The painting echoes the pose of Manet’s Olympia – but the subject is an indigenous Australian woman surrounded by European books, that comment on the European traditions of art, and perched underneath the leg of the day bed, holding it level, is a copy of John Berger's Ways of Seeing.  The symbolism of this was what first struck me when viewing the painting at the Archibald prize exhibition. It is not subtle. It offers continuity with a tradition and, at the same time, a re-contextualisation and critical comment on it.  The only analysis of the painting that I found so far identifies the reference Manet’s work but concludes that Young's painting is shallow and unconsidered: 

It’s a likeable, albeit lightweight work, but I don’t understand what Young is trying to tell us by putting so many books into the picture. Does she want us to know she is a good reader? Is she suggesting Harris is not just a pretty face? Either way, the gratuitous sprinkling of titles acts as a distraction, not an enhancement.

The titles aren't a distraction; they offer an interpretive lens to the entire composition.  I don't think Young merely wants to show that she is a good reader.  The allusion to Manet establishes continuity, the selection of books on European art and australiana reemphasises both continuity and recontexualization, and a book about the social context and purpose of art invites social comment  on the traditions of art in Australia and the representation of women in art and indigenous women in particular. How could an art critic miss these connections?  

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