Knowledge and power in an overheated world

Abstract

Suddenly, we seem to live in a time dominated by ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, conspiracy theories, scepticism of scientific research, partial accounts parading as ‘the real truth which has hitherto been concealed from us, the people’, revolts against allegedly smug academic elites and distant political elites – a time where YouTube videos claiming research into climate change to be a scam get far more viewers than videos presenting the science of climate change. In this world, where the authority of science and empirical methods is being questioned and where even world leaders may brush aside uncomfortable facts as ‘fake news’, it is increasingly difficult to know whose knowledge to trust. This insight is the starting point of this slim collection of articles, which has grown out of a workshop organised by the ERC AdvGr project ‘Overheating: The Three Crises of Globalisation’ in Oslo in 20151. We are very pleased to be able to offer these texts as a free e-book, not least considering the fact that its subject-matter is knowledge. In this introduction, we give a brief outline of the study of knowledge regimes in anthropology and related disciplines before presenting the e-book, but first, some context on acceleration and overheating is required. [...]