A Rocky Moment in the History of a University Course

Unfortunately, the 21st century university, a neoliberal institution, is still full of the old-fashioned and archaic guardians of disciplinary boundaries, always ready to reject those who dare to cross those borders. Recently, I had to listen and endure one of these guardians, a geologist in this case, who in debating the modification of an anthropology course not only circumscribed scientific knowledge to the domain of the so-called natural sciences but also excluded the environment from the objects of study of the social sciences. The irony is that the geologists themselves are the ones who nowadays speak of the Anthropocene, a concept that, although at an elevated level of abstraction, makes the geological and environmental inseparable from the social and cultural (Rivera Collazo 2015; Anazagasty 2019; Moore 2015; 2016). Puerto Rico demonstrates how tangled these are, for as concluded by Isabel Rivera Collazo (2015: 1608): “Starting from the earliest occupations, human influence has altered the ecology of Puerto Rico so deeply that the natural resources we work toward preserving, conserving, or restoring today cannot be understood without considering the social contexts that shaped them.” Thus, the geologist in question, by untying nature from society, reproduced an outdated but persistent duality. Moreover, this geologist appropriated the biophysical environment for the so-called natural sciences while relegating social life to the social and human disciplines.

Putting the human-nature duality aside, I will focus on the gatekeeping issue. Therefore, this essay is about how a geologist turned the academic revision of a course into a rocky moment, an episode that although lamentable is useful in revealing the enduring stratified and unequal character of both the academia and the scientific establishment, where many natural scientists marginalize and undervalue the social sciences and the humanities.

What prompted the gatekeeping practices of the geologist in question? This expert on the Earth was reacting to a proposal to modify an existing anthropology course on energy and culture. The proposal included eliminating the prerequisites of the course, changing it from a 400 to a 300-level course and a minor change in the official description. A colleague and I proposed these changes to make the course attractive and available to all students, especially since energy affairs have become an important and pressing social problem in Puerto Rico. The proposed description of the course was the following:

Study of the cultural and social dimensions of various patterns of energy consumption and their social and environmental impact, and the relationship between those patterns and the production and distribution of energy. It also includes the study of the social and cultural dimensions of various energy technologies, energy policies, and various controversies and social struggles relative to energy.

Energy policies and debates are only one aspect of the course. Yet, the geologist was troubled by the policy dimension of the course. For this geologist, good energy policy requires scientific knowledge, meaning that without proper background in geology and science it is easy to push ill-informed policy. The geologist even provided an example: mining practices required to provide rare-earth minerals for batteries can have quite a severe negative impact on the environment due to open pit mining practices. Indeed, as I noted elsewhere, the shortage of materials used in several key components of smart technology already represents a potential barrier to the large-scale deployment of this technology, a problem also faced by technology linked, for example, to photovoltaic panels (Anazagasty 2021). Lithium, whose extraction has considerably increased in recent decades, could become scarce soon. Its extraction has significant impacts on water, soil, and air. The processing of lithium requires various chemicals whose release through leaching, spills or atmospheric emissions can harm human communities, ecosystems, and food production. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, mining activities to extract lithium consumed 65 percent of the region’s water and have considerably damaged the soil and polluted the air. Its extraction in Tibet has also greatly damaged the environment, which has caused protests. In Salar de Hombre Muerto in Argentina, lithium extraction has contaminated water bodies used by many of the nearby communities, which are vital for agriculture and livestock. The extraction of lithium is not only tied to environmental problems, but also to environmental inequalities and injustices (Anazagasty 2021).

To avoid inadequate policies, those lacking scientific basis, the geologist recommended adding a course on the geological aspects of the environmental sciences as a co-requisite. Accordingly, the geology course would have provided students with the basic foundations needed to understand the science behind policy making. The geologist was calling for a balance between scientific knowledge, meaning the knowledge provided by the natural sciences, and knowledge regarding the “social aspects,” the realm of anthropology, sociology, and like disciplines. The geologist’s recommendation is reasonable. A good course on energy issues should facilitate and encourage students to learn about energy from various disciplines and perspectives, from both the social and natural sciences. However, adding a geology course as a co-requisite would have defeated our goal, the institution of a general or introductory course available to any interested student. The problem was then not the geologist’s recommendation, but the arguments used to justify it. These arguments were based on a series of presuppositions and opinions detrimental to the social sciences.

To begin with, the geology professor, like other gatekeeping scientists and academics, upheld the presence of clear-cut boundaries within the sciences and academic disciplines, rather than admitting the porous quality of these borders. The geologist in question also wanted to make sure that the proposed course on culture and energy was focused upon teaching the social and policy dimensions of energy affairs only, rather than in teaching any science, for as the geologist contended, the scientific aspects would fall under the responsibility of geologists and other natural or biophysical scientists to teach. The geologist’s bigheaded statement blatantly excluded anthropology, sociology, and like disciplines from the sciences. Moreover, the geologist wanted to preclude social scientists from teaching any “science,” the scientific study of energy in this case. The geology professor neglects the fact that social scientists, especially sociologists and anthropologists, have been studying the energy question for a very long time, going back to the classics, and more forcefully since the energy crisis of the seventies, often engaging natural scientists and engineers, acknowledging the need for inter and transdisciplinary work in addressing a complex issue (Lutzenhiser, Harris and Olsen 2001; Rosa and Machlis 1983). And energy has been a basic topic for environmental sociologists since the origins of the specialty area in the sixties (Lutzenhiser, Harris and Olsen 2001; Rosa and Machlis 1983).

From the geologist’s perspective, social scientists are simply ill-equipped to teach anything regarding the scientific aspects of energy and other environmental phenomena. Of course, the condescending geologist did not make any arguments in favor of precluding geologists from doing research and teaching about the social, even though the official descriptions of various geology courses refer to society and various social processes. Consider, for instance, the description of the course Introduction to Earthquakes at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez:

General study of earthquakes, from the conditions that cause them to their geographic distribution in relation to global plate tectonics. Identification of instrumentation and description of modern methods employed to determine earthquake locations and the parameters used to make estimates of seismic rupture process. Exploration of earthquake mitigation, secondary effects, and social impact and resilience.

According to our geologist’s own constraints, geologists should be banned from teaching anything about mitigation, social impacts, and human resilience, for that matter would fall under the exclusive purview of sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars from like disciplines to teach. One could argue, for instance, that most geology professors would be unfamiliar with the rich body of research regarding hazards and disasters done by sociologists and other social scientists for decades. The sociology of disasters is indeed a specialty field with a long and rich history (Nigg and Mileti 2001). Following the geologist’s own logic, one could propose requiring geology students to take a sociology of disasters course as a co-requisite to the earthquakes course.

Also consider the official description of the course Volcanoes and their Hazards:

Hazards associated with volcanic activity, monitoring of volcanoes, and long and short-term forecasting of eruptions, effects of volcanic eruptions on humans, infrastructure, and agriculture, impact of crisis on society.

If we uphold the disciplinary boundaries defended by the geology professor, should geologists be teaching about the impact of volcanic eruptions on society? Also, and again following the geologist’s own rules, should a geologist teach a course like Economic Geology? Shouldn’t commercially important mineral deposits be a matter for economists only?

Earthquakes, volcanoes, climate change and other natural hazards and related disasters, just as energy issues, are complex multidimensional phenomena best researched and taught from the vantage point of interdisciplinary research, and even better, from a transdisciplinary viewpoint. Yet, other academics neglect and actively marginalize the social sciences, not to mention the humanities, from the spaces devoted to study, teach, and address these issues. Politicians and policymakers also sideline or disregard social scientists and their research in the policy arena. Research and policymaking regarding climate change are good examples. In their introduction to Climate Change and Society, environmental sociologists Robert J. Brulle and Riley E. Dunlap (2015) quote Bruno Latour, expert on science and technology studies, stating that the body of knowledge regarding climate change is “probably one of the most beautiful, sturdy and complex ever assembled.” That knowledge has grown rapidly, led by the natural sciences. The social sciences have had a marginal role in this venture. Yet, Brulle and Dunlap noted that despite the development of an extensive empirical literature addressing the social dimensions of climate change, the social sciences have not been well integrated by bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example. For these environmental sociologists, one reason is that social science research on climate change is comparatively newer than those in the natural sciences. Another reason is that such research is not easily identifiable nor accessible to the wider scientific community. The social sciences have also had a peripheral role because these are actively marginalized, signaled in the very framing of climate change as a problem. As shown by Brulle and Dunlap, most scientists, and policymakers, among other actors, frame it primarily through the natural sciences as an environmental problem, not as a social problem, not even as a socio-ecological problem. The effect is the disregarding of the adequate analyses of the social processes that produce, extend, and intensify climate change, even though climate change is primarily the consequence of anthropogenic, and thus social, activities. As noted by these sociologists: “This marginalization of social science research results in the detachment of climate change from its socio-structural context, as if it were devoid of political, cultural, or economic contestations” (12).  Such relegation of the social sciences from various scientific and policy fields is not new nor will it disappear anytime soon.

The geology professor was not only separating the natural and social sciences, reinforcing disciplinary boundaries, but also distinguishing science from the “social aspects” or from society. Although the distinction might be heuristically useful, scientific practices are necessarily social phenomena; scientists do not conduct research outside and above society. Humans practice science, this practice is inherently and fundamentally a social phenomenon and, accordingly, we cannot analyze it as an isolated practice detached from and atop other human activities. Diverse social forces shape the scientific establishment. According to Richard York (2008), while there is considerable virtue in the philosophy and rationality of science, there are also aspects in the actual scientific establishment that warrant critique. By the «establishment of science» he refers to the actual practice of science, the social, economic, political, and cultural institutions which support it; the research centers (universities, transnational corporations, research and development centers, and laboratories) where scientists work; and of course, the scientists themselves. The scientific establishment is a socially situated set of practices and institutions and a network of social actors that we must study by inspecting how it operates in society, the social forces that configure these practices and institutions, and what their consequences have been for humans and the environment, not by recourse to abstract philosophical reasoning alone. Although the scientific community does support the ideal of objectivity, in practice scientists are not completely free of biases and prejudices nor of social, cultural, political, and economic forces. Also, scientists are not free of psychological traits and dynamics, nor of the subjective and emotional states shared by all humans. The idea of fully objective and morally and politically neutral scientists researching in an unearthly and asocial sphere separated from nature and society is a myth. Thus, and to various degrees, scientific findings and theories always exhibit the social background in which scientists produced it.

Science replicates the social context in which researchers develop their theories and carry out their research. For example, university science is a set of local activities determined by the cultural and social resources mobilized by academic scientists in that context, one that simultaneously facilitates and constraints scientific practices through norms and the provision of resources. Economic, social, political, and cultural forces and processes acting and happening at various geographical scales, from the local to the global, shape the university and scientific research within it. Since university scientists do research in an institutional context, we must consider not only the productive and dynamic character of science but also its contingent and constrained qualities. In the neoliberal university of today, described by Ricardo Fuentes (2022), and that includes the University of Puerto Rico, this involves taking into account various processes: the dynamics between the theoretical, experimental and applied concerns of university scientists and their research practices; the effect of public and  private sponsorship and competition for research funds in the context of relationships between various disciplines; the effect of other actors, including political and economic actors, on their scientific practices;  and the difficulties and contradictions researchers encounter when merging their academic work with their research and development work for private companies. This shows that science is a complex, and often contradictory work determined by multiple social, cultural, political, and economic forces. So, to speak of a balance between science and society while counterposing both and losing sight of these relationships is arbitrary and problematic. With regards to the energy question, this framing of a science outside and above society often produces and promotes a “scientized” view of the energy question, a technocratic and allegedly value-neutral discourse that takes the form of a detached, unpolitical, and allegedly universal imaginary.

Apart from presupposing a science outside and above society, the geology professor also presupposed a straightforward or smooth relationship between science and policy. The geologist’s take is naïve with regards to this complex relationship. Unfortunately, politicians and government officials institute ill-informed policies even in the context of good and rigorous science. Moreover, policymakers actively ignore, oppose, deny, and reject research done by scientists. Take, for instance, policies regarding climate change in the United States, where climate science hardly escapes politics. The denial of climate change, and of the science behind it, have become a well-organized countermovement, often backed by Republicans and conservatives.

Environmental policymaking locates scientific research and disputes, such as those regarding climate change or the energy crisis, within a political context, where politicians and public servants enlist scientific research and scientific quarrels to either promote or undermine the argument of the various stakeholders involved. In the context of policymaking the acceptability and adequacy of scientific research is at the center of debates regarding various environmental problems. As explained by Allan Schnaiberg and Kenneth A. Gould (1994), in this context, research reports and data sets represent implied policy recommendations backed by particular interest groups sponsoring and providing scientific research. Consequently, disputes tend to focus on the credibility and reliability of the research and data sets primarily in terms of the political effect of their full acceptance and enactment. Political actors assess and critique research findings presented in the environmental policy arena for their ramifications for decision making and politics rather than on their scientific and methodological merits. The entire process ends up harming environmental science, negatively affecting the perception of science as a fact-revealing undertaking while also demoting scientific research to being a mere tool of interest-oriented political actors and their rhetoric.

Policymakers recruit scientific research to promote economic and political interests. As such, the scientific establishment is not always completely neutral nor objective and is often ideological. For instance, to use the geologist’s own example, while geological knowledge could and have informed policies aimed at addressing the environmental consequences of mining lithium, it also informs diverse exploitative mining practices. Geology, like all sciences, is not a neutral and fully objective enterprise. As Kathryn Yusoff (2018) affirms in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None: “Geology is a mode of accumulation, on one hand, and of dispossession, on the other, depending on which side of the geologic color line you end up on.” Geologists, sheltered or concealed behind scientific objectivity, are often unaware of the troubling relationship of their science with racism, colonialism, and imperialism, and more to the point, with ecological imperialism and environmental colonialism. Indeed, geological surveys were quite common in European and American imperial and colonial projects, including the United States colonial project in Puerto Rico, aimed at surveying, and locating valuable minerals and other resources for extraction and exploitation. Geology is, of course, not alone, as other sciences, including the social sciences, have also served colonial projects.

Today, research into industry-university linkages, especially in the United States, has shown the extent to which scientists have become steadily integrated into the worldviews, values, ideas, and priorities of corporations. In the era of “academic capitalism” it is not unusual for universities to collaborate with corporations and even hold stocks in companies formed by faculty members who have licensed their inventions and innovations or established venture capitalist entities (Olsen and Peters 2005; Tuunainen 2005). Research into the effects of commercial sponsorship on academic judgement in the medical and biotechnology fields, and life-science research in general, has shown that the demands of corporate investors seriously compromise the independent judgement of scientists, and with it, public trust in scientific opinion and research (Bowring 2003). In the policy arena, this research repeatedly becomes part of a series of efforts to persuade relevant actors that the produced knowledge and policy recommendations are a route to a desired form of very objective power and economic growth. Scientists working for or at the service of economic and political actors, as it is quite common today, have substantial incentives to produce research findings that reflect favorably on the positions taken by those actors or sponsors in specific political conflicts and disputes. And those who resist and reject these incentives are censored.

That is not to say or imply that all scientific research produced or used in policymaking contexts is deeply biased. It is only to say that even the most rigorous scientific research cannot escape social and institutional forces. This applies, of course, to energy research. However, there is no reason to discard or deny scientific knowledge nor oppose energy policy drawing on scientific knowledge, including geological knowledge. On the contrary, energy policy should rely on that knowledge. But we should be cautious and reflexive, and admit that the relationship between science and policy is fuzzier than usually believed. And it is precisely these fuzzy political contexts, as well as the equally ambiguous cultural, economic, and social contexts that researchers in the social sciences study. This should make inter and trans-disciplinary research more, not less, desirable. This is what a course on energy and culture should do: teach students the value of reflexive and critical inter and trans-disciplinary research in approaching energy problems. Although the course on energy and culture underlines the importance of social and cultural factors and processes in understanding energy uses and the meanings attached to these uses, it would be a limited course if it does not point to other aspects, often stressed by other sciences, including geology.

The reason to stress those social and cultural factors is because natural scientists, engineers, and policymakers often ignore or neglect these factors. For example, policymakers and other actors often approach household energy consumption from economic and engineering perspectives. Loren Lutzenhiser (1992) already noted this tendency in the early nineties while evaluating the approach to it by engineers, economists, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. Engineers, with exceptions, conceive residents in a household or building as physical entities occupying space, manipulating devices, and contributing body heat to the indoor environment. Humans are then physiological systems in a physical and technological environment. Economists approach household energy consumption through econometric models of residential demand with information about buildings, systems, and appliances, among other factors that constrain or condition prices. Both models presuppose a rational human being; engineers tend to presuppose a rational being in routine everyday behavior, while economists tend to presuppose a homo economicus. But humans are not always rational or objective, so these models fail to consider people’s highly subjective preferences and not so rational behaviors when it comes to energy use. Peoples’ energy use is hardly efficient and oftentimes wasteful. Psychologists account for the subjective and less rational or instrumental dimension of household energy consumption, focusing instead on why people deviate from the expected rationality of engineers and economists, addressing psychological dynamics: attitudes, perceptions, valuations, risk assessments, among other variables. In the psychological model, these dynamics are the practical accomplishments of individuals, achievements that nonetheless depend on various social and cultural variables.

Despite their respective values, these three models—engineering, economic and psychological—fail to account for the social and cultural dimensions and variations of energy demand and consumption at the household level (Lutzenhiser 1992). Sociological and anthropological approaches show that peoples’ energy uses and consumption levels, their likelihood of pursuing energy conservation, their adoption of energy efficient technologies, and their understandings of energy and related technologies vary systematically among groups based on social class, ethnicity, race, age group, gender, level of education, occupation, place of residence and culture (Lutzenhiser 1992). Yet, engineers and natural scientists hardly consider how people commonly use energy and the meanings and values they attach to those uses, nor the social factors that influence these uses and their significations. Such neglect and the poor understanding of people’s energy-consumption patterns in social contexts limits the potential of needed energy efficiency and conservation programs, the likely success of energy policies, and the effective and efficient use of energy technologies, all problems needed to be addressed in a world where the household consumption of energy continues to grow, a growth with serious social and environmental consequences. Addressing these problems requires a better understanding of the relationship between energy, society, and culture.

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