Sanders, Todd
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/68881
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Item Openness(Duke University Press, 2021) Sanders, Todd; Sanders, Elizabeth F.In today’s world, open science and open government matter. When combined, many agree, they strengthen science and democracy. Yet opening up – whether in the name of open science, open data, open source or open government – is rarely straightforward. This essay explores the curious alliances, novel tensions and surprising paradoxes that contemporary practices of openness entail. It dwells on two controversies in particular: Climategate and The Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017. These examples show that the grounds on which expertise and science for government work are shifting; and how difficult it can be to defend established scientific practices, which are increasingly cast as secretive, suspect and morally untenable. While pundits routinely take both examples as evidence of a populist, right-wing assault on science, the essay suggests that the recent push for openness and transparency itself contributes substantially to the challenges science for government faces. Familiar stories about a post-truth, anti-science Right that operates in the shadows, and a truthful, pro-science Left that does not, have limited explanatory value. Ultimately the essay aims to expand our thinking on the knotty entanglements of science and liberal democratic governance in the twenty-first century.Item The Curve(2020) Sanders, Elizabeth F.; Sanders, ToddItem Territorial and Magical Migrations in Tanzania(Brill, 2001) Sanders, ToddThis chapter explores culturally specific idioms of movement amongst the Ihanzu and Sukuma of north-central Tanzania. Over the twentieth century, these two neighbouring peoples expanded in all directions in search of more fertile farming and grazing lands. The Sukuma’s numerical superiority and their preference for pastoralism have given them a decisive advantage as they increasingly encroach on Ihanzu lands. However, the Ihanzu have been concerned not just with a heightened influx of foreigners onto their soils but, more monumentally, with what they see as an all-out Sukuma witchcraft offensive against them. Migration is, therefore, not simply about moving bodies over physical terrains but is imaginatively crafted through particular cultural lenses. Above all, this chapter compels us to problematise locally-inflected understandings of expansion, migration and mobility and to consider how these interact with well-worn political-economy explanations of such processes.Item Imagining the Dark Continent: the Met, the media and the Thames torso(Berghahn, 2003) Sanders, ToddThis article provides the first anthropological analysis of the Thames Torso case in Britain.Item Interdisciplinarity, Climate Change, and the Native's Point of View(Social Science Research Council, 2016-10) Sanders, Todd; Hall, Elizabeth FTodd Sanders and Elizabeth Hall bring our debates about interdisciplinarity to climate change, a major global issue for which the need for interdisciplinary perspectives is taken for granted. How, they ask, “do we imagine and practice ‘interdisciplinarity’ to save the planet?” The authors describe and critique a range of contrasting modalities for doing interdisciplinary work on climate change and the assumptions under which they operate. Sanders and Hall also reflect on the complexities of studying interdisciplinarity when its practitioners and observers are part of the same milieu—both being “natives” in the world of research.Item Accountability and the Academy: Producing Knowledge about the Human Dimensions of Climate Change(Wiley-Blackwell, 2015-06-01) Hall, Elizabeth F; Sanders, ToddCalls for accountability and ‘impactful’ research are fundamentally reshaping the academy, giving rise to a large, critical scholarship on neoliberal regimes of accountability and their pernicious effects. But these calls also animate other institutional forms and practices that have received less critical attention. These include new forms of science that promise accountability through interdisciplinarity, collaborating with stakeholders, and addressing real-world problems. This article considers one example of such accountable science: human dimensions of climate change field research. This research endeavour has produced surprising results, including the uncritical adoption of controversial Euro-American ideas about traditional Others. In exploring how this has come about, the article considers how theoretical and disciplinary diversity are managed within this arena, and the organizing logics that enable climate sciences and scientists to work together. We ultimately argue that accountable science – like other neoliberal modes of accountability – can produce outcomes for which no one can be held to account.