Knowledge and Power in an Overheated World
Beschreibung des Verlags
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 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 2015. 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.
Contributors to the book are Ben Campbell, Elisabeth Schober, Desmond McNeill, Christina Garsten and Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Art direction and technical expertise by Maria Kartveit.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and PI of the ERC AdvGr project ‘Overheating’. His most recent books in English are Globalization: The Key Concepts (2nd ed., 2014), Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography (2015) and Overheating: Coming to Terms With Accelerated Change (2016).
Elisabeth Schober is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. As part of the Prof. Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s “Overheating”-research project, she has recently undertaken seven months of ethnographic field research in the Philippines and South Korea. Previous research of hers on the US military presence in Seoul, South Korea, forms the premise of her most recent monograph “Base Encounters. The US Armed Forces” (2016, Pluto).
