PostGrad Café meeting report – Wednesday 2nd November

The PostGrad Café meeting held last Wednesday was well attended by postgraduate students from across Cardiff University’s social research schools. Three papers were presented:

Michael Arribas-Allyon’s presentation explored the policy assumptions of ‘mutual obligation’ as a putative solution to the problem of ‘welfare dependency’ in Australia. Mutual obligation is understood here in terms of a paternalistic contractualism between ‘individual’ and ‘society’. Using Durkheimian themes of social pathology, moral education and state paternalism, he argued that mutual obligation resurrects twin programmes of moralisation and medicalisation. The poor, the idle and dependent form the basis of contractualising the freedom of self-governing subjects. Michael suggested that we can understand this move as a neo-Durkheimian version of Rousseau’s paradox: the necessity of ‘forcing individuals to be free’. Arguably, the landscape of the social that emerges from the anti-politics of welfare is one in which the social is immanent to individuals and therefore radically individualised.

Andrew Bartlett presented a paper entitled A prologue to robots and aliens. He discussed the effect that the automation of scientific practice might have on the generation of scientific knowledge. Discussing automation as an increase in ‘functional rationality’, he described automated science as, after Kuhn, ‘extraordinarily normal science’. Whereas Kuhn described normal science as being a process of forcing nature into the relatively unflexible box of the paradigm, Andrew suggested that in an automated laboratory the paradigm becomes black-boxed. Whereas the ‘boxes’ that represent the paradigms of normal science are merely inflexible, black boxes are designed to be indestructible.

Catherine Butler presented a paper entitled Knowledge and Non-knowledge: Socio-environmental issues, scientific un/certainty and in/action. She referred to arguments in contemporary social theory which entail the assertion that contemporary socio-environmental issues are inescapably indeterminate and that calls for 'further research' with the aim of attaining certainty on such issues are futile. She went on to discuss the assertion that there continues to be a political reliance on certainty and an apparent difficulty in making decisions in areas where certainty is not available. She made particular reference to the issue of global climate change as an example of an indeterminate socio-environmental issue. She finished by raising questions concerning the tension between the need for physical scientific evidence and the necessity to make decisions without the comfort of scientific certainty.

The next PostGrad Café will be held Wednesday December 7th at 5pm in the Senior Common Room, Glamorgan Building. The theme has not yet been decided. If you would like to present a short (10 minute) paper on any aspect of your research in particular or social research in general, please e-mail any of the PostGrad Café team members.

Please use the comments facility on this site to open a public discussion of any of the issues raised in these talks. If you would like to post a piece of short writing to this website, which can be on any topic connected with social research and analysis, please e-mail any of the PostGrad Café team members.

The speakers can be contacted at the e-mail address (modified in an attempt to avoid automated e-mail harvesters) listed below.

Michael: arribas-allyonM[at]cardiff.ac.uk
Andrew: bartlettA[at]cardiff.ac.uk
Catherine: butlerCC1[at]cardiff.ac.uk