Evidence in Action between Science and Society Constructing, Validating, and Contesting Knowledge

This volume is an interdisciplinary attempt to insert a broader, historically informed perspective into current political and academic debates on the issue of evidence and the reliability of scientific knowledge. The tensions between competing paradigms, different bodies of knowledge and the relative hierarchies between them are a crucial element of the historical and contemporary dynamics of scientific knowledge production. The negotiation of evidence is at the heart of this process. Starting from the premise that evidence constitutes a central, but also essentially contested concept in contemporary knowledge-based societies, this volume focuses on how evidence is generated and applied in practice—in other words, on “evidence in action.” The contributions analyze and compare different evidence practices within the field of science and technology, how they interlink with different forms of power, their interaction with and impact on the legal and political domain, and their relationship to other, more heterodox forms of evidence that challenge traditional notions of evidence. In doing so, this volume provides much-needed context and historical background to contemporary debates on the so-called “post-truth” society. Evidence in Action is the perfect resource for all those interested in the relationship between science, technology, and the role of knowledge in society.

1. Introduction: Evidence in Action Sarah Ehlers and Stefan Esselborn Part I:Establishing Evidence: The Formation of Disciplinary Cultures 2. War, Wheat, and Crop Diseases of the Late Enlightenment: Contesting and Producing Evidence in Agriculture in Great Britain John Lidwell-Durnin 3. Presenting Chemical Practice in Court: Forensic Toxicology in Nineteenth-Century German States Marcus B. Carrier 4. No "Mere Accumulation of Material": Fieldwork Prctices and EmbeddedEvidence in Early (Latin)Americanist Anthropology Julia E. Rodriguez Part II:Innovating Evidence: Contemporary Technoscientific Approaches 5. Prototyping Evidence: How Artifacts Demonstrate Technological Futures Sascha Dickel 6. On Top of the Hierarchy: HowGuidelines Shape Systematic Reviewing in Biomedicine Alexander Schniedermann, Clemens Blümel, and Arno Simons 7. On the (Im)possibility of Identifying the Evidence Base of the Impact of Star Architecture Projects Nadia Alaily-Mattar, Diane Arvanitakis, Martina Löw, andAlain Thierstein Part III:Governing Evidence: Evidence-Based Practice and Politics 8. The Thing We Call Evidence: Toward a Situated Ontology of Evidence in Policy Kari Lancaster and Tim Rhodes 9. "Drawing Thresholds That Make Sense": DiagrammaticEvidence and Urgencyin Automatic Outbreak Detection Steffen Krämer 10. Producing Migration Knowledge: From Big Data to Evidence-Based Policy? Laura Stielike Part IV: Contesting Evidence: The Politics of Heterodox Evidence 11. Fearful Narratives: Evidence Production in the Visual Rhetoric of the Historic Anti-vaccine Movement in the German States Christiane Arndt 12. The Politics of Evidence: State Secrecy, Ambiguity, andCounterforensic Practice in "Missing Persons" Cases in Pakistan Salman Hussain 13. Digital Ethnographic Art(i)Facts as Evidence: Anthropological Entanglements between Techne and Episteme Anna Apostolidou

Sarah Ehlers is a postdoctoral researcher working on the global history of medicine, science and the environment at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Deutsches Museum and an affiliated researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Stefan Esselborn is a postdoctoral researcher at the Professur für Technikgeschichte at the Technical University of Munich. He is writing and teaching on topics in the fields of global and colonial history, the history of science and technology, the history of knowledge and expertise, and the history of risk and safety.