Knowledge Co-production

You have found a "Wrecksite". Here and there, "shipwrecks" will manifest themselves. They gesture to the apparatuses that produce conditions under which some phenomena can exists within polar bear monitoring, my research and this knowledge-land-scape- and others cannot. Different shipwrecks gesture to different possibilities and futurities. This one allows you to think with the im/possibilities of knowledge (co-)production in polar bear monitoring and co-management.

To be meaningfully co-produce scientific knowledge, is to co-determines what is included and what is excluded from the properties and meanings of "scientific knowledge" as a phenomena.

In scientific wildlife co-management and research the properties of ‘science’ are mostly determined by the agential cuts of post-positivist western natural sciences and its understanding of the world through representative data (Brook, 2005; Smylie, 2014). Without meaningful inclusion of other knowledge systems, the phenomena of ‘science’ materializes not only in a very small resolution of its possibilities.

Scientist seeking to make IQ ‘’intelligible’’ within this performance of western natural sciences, either need to break it down into such representative data, or placed IQ completely outside of the phenomena of Science to become intelligible as ‘another phenomena’ like; values, beliefs, ethics or cultural identities. Neither of those cuts can be considered meaningfully co-constituted with Inuit ways of knowing and being. Making IQ intelligible only as a category that can exist outside of science, continues a form of erasure in which the west views itself “as the center of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of ‘civilized’ knowledge” (Smith, 1999, p. 63).

Besides, the Gjoa Haven HTA, has indicated a couple of times that they feel that research seems to be ever ongoing, without it ever impacting their polar bear harvest quota. Over the last couple of years they have been trying to get BearWatch researchers to turn their focus towards the available polar bear harvest quota. Tomorrow, 20 people will come to talk about how a harvesting moratorium from 2001 has had reverberating impacts on them up until today.

Return to the BearWatch project to join the workshops. You should get going, because you also still need to buy coffee, "pop", and snacks for that meeting.<\span>

Return to cut 3 Workshops