“Everything, as they say, is connected to everything else, and not neatly. There is no clearly determinable boundary between the sea and land, between sociology and anthropology, between an automobile’s exhaust and your nose. There are only boundaries of word, thought, perception, and social agreement — artificial, mental model boundaries.” -Donella H. Meadows, in Thinking…
Tag: positionality
When objectivity is not an option
In physics, I was trained to design and conduct experiments that were repeatable — that anyone could, with careful scrutiny of my papers, the right equipment, and some hard work, reproduce at another facility somewhere. The observers, by this logic, were important only in the sense that they were needed to do the work. If…