Tag Archives | Crisis Science

Collaborative Practices in Crisis Science: Interdisciplinary Research Challenges and the Syrian War

Fiona Greenland, Michelle D. Fabiani

Sociological Science December 10, 2021
10.15195/v8.a22


Crises present the scientific community with unusual demands, including the need for rapid solutions. This can translate into a greatly compressed time frame that curtails data collection and analysis procedures used in “normal” science. Researchers cope with these demands, while maintaining professional standards and a personal commitment to producing reliable work, by engaging in what we call performed separations. These are practices that allow people to adopt an ethical epistemic position while operating within constrained and urgent research situations. We distill the core features and effects of performed separations in the case of experts working to study archaeological looting in wartime Syria. We look specifically at how different practices of control allow for varying degrees of separation and the production of knowledge claims. By extension, performed separations facilitate making ethical claims about one’s role in the production of research and use of findings.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Fiona Greenland: Department of Sociology, University of Virginia
E-mail: fg5t@virginia.edu

Michelle D. Fabiani: Criminal Justice Department, University of New Haven
E-mail: mfabiani@newhaven.edu

Acknowledgments: The authors thank Madeleine Peterson and Grant Tabler for research assistance and James Evans, William Greenland, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and questions. Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Human-Machine Intelligence group (HMI) at the University of Virginia and the Technology, Knowledge, and Society annual meeting in 2020. Support for this research was generously provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (award no. 1754992).

  • Citation: Greenland, Fiona, and Michelle D. Fabiani. 2021. “Collaborative Practices in Crisis Science: Interdisciplinary Research Challenges and the Syrian War.” Sociological Science 8: 455-479.
  • Received: April 27, 2021
  • Accepted: June 13, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v8.a22


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