When I was a teenager in 1990s UK – a period which coincided with the height of public obsession with the TV show Friends – a series of adverts for hair products circulated featuring the Friends actor Jennifer Aniston. Famous for her glossy hair and ‘Rachel cut’, in the ads she talks about falling in love – with a shampoo. The most famous version of the advert doesn't only feature Aniston, however: she breaks off with the immortal words ‘Here comes the science bit – concentrate!’, allowing the ad to segue into an animation representing the shampoo in question's innovative technology and a (male) voiceover that explains this technology. According to the scriptwriters, this allowed them to include the ‘obligatory scientific message’ with humour and a sense of fun.

I have forgotten a lot of things from this period of my life, but – for better or worse – this advert is not one of them. And perhaps it is ripe for re-analysis. There's a lot to reflect on in it: that the ‘science bit’ is framed as comprehensively separate from Aniston; that it is disembodied; that it involves jargon (the product contains Ceramide-R!); that there is the suggestion, through Aniston's winking ‘concentrate!’, that it is boring or at least demanding. The advert is just one example of the ways in which science and technology populate culture, not only through the technologies we use or how we imagine the role of science in society, but in popular media, consumer culture, and entertainment. Technoscience permeates leisure as well as politics.

This chapter explores some of the ways in which it does so, and how it comes to shape our shared visions and imaginations not just of science but also of collective life and the future. In it we look at how science is represented in news and entertainment media, and at some of the subtle ways – such as that shampoo advert – in which it forms part of public culture without us really being aware of it. At least some of these manifestations of technoscience may seem trivial: who really cares about what is represented in a shampoo advert, after all?

What is necessary for building a well-functioning state? The answers, of course, are various, and are often enshrined in constitutions – the principles or laws that define and govern particular nations. In India one such constitutional principle is the notion of scientific temper, which is presented as one of the ten central duties of citizens. ‘This clause’, explain Anwesha Chakraborty and Poonam Pandey, ‘makes embracing scientific and rational thinking and ways of life a duty and responsibility of Indian citizens’. Based on the work and writings of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, scientific temper is:

Indian citizens are thus expected to embrace not just science and its applications, but the mindset that is understood as tied to it: critical thinking, the capacity to change one's mind, the rejection of irrationality and ‘religious temper’ (which Nehru framed as the opposite of scientific temper). Science is thus constitutionally central to citizenship. Similarly, in 2009 the then-new President Obama promised to put science in its ‘rightful place’ in US society and politics. In both cases, the assumption is that science is central to society, the state, and to politics, and that its ‘rightful place’ is at the heart of the political system, speaking truth to power. Indeed, for some commentators science and democracy are intimately connected, sharing central values such as rationality and working in constant support of one another. In this view one cannot have one without the other.

The previous chapter explored some of the ways in which technoscience is represented in public and popular culture, finding science in shampoo adverts and in promises about future technologies, and observing scientists both in their stereotypical guises and as real people who may be squeezed out of public media because of assumptions about what researchers look like. One thing that wasn't discussed was how such portrayals of science are received. How do publics engage with such representations, and with science and technology more broadly?

This question is the focus of this chapter, which covers how laypeople consume, engage with, protest, and otherwise negotiate technoscience. Of course, these aspects often overlap: even when we consume* forms of science communication such as science documentaries or books, for instance, we are also actively making sense of scientific knowledge, fitting it into our existing knowledges and understandings. Any communication process is active, even those that focus on the transfer of information. When I give lectures to students (or as I write this book), I might like to think that I am seamlessly transferring knowledge from my mind to those of others, but in reality they (and you) are taking in some aspects and not others, fitting ideas into pre-existing frames or concepts, disagreeing with or rejecting some things, and all in all making sense of the content I discuss in their (your) own ways. When we encounter non-scientists engaging with technoscience we should therefore expect sophisticated negotiations of its content rather than passive absorption. Indeed, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, we should also expect to see technoscience being made – co-constituted – in nonscientific spaces. This chapter therefore overlaps in substantive ways with several others, highlighting themes of active public engagement with technoscience and the intersections of scientific and other knowledges that we see throughout.

An initial example demonstrates some of these dynamics. Health communication is one important way in which technoscientific knowledge becomes visible in our lives, perhaps especially during times of crisis (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) but also more generally, as we are exhorted to stop smoking or get vaccinated or are given advice about how to manage conditions or illnesses.

Retrieving the historical contrast between open and closed wind energy structures

Our present perception of wind energy technology is dominated by the version of wind turbines that we find in ‘wind farms’ (‘wind parks’), which is associated with landscape degradation and local resistance. Locals don’t want these turbines installed in their back yard, we don’t ever see them posing happily in front of them. Even their most ardent supporters, who promote them as an unavoidable necessity in the face of the global environmental crisis, agree that there is nothing aesthetically appealing about these wind turbines. They just charge the local opponents of these wind turbines with suffering from the ‘not in my back yard’ syndrome. The reference to such a syndrome is by itself an acknowledgement of the negative aesthetic impact of these wind turbines. The ‘energy landscapes’ produced by the installation of wind farm turbines are certainly not attractive. In fact, if the criterion for the evaluation of the merits of wind energy turbines is their impact on the landscape, wind farm turbines score no better than fossil fuel energy generation plants (Pasqualetti and Stremke, 2018).

There were, however, in the past versions of wind energy technology that people were looking forward to be in a picture with. Going through the album of pictures that T. Lindsay Baker collected in American Windmills: An Album of Historic Photographs leaves no doubt about it (Baker, 2012). The owners of the kind of wind energy technology that we find in this album, together with a crowd formed by their relatives and friends, posed happily in front of it on all important occasions: from a baptism ceremony that was taking place at a water tank filled through the use of a wind pump to a wedding ceremony that was bringing together a comparable crowd, which also posed in front of the wind pump and the farm house that it was right next to (or just behind of). As we see in the picture that Baker chose for the cover of his book, people could not simply pose in front of this wind energy technology; they could actually pose in it (and on it). We will here refer to this past farm wind energy technology as ‘open’, while we will argue that the wind farm energy technology of present day is ‘closed’.

The agroecology of Genuino Clandestino

Starting from the end of the 1960s the so called ‘Green Revolution’ significantly transformed the ways through which agriculture has been developed on a global scale (Shiva, 2008; Altieri and Toledo, 2011; Rosset and Altieri, 2017; Altieri, 2018). The central role of mechanization, the adoption of new technologies, the selection of high yielding varieties of cereals and the extensive use of chemical fertilizers and agrochemicals are the main features of current ‘industrial’ agriculture. These technologies of food production have wide-ranging eco-social implications on biodiversity and climate change, and they entail a relationship of strong dependency between farmers and the world’s largest chemical producers. Agroecology (Altieri, 2018) appears as one of the main alternatives for overcoming the shortcomings and damages that the ‘Green Revolution’ has caused. Agroecology is a response to the question of how to transform and repair our food system and rural life, starting from the ecological practices of peasants and farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, indigenous cultivation methods, urban food producers and so on. In this sense, food sovereignty movements and agroecological farming are creating alternative politics of matter (Papadopoulos, 2018) and by seeking different material circulations and channels of involvement, they enact different possibilities of humansoil-food relations.

Permaculture, organic, bio-dynamic, regenerative agriculture, alternative food distribution: these are some of the names given to practices by which movements of ecological agri-food transition are converging today in emphasizing a need to attend to the health of the soil and the broader ecologies in which we grow food (Altieri, 2018). Food sovereignty campaigns entail the simultaneous responsibility of participants to be food growers and consumers, which means being involved in the processes of food production and distribution by inventing alternatives to the large supply chains that currently dominate the existing agri-food system. However, food sovereignty is something more than the consumers and growers’ right to choose what to consume and what to grow and how. Agroecology and food sovereignty are, first of all, about creating alternative ways to deal with the ecological interactions and interdependencies involved in the processes of farming: the collective enterprise of creating an alternative lifeworld within the interactive dynamics that inhabit the soil and its inhabitants.

Introduction: a metaphysical catastrophe

And suddenly the world began to quake. The ground trembled. Soils liquified under the smooth covers of asphalt. Modern infrastructures were bent, dented, upended. Buildings moved to the rhythm of their crumbling dance. Those inside ran out, when they could. Others succumbed to the collapse. The rumbling noise filled the air. Amidst the turmoil, hundreds of metres of coastline fell off a cosmic cliff, dropping vertically by over half a metre. The Earth itself trembled, shaken, literally knocked off its axis. Days have been shorter ever since. The Pacific Ocean shrivelled a little. And Japan, whose northeastern region of Tohoku was closest to the epicentre, was moved 13 feet closer to North America. With a magnitude of 9,1 Mw, it was the biggest earthquake to have struck the archipelago, and only the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. And yet it only took six minutes. Six. The planetary blink of an eye, making it present that most things happen in the break, through the cracks, with the tides of time, through the resonance of events: ‘point of view on a point of view, displacements of perspective, differentiation of difference’ (Deleuze, 2004: 200). For indeed, the earthquake that struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011 turned out to be but a prelude, a foreshock of its own, a call to another kind of intensity whose response washed it all away. This was what seismologists call an underwater megathrust earthquake – a name that could belong just as well to geology as to poetry – and the 39-metre tsunami that it summoned flooded the entire area, ravaging it all in a 200-square mile range. The dark wave truly devoured everything: almost 20,000 people died, countless other critters saw their lives brought to a sudden end, and over 45,000 buildings were destroyed. Among those who survived, 4.4 million households were left without electricity, over 340,000 people were displaced, and suffered from food, water, shelter, medicine, and fuel shortages for a long period of time afterwards, even when considerable material efforts were deployed to restore infrastructures in the wake.

The tsunami precipitated ripples of its own.

Land in Our Names (LION) began in 2020 as a young collective with big plans for the year. At the Oxford Real Farming Conference in the UK, in January 2020, we facilitated a workshop with Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm on the topic ‘Farming So White: Land, Ownership, Race and Racism in Britain’ and held the first ever Caucus for Black and People of Colour (BPOC) growers, land workers, environmentalists and food justice organizers at Willowbrook Farm. It was an emotional experience for everyone who attended. We all remarked that we had never been in the countryside in Britain surrounded by People of Colour before. The care, excitement, community and safety that we shared with each other was energizing and made us even more dedicated. We want to speak to BPOC growers, land workers, land and food justice organizers.

Then our plans for the year took a dramatic turn with the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the US, Britain and elsewhere. We have been humbled by the amount of people who have reached out to us asking for our thoughts and feelings. The truth is that we carry each life lost to racism with us always. It is a grief that we must manage every day. This is one of the reasons why we founded Land in Our Names – we want to create an anti-racist and inclusive land and food justice movement that speaks to Black and People of Colour. Racism is a structural and systemic problem that needs reparative justice in order to stop the unnecessary violence that People of Colour experience. That is why we see land reparations as crucial towards building resilient and sustainable anti-racist communities. We want to continue nurturing our fledgling network of BPOC growers, land workers, organizers, educators and enthusiasts with empowering and inspiring events. We want to create resources that look at food and land justice through an intersectional lens. We want to support BPOC growers’ access to land and work.

The opening lines of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt’s (1958) sweeping ‘reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears’ (5) describe the Sputnik launch in 1957.

These lines also name the principal sentiment against which the alternative viewpoint that follows is offered. Like Arendt, I am unsettled by the dream of escape captured in this scene and countless others played out in the subsequent enthusiasms of sci fi writers, space aficionados, and billionaires – a dream that seems only to have grown as our sense of planetary fragility has intensified.

Introduction

Memory is the connective tissue that makes lives meaningful. A connection to the past enables sense making in the present and renders possible futures as thinkable. In the case of traumatic or difficult pasts, this connection becomes intensely important. At personal, collective and national levels, past harms and injustices need to be made visible and subject to commemorative exploration in order for victims to ‘go on’ in the present. In this context, repair is usually considered to be a memorial work of putting the past in order to meet ongoing moral and epistemic demands (Margalit, 2002; Blustein, 2008; Campbell, 2014). Through this work it becomes possible to envisage a reconstruction or ‘healing’ of personal and social ecologies of thought and feeling.

This understanding of memorial work as repair is complicated by issues around mental health. For example, while some approaches to trauma (for example Johnstone and Boyle, 2018) emphasize the need to understand personal histories – ‘what happened to you’ – as a way of addressing current feelings and experiences – ‘what’s wrong with you’ – there is also a counter-discourse around the inherently unrepresentable nature of traumatic pasts (Caruth, 1996). Pain and suffering incurred through extraordinary and horrific violations of social and personal relations may be simply incomprehensible and hence difficult to both recollect and to narrate. Mental health issues may also call into question the reliability of memory. Victims – and in some cases perpetrators – may have their recollected experiences problematized or discounted (see Haaken and Reavey, 2010). They may also be accused of focusing unduly and unhelpfully upon the past rather than facing up to problems in the present. Here, repair can take the form of an injunction to disconnect from a difficult past in order to ‘move on’ with living.

In this chapter, we want to explore the tensions in memorial repair work around mental health. We will be concerned with the question of when and how the past comes to matter for persons managing severe and enduring mental health issues. Crucially, we look at the practices which are enacted to manage these tensions, and how they are collectively performed within an institutional setting. Our argument is informed by work we have conducted in a medium-secure forensic pathway in a large inpatient psychiatric unit.