Tag: Helen Verran

Just read Martha Ken­ney’s “Count­ing, account­ing, and account­abil­i­ty: Helen Verran’s rela­tion­al empiri­cism”.
The arti­cle is cur­rent­ly avail­able through the Social Stud­ies of Sci­ence Online­First ser­vice. Inten­tion­al­ly or not, it sits nice­ly with oth­er arti­cles brought togeth­er to exam­ine .

Ken­ney, M. (2015). Count­ing, account­ing, and account­abil­i­ty: Helen Ver­ran’s rela­tion­al empiri­cism. Social Stud­ies of Sci­ence, 1–23.

Ken­ney’s arti­cle is very much a homage to Helen Ver­ran and her won­der­ful book Sci­ence and an African Log­ic. She pays spe­cial atten­tion to Ver­ran’s efforts at decom­po­si­tion and frames these through a lens of account­abil­i­ty. Care is giv­en by Ken­ny to dif­fer­en­ti­ate this kind of account­ing from that of “con­tem­po­rary neo-lib­er­al bureau­cra­cies” that run the risk of strength­en­ing “the aca­d­e­m­ic cul­ture that priv­i­leges cri­tique and rev­e­la­tion over oth­er, more sub­tle and cre­ative, approach­es.” (more…)