Producing vertical territory: geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.168 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
This paper relates developments in the science of geology to forms of governmental rationality in Canada during the late nineteenth century. By so doing it opens for discussion a topic rarely broached by political theorists: the role that the earth sciences played in the historical evolution of forms of political rationality. The paper contests theoretical approaches that understand the relation between scientific knowledge and state rationality as only instrumental. Instead, the paper demonstrates how attending to the temporality of science (as evident in the emergence of specifically geological ways of seeing nature during the period) helps us understand the ways in which science is constitutive of political rationality, rather than merely its instrument. This argument is developed through a critique of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, a concept that historicizes political rationality, yet remains silent on how the physical sciences contributed to its varied forms. The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of such an argument for theories of the social production of nature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Ecumene
- Topic
- History of Science and Natural History
- Field
- Arts and Humanities
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- RationalityGovernmentalityArgument (complex analysis)TemporalityEpistemologyPoliticsSociologyState (computer science)Relation (database)Social sciencePower (physics)Political sciencePhilosophyLaw
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes