Page 366 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

29 Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Border Theory and Justice 341

knowledge. Eurocentrism’s normative construction of borders, and the belief in their
territorial and conceptual binding power for shaping the world and its discourses,
remains as its lingering legacy.
However, global contemporaneity has bought with it newer interpretations and
more complex views of borders and space, and two significant ideas emerge that
are useful for science education and TEK. The first idea posits the multiplicity and
mobility of borders and their drawing (or continual reb/ordering), and is tied to the
epochal, material and theoretical nature of the global world (Rumford 2006).
Bauman (2001) and Beck, Bonass and Lau (2003) both point to the pluralisation of
borders and the attempts to draw them as a key characteristic of contemporaneity.
For example, Beck (1992) argues that in reflexive modernity (a term he prefers to
contemporaneity or postmodernity or indeed Bauman’s (2000) liquid modernity),
as the available a priori categories have declined and generalised rules no longer
apply, each case becomes contextual and criteria have to be developed, and then
judged on their merits by all actors involved. It is only then that “the existence of
boundaries (can be established) whose artificial character is freely recognized, but
which are recognized as legitimate boundaries all the same” (Beck et al. 2003, p. 20).
Specifically he argues that:
1. Boundaries cease to be given and instead become choices. Drawing boundaries
becomes optional.
2. Simultaneous with that, there is a multiplication of the plausible ways in which
boundaries can be drawn, as well as the ways in which they can be brought into
doubt.
3. The existence of multiple boundaries changes … the nature of boundaries them-
selves. They become not boundaries so much as a variety of attempts to draw
boundaries. (p. 19)
In short, as fast as one can draw a boundary or a border, someone else is coming
behind and rubbing it out!! Shields (2006) notes that as boundary drawing is less
taken for granted, we must be prepared to accommodate the increased contestation
that must result. Similarly, Bauman (2001) identifies the messy flux of the boundary-
drawing process itself where things are “set against each other, compared, scrutinized,
criticized, tested, valued or de-valued” (p. 138) and left to battle it out in “a vast
theatre of boundary wars – a battleground of endless “reconnaissance skirmishes” …
(where) … there is no plausible finishing line… each successful challenge throws
open new battlegrounds and prompts further challenges” (p. 141).
Beck et al. (2003) apply this thesis specifically to the boundaries of the sciences,
and argue that as a consequence of the critiques of science studies and the inclusion
of previously excluded knowledge such as TEK, the authority for scientific boundary
drawing has moved beyond the scientific academy itself. “The boundaries of knowl-
edge – that is, the boundaries between scientific and unscientific, between science and
politics, and between experts and layman – have now been drawn in several places at
the same time” (p. 20). Gieryn (1999) has famously written on this point arguing that
the sciences face a permanent commitment to boundary work and the ceaseless
policing of borders as a condition of contemporaneity. Hence, for Beck et al. (2003),