Decolonizing Knowledge Upstream: New Ways to Deconstruct and Fight Disinformation in an Era of COVID-19, Extreme Digital Transformation, and Climate Emergency

Technological Encounters in a Knowledge Economy: An Epistemic X-Ray

Climate emergency is a planetary health and systems science challenge because human health, nonhuman animal health, and the health of the planetary ecosystems are coproduced and interdependent. Yet, we live in a time when climate emergency is tackled by platitudes and weak reforms instead of structural and systems changes, and with tools of the very same systems and metanarratives, for example, infinite growth at all costs, that are causing climate change in the first place. Seeking solutions to problems from within the knowledge frames and metanarratives that are causing the problems reproduces the same problems across time and geographies. This article examines and underlines the importance of an epistemological gaze on knowledge economy, an epistemological X-ray, as another solution in the toolbox of decolonial and other social justice struggles in an era of climate emergency. Epistemology questions and excavates the metanarratives embedded in knowledge forms that are popular, dominant, and hegemonic as well as knowledges that are silent, omitted, or erased. In this sense, epistemology does not take the "archives" of data and knowledge for granted but asks questions such as who, when, how, and with what and whose funding the archive was built, and what is included and left out? Epistemological choices made by innovators, funders, and knowledge actors often remain opaque in knowledge economies. Epistemology research is crucial for science and innovations to be responsive to planetary society and climate emergency and mindful of the social, political, neocolonial, and historical contexts of science and technology in the 21st century.

Taking Political Determinants of Planetary Health Seriously: Expanding from P4 to P5 Medicine

Predictive, Personalized, Preventive, and Participatory (P4) Medicine is embedded in the precision medicine conceptual framework to achieve the overarching goal of "the right drug, for the right patient, at the right dose, and at the right time." Science cultures and political determinants of health have normative and instrumental impacts on P4 medicine. Yet, since the age of Enlightenment in the 17th century, science and economics have been disarticulated from politics along the lines of classical liberalism, and with an ahistorical approach that continues into the 21st century. The consequence of this liberal disarticulation is that science is falsely and narrowly understood as an invariably technocratic and objective field. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is clearer that political determinants of health are the causes-of-causes for disease and health. I propose that we need P5 medicine with a fifth P, political determinants of planetary health. The new "P" can engage not only with instrumental aspects of P4 medicine research and clinical implementation but also with the structural factors that are an integral part of the politics of the P4 medicine. For example, the living legacies of colonialism contribute to the unequal relationships in trade, labor, provision, and production of materials among nation-states and between the Global South and the Global North and shape the class struggles in contemporary society, science, and medicine. A decolonial politics of care in which the political determinants of planetary health are taken seriously is therefore crucial and relevant to building a robust, ethical, responsible, and just P5 medicine in the 21st century.

Feminism Is for Everyone: Scientists, Too

Critically informed engagement in politics and the knowledge of social theory help democratize knowledge production, and redress power asymmetries in science and society. A feminist lens is one of the many ways in which power asymmetries in science can be critically unpacked and interrupted. There are many strands of feminism and feminist theory that differ in their approaches to resist patriarchy and injustices in science and society. As an example, I adopt here the definition of feminism of the late cultural critic bell hooks because her works underscore that feminism is an intersectional liberatory methodology for everyone to resist multiple forms of oppression simultaneously. Queer theory is a strand of social theory that came to prominence since the 1990s in particular. Queer feminism continues to shape feminist writing on science cultures and the knowledge-based innovations contemporary science strives to accomplish. Systems science brings about systems thinking, and that includes rethinking science as culture beyond a narrow realm of technology, and being cognizant of the broader social, feminist, queer, and political contexts of science around the world.

Narrative Metadata: Leaving the War Metaphor Behind and Unpacking the Control Tactics of Biopower in COVID-19

Narratives are a veritable type of metadata. Narratives are power-laden storylines that conjure up emotions and enact value systems that markedly affect scientific practices, and to what ends, and for whom science and health innovations are made available. Narratives, if they are left unchecked, can undermine critical thinking and the agency of publics, threatening the possibilities for robust, responsible, relevant, and democratic science. One such narrative, a sociotechnical metadata in its own right, and of immense relevance in the current historical moment of the pandemic, is the uncritical use of the war and other military metaphors in COVID-19 science and planetary health interventions. In October 2022 issue of OMICS, Ebru Yetişkin adopts a biophilosophical transdisciplinary approach and feminist versions of science and technology studies to examine the ways in which the war discourse and other military metaphors have been deployed for the sake of biopower during COVID-19. In this article, we discuss the need to critically unpack the narrative metadata to leave the war metaphor behind, and hold to account the control tactics of biopower embedded in the COVID-19 pandemic.