Keep biology weird: slowing down with scientific findings

Series: Life & Health 

Speaker: Kim Hendrickx (Université de Liège)

Résumé :

When I worked alongside biologists specialised in the model organism C. elegans, they often said that a particular finding was ‘weird’. Weird is an interesting term, associated with the idea that human attempts at knowing fate or controlling destiny induces unexpected twists. This long-standing etymological and narrative heritage becomes particularly interesting when it is evoked within a scientific infrastructure designed to keep out these unexpected twists as much as possible, namely research with standardised model organisms. My aim in this talk is to explore how ‘weirdness’ might offer a different take on how we think and tell about scientific research and findings. I will tentatively characterise the weird as a mode of attention that is not only important to intensify the implications of scientific facts in the laboratory, but also to help us relate to ecological facts of toxicity and environmental degradation in other terms than ‘data’ and the solutionist tendencies of ‘policymaking’.

Contact : maxence.gaillard@uclouvain & juliette.ferrydanini@uclouvain.be