In a short retreat in 2019, CSS explored the question of what critical and responsible science is, and how such research can be funded and flourish, together with national and international scientists and representatives of civil society. This led to the current project. In the summer of 2022, a three-day in-depth retreat with around 20 international participants was organised. The participants considered what is wrong with the current dominant scientific paradigm, which is a key issue to address before arriving at a synthesis and a vision of what a more convivial science that works responsibly and towards socio-ecological transformation could look like. A key outcome has been a book providing an in-depth analysis of the historical and contemporary problems with dominant forms of science.

Long Abstract of the book "Towards Convivial Sciences: Uniting Strands of Critical Inquiry"

"Science is under threat. Scientists are taking to the streets to defend it against populist leaders and antiscience sentiments in parts of the population. Science is also under pressure to deliver: its value has become linked to the marketable innovations it promises. And in pandemic times, the hope of ending the pandemic rests on science. But it appears that antiscientific, promissory, and overly faithful accounts of science share a reductionist, instrumental view of science. And accordingly, certain forms of science have come to dominate. Yet, such dominant forms of science lack an account of their own sociopolitical and -economic entanglements, both historically and in relation to the issues we face today. For instance, historians of science have provided key insights in the instrumentality of science for colonialism and imperial projects. Feminist and decolonial scholars have pointed to the hubristic worldview of human superiority and control over nature that dates back to Bacon but still underlies dominant science. And anthropologists and sociologists of science have highlighted the neoliberal erosion of public higher education in recent decades, stripping it of public resources and subjecting it to market logics. This book offers a thorough analysis and synthesis of the entanglements of dominant science with the politics of appropriation of land and non-Western ways of being and knowing, the politics of values and knowledge at the heart of dominant science, and its neoliberal institutional structures and their various effects. But the book does not only provides a comprehensive account of what’s wrong with dominant science, it proposes an alternative: convivial sciences in the plural as humble, democratic, and pluriversal ways of doing science that are attuned to social and ecological complexity and relationality."

Link to the book published with Oekom (Open Access) on 26 June 2025.