Introduction

As an interlude, this chapter is an effort to connect, bridge, and provide an overlap between the other two parts of this book: Separation and Coproduction. In this work, we complicate the picture of a clear division between science and politics. Our focus is on science and politics as two separate activities with their own institutions and practices, but we also turn to the question of how the interplay between science and politics is understood in terms of overlaps and connections.

Better communication, increased proximity, or more interaction while maintaining an arm’s-length distance – there are many expressions of how science and politics connect and should be connected; and from the science side, they can be summarized as an ambition to make science relevant to policy, to make it close to politics but not too close (Gieryn 1995: 435, referring to Jasanoff 1990). In other words, policy-relevant research involves a balancing act between separation and integration (Sundqvist et al 2015, 2018). According to this view, research must be sufficiently separate to maintain its autonomy, but integrated enough to be socially relevant. This ambition entails a critique of an overly strong division, but also points out the risks that one side will take command of the other. From this perspective, a scientization of politics and a politicization of science are both highly undesirable and considered as risks. There is thus a need for a proper distance between science and politics.

To be fair, we must say that several of the approaches and perspectives presented in Chapter 3 devote a great deal of effort to understanding the interplay between science and politics. Collins and Evans’ third wave suggests such a ‘balanced’ solution. This also applies to Habermas’ pragmatism as well as to Nelkin's aim of understanding scientific experts as part of a political context and, from there, sorting out the conditions for expert work.

However, the aim of chapters 2 and 3 was to account for a division between science and politics and the approaches that focus on this, including suggestions from some scholars that one side should dominate the other. Here, Plato's allegory of the cave is archetypal, as it is based on a strong division but also on a desired dominance of knowledge over politics. This allegory is echoed in delegative democracy, the linear model of knowledge, and the deficit model.

Why ‘thinking through family’?

This is a book about family, based on the narratives of 35 young adults with care experience. These individuals are not typical, or statistically representative, of care experienced adults in England. They took part in one of two studies, which were very different in focus: Against All Odds? was a cross-national project focused on people who were in education or employment at the time of joining the research; the Evaluation of Pause examined the work of a programme of intensive support for women in England who had been identified as being at risk of recurrent child removal. This book is focused on the experiences of two subgroups within those studies: Against All Odds? participants who were living in England, and participants in the Evaluation of Pause who were part of a ‘care leaver pilot’. The population of people with care experience is diverse and, inevitably, there are striking similarities and differences in people's experiences within and between the two studies. But my aim in bringing the studies together was not to compare, nor have I tried to identify pathways to risk or protective factors. Rather, the purpose has been to illuminate the diversity of experiences and narratives of family for people with care experience, and to enable the recognition of care experienced lives as varied, specific and socially and biographically located, avoiding the dangers of a deficit-focused ‘single story’ of the care experienced family. The overarching objective of the book has been to think through family in the lives of care experienced people, in order to:

• • extend the theorization and conceptualization of ‘family’, challenging the politicized binary of the ‘ordinary’ and the troubled ‘other’;

• • inform family-minded approaches to policy and practice that respond to the enduring dynamic complexities of family relationships for young people, during childhood and into adult lives.

Conceptualizing family: thinking beyond the ‘single story’

I began this book by discussing the dangers of a ‘single story’ of family, borrowing the metaphor from Adichie's (2009) discussion of the Igbo concept of nkali, meaning ‘to be greater than another’.

Communal growing projects over time

Time emerges as a critical element in understanding the evolution and implications of communal growing practices. Projects react to opportunities within funding structures and the broader social landscape, adapting and filling spaces that emerge. This is most clearly demonstrated by attending to continuities and crises that have emerged since the initial in-depth fieldwork of 2015–16. Reflecting on the enduring problems of communal growing projects, I argue that a longer temporal lens is required to understand communal growing projects as emerging in context over time. This allows for a deeper engagement with the question of how communal growing projects might become more transformative, more political, over time and what conditions facilitate this.

Naturally, attending to the period between 2016 and 2022 requires some reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic. Both case studies had social value during the height of the COVID-19 crisis because of what they already were – spaces of release, of decompression, of time sovereignty and of collective meaning. That is, because they were spaces of escape. This longer-term basis is important to recognize, against a prevailing narrative around interconnection and mutual aid as suddenly emerging. The quick praise for mutual aid and solidarity that emerged during the pandemic overlooks perhaps the slow burn of social connection that we are always already enmeshed in (Studdert and Walkerdine, 2016b, 2016a; Blokland, 2017; Care Collective, 2020) and which is a crucial element of what makes the social infrastructure of cities function. Underplayed too within narratives of mutual aid's explosion is the important collective imaginary underpinning such work – and underpinning the work of the community gardens here. The idea of community, of collective life, of mutual support is critical (see Chapter 6 and Traill, 2021). Moving from the extremely local to the global, the lenses of tragedy and crisis demonstrate how the key analytical themes of the ethnographic fieldwork echo, morph and survive through tragedy and crisis, reflecting the broader significance of spaces of everyday escape.

Many of the most acute critiques around justice and politics in the growing projects studied here take on a different hue when viewed with a little extra hindsight. In returning to the projects again across the years between 2016 and 2022, changes emerged which shed new light on growing as a situated phenomenon.

Introduction

The two communities in Cyprus, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, lived relatively peacefully on the island for centuries. Even after the Greek revolution in 1821 against the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the ‘Enosis’ ambition (annexation of Cyprus to Greece) among the Greek Cypriots, the two communities continued to live in harmony.

Political developments of the 20th century, such as British colonialism and the hostilities between Greece and Turkey, were crucial in generating a Greek–Turkish conflict in Cyprus. Greek Cypriots considered their community as the historical inhabitants of the island and thus sought the annexation of the island to the newly founded Greek state. On the other side, Turkish Cypriots considered that ‘Enosis’ would degrade their rights and wanted to divide the island into two parts. After a four-year anti-colonial armed struggle (1955–9), Greek Cypriots failed to achieve ‘Enosis’, and the two communities compromised on the foundation of an independent state. The foundation of the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) was not the priority for either of the two communities, so bi-communal conflicts continued. In 1974, after a failed coup d’état orchestrated by the Greek junta against the legitimately elected president of the RoC, Turkey invaded the northern part of the island. The Turkish invasion forced hundreds of thousands of Cypriots to leave their homes and migrate to the north or south. Since then, Turkey has deployed a large military force in the northern part of Cyprus, while, according to international law, an illegal state was founded, which is solely recognized as a sovereign state by Turkey. After 1977, the five parties involved in the Cyprus Problem (Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, Greece, Turkey and the UK) sat at the negotiating table several times to find a mutually acceptable solution, which has not yet been achieved.

The two communities had lived in complete isolation for many years, as until 2003, the regime in the north did not allow anyone to cross to the other side of the island. In 2003, the opening of some checkpoints allowed inter-communal contact for the first time in almost 30 years. Nevertheless, to this day, the relations and the contacts between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are still considered marginal.

Introduction

This chapter goes deeper into the complex relation between science and democracy. Previous chapters discussed how science and politics are separate and that one elite (scientific experts) is delegated the power to represent nature (as knowledge objects) and another elite (decision makers, not only elected politicians but broadly speaking) is delegated the power to represent the people. This double delegation (delegative democracy) is based on a distinction between what is represented and who can represent. These two forms of representation divide the world into the two domains of knowledge and politics and, in addition, create a sharp division between those who are in power (the two elites) and those who are not (the ignorant mass). However, these separate domains are also interlinked, and as we have seen earlier, the boundaries between them and their authority and legitimacy can always be questioned and change over time. The separation between science and democracy, between representatives and represented, is a joint product. One of the most important ideas within STS research is that knowledge and social order are intertwined or, as it is often expressed, co-produced (Jasanoff 2004b).

Science and democracy are not independent from each other. Democracies legitimize and back up decisions and reforms with expert knowledge, and an uneven distribution of knowledge and education in a society is seen as a democracy problem (Sismondo 2010: 80). Governing requires knowledge, and science is intermingled with power. Science and democracy may be the result of a joint process, but they are often presented as separate, which has consequences for how practices are performed and leads to what they have in common being concealed. Knowledge is understood and presented as being independent of social order and power, especially in the scientific community. Researchers have a professional interest in keeping sharp distinctions between scientific knowledge and other types of knowledge as well as sharp distinctions between scientific knowledge and political interests (Gieryn 1983). At the same time, researchers also have an interest in getting attention from outsiders and they want their results to be used outside of the research community. This duality, which we have discussed previously, implies the wish of researchers to have, simultaneously, distance and closeness to politics.

‘A depressurizing chamber’

In the mornings, on the way to school drop off, Natalie and her daughter cut across the meadow. As her daughter gets older, Natalie finds the encouragement onto the site can get rid of a certain funk associated with the morning drudge. No matter how stressed everyone is – getting lunches together, has the homework been done, where are the shoes – the space of the meadow provides what Natalie calls a “depressurizing chamber”. It allows for the evaporation of the pressures of getting to school or work, and creates a brief period of quiet, green, social time in an otherwise hurried day. The idea of seeing the dogs and their owners acts too as an incentive to Natalie's daughter to get out the door. Natalie, laughing, admits to me as we talk in the woods that this works on her too. In this way, the meadow provides an important escape, however temporary and mundane, from the pressures of everyday life.

Both projects create time and space for alternative ways of living the city, opening up the possibility of alternative urban rhythms. In attempting to move beyond the pressures of everyday life, the case studies carve out spaces of autonomy and solidarity in the city. I characterize such action as escapist, although the experiences within each space vary between projects and participants, shaping how each place is understood. There are differences between the sites around how structured the rhythms are; but there are also many similarities, especially around reconnection with others and the natural world. In this, escape is a multiplicitous lens for considering communal growing projects.

Rhythm as a heuristic

Natalie's account highlights the everyday rhythms of the space; how the intersection of her school run with the lives of dog walkers creates a social moment in the mornings. In exploring how escape is lived, I draw on the work of Lefebvre, which provides a theoretical grounding for understanding the texture of escape within communal growing. Lefebvre (2004) noted that rhythm was everywhere, constructed at every juncture where place, time and action combine. An understanding of rhythm, he expected, would deepen our understanding of urban life and its various characteristics and structurings, extending his work on the production of space (Lefebvre, 1991, 1996). What rhythm offers is a way to think time and space together (see also Massey, 1994).

Donna Haraway's exhortation to ‘Make kin, not babies’ has accompanied us throughout this text. The slogan is used in Haraway's speculative fiction experiment, ‘The Camille Stories’, and elsewhere in her book Staying with the Trouble (2016). It derives from Haraway's belief that there are too many humans in the world and that privileged people should focus on building kin relations beyond those predicated on producing more human individuals (Haraway is clear that some marginalized and oppressed people do not have enough children and should be helped to have more) (Haraway, 2018: 69–74).

In conversation with Haraway, and working within the frame of ecofeminism and environmental humanities, Australian feminist Jennifer Mae Hamilton draws our attention to the hard work of mothering. Like us, Hamilton is interested in caring, particularly ‘the sweaty work implied by the notion of making kin’ during extreme bushfires. Hamilton pushes back against Haraway's injunction to ‘Make kin, not babies’, arguing Haraway romanticizes the work of kin making and asking:

We agree that Haraway's emphasis on kin making in ‘The Camille Stories’ could be characterized as optimistic, even romantic. The dream that each human or symbiont child should have three (or more parents), for example (Haraway, 2016: 138; Haraway 2018: 96), both underestimates the number of parents many children have already (thus affirming heteronormative, settler models of one-or two-parent families) (see also Benjamin, 2018; Tallbear, 2018) and assumes that more parents means better parenting and a more positive experience of growing up. Of course, having three not-so-great parents could be worse than having only one or two of them! ‘The Camille Stories’ also skip over what might be involved in ‘discouraging’ people from having babies even while ‘actively cherishing’ reproductive freedoms and rejecting coercion (Haraway, 2016: 139).

In the former chapters, I have analysed and discussed the ways in which the Steam platform has historically expanded the scope of economic transactions (Chapter 5), how this is enabled by the platform features (Chapter 6), and how different actors on the platform turn these affordances into ways of making business (Chapter 7). In this chapter, I will dive deeper into the way these economic transactions extend beyond the Steam platform on to the wider internet. My key point will be that the existence of extra-platform contexts of economic exchange not only serves to expand the number of economic transactions and grow the market, but potentially turns the Steam platform into a payment instrument and skins into a unit of transaction independent of the games from which they originate. Indeed, it can be interpreted as an attempt to create ‘money at the margins’ (Hütten and Thiemann, 2017) by transforming Steam and its extra-platform transactions into a ‘monetary network’ (Dodd, 1994). Firstly, I will characterize some of the extra-platform contexts of economic exchange and explain in what way they seem to be ‘powered by Steam’. As an extension of this, I will discuss Valve's possible motives for enabling, or at least not policing, these economic practices. These motives can to some degree be tied to the business emphases addressed in Chapter 5, that is, expanding the scope of economic transactions by enabling microtransactions on third-party websites and allowing the secondary market of game items to expand beyond the platform. However, Valve's motives can also be interpreted as an attempt to explore Steam's potential as a social-financial technology beyond its game economies. In the subsequent sections, I will discuss in more detail what this implies. On one hand, the Steam platform does not feature any blockchain technology and does not provide the opportunity of ‘mining’ for assets. In this way, we are by no means talking about a new kind of cryptocurrency system in the established sense of the word. On the other hand, the avid trading community of Steam gamers can be seen as an alternative and perhaps even more important resource for developing a local medium of exchange which allows players to trade items and engage in economic practices beyond the game economies in which these communities originate, effectively linking the Steam platform to wider economic practices on the internet.

Coming home to Canberra from Aotearoa-New Zealand, January 2020: Rebecca

We drove home along the Princes Highway and the smoke got increasingly dense as we approached Canberra. I remember researching the type of masks we needed and ordering smoke masks online as we drove down, as we’d heard there was a shortage in Canberra. At a roadside stop near Bundanoon we felt like we’d stepped into a refugee zone: cars of weary families buying up massive amounts of supplies, obviously having just driven from bushfire affected areas of the coast, a feeling of tension palpable. It felt surreal, as we’d been otherwise so disconnected from the ‘reality on the ground’, having just flown in from Aotearoa-New Zealand. We carried on to Canberra and the smoke was very thick. We have evaporative cooling at our house which we couldn't use with the smoke, as it draws air in from outside to function. It was very hot. The smoke leaked into the house via a grille on the toilet window, so when we arrived home, there was a definite smoke smell throughout the house. I remember thinking that it felt like a very strange decision to leave the Aotearoa-New Zealand summer and clear skies for this smoky, apocalyptic reality. On bad days, particularly just after New Year, we could hardly see the street in front of our house, let alone any of the hills around us.

Introduction

Science and democracy have emerged as important institutions in modern Western societies. But what do we mean when we say that a society is ‘modern’? Among other things, modernity means that the world is understood in the light of scientific knowledge instead of traditional knowledge and religious beliefs. Scientific knowledge takes precedence over other forms of knowledge and becomes the yardstick from which other knowledge claims are judged. This situation becomes an important part of the characterization of modernity (Beck 1992: Chapter 7).

That science is superior to other forms of knowledge in modern society is only valid on a rather basic level. However, we are expected to accept that the earth was not created in seven days, that all living things consist of one or more cells, and that the dropped coffee cup falls to the ground due to gravity. The limit, or the boundary, of what issues can legitimately be answered from a scientific point of view can never be strictly formulated. Does climate change have human causes? Has extreme weather become more common due to a higher global average temperature? Is a global climate tax the best measure for reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Do we all need to change our individual lifestyles due to climate change? Where in the climate discussion does science end and politics start, and is climate change mitigation a scientific issue at all?

These questions illustrate that it is not obvious what questions science can answer and when science should have priority over other kinds of knowledge. The boundaries between science, values, and political assessments are not sharp in these kinds of issue complex (Hulme 2009). Many issues in relation to topics like climate change are both understood and managed by a mix of scientific knowledge and political assessment. Climate change would not be an issue at all if there was not an underlying value-based assessment that it is of interest to protect planet earth for future generations of human beings.

Modernity and its strong focus on scientific knowledge can be understood from the notion of separation. The anthropologist and STS scholar Bruno Latour (1993) characterizes modernity as a separation of nature (non-humans) from society (humans). This division is fundamental to modern societies and has led to a sharp division between science and politics. In the modern, enlightened society, both science and democracy are highly valued.

A meadow in winter, a garden in spring

In the mornings, the North Kelvin Meadow is a calm place, periodically enlivened by dog walkers and people passing through as a shortcut to destinations both nearby and further afield in Glasgow. A mother and daughter pass through on the way to school, greeting the dogs. For them, passing through creates a break between the clamour to leave the house and the pressures of work and school. Others climb through the gaps in fences or walk between cheerfully painted bollards to sit among the trees reading a newspaper in a slither of sunlight coming through the branches of the birch trees. For some the meadow is a place to linger, to embrace the slowness of seasonality; or to speed up the boredom of having little to do. In the summer, the meadow's tree-lined edge blocks out the surrounding houses, lending the space a sense of disconnection from the rest of the city. In the middle of the meadow, it opens out: raised beds along one side and into the corner, open grass in the middle, worn through by use in places to its previous red, crumbling sports surface.

In my early research encounters with the meadow in December 2014, it was brittle with frost, the ground hard and the days short. Walking through with a local campaigner and long-time resident, Alasdair, who insisted that we leave the warmth of his flat where we were talking to take in the meadow around the corner in the early dusk of mid-winter, we spontaneously met others who wanted to talk about old shell casings found on the meadow, the history of the space. Alasdair was enthusiastic, garrulous even, in spite of the freezing temperatures. I had initially reached out to him to discuss the meadow's fight against the sale of the land for development but Alasdair insisted that to understand the space and its value, I had to appreciate its rich, common ordinariness in person and immediately. As he put it, “It's communal, everyone's entitled to use it.” In the meadow, the intertwined threads of mundane use and political campaigning against its development highlight critical tensions around who makes the city and how it might be remade and reimagined.

The meadow is embedded in the rhythms of everyday life for many local people; an everyday green space in the fabric of the city.