Doing research with care in times of crisis

In the early 2010’s, the replication crisis struck the sciences, especially the social and medical sciences. By now, the crisis has been declared to be an ongoing methodological crisis. As a cure, researchers have thought of open science as the new framework to end the reproducibility crisis. Questionable research practices are identified and fraudulent researchers are punished. According to many, the new open science framework should be the new standard of practising research: open data open source, open methodology, open peer review, open access and open educational resources. Open science may get right what the ‘old’ science got wrong.

If I turn to Puig’s notion of ‘touching visions’, I wonder if the trying to get it right instead of trying to take care may be a big drawback for the sciences. Open science offers ways of direct accessibility of research and feedback from fellow researchers. Therefore, it may fit quite nicely within a time and culture that is radically turned to an investment into a future of outputs and return, the epitome of efficiency. The question is what is the value of the output and return that we receive. Knowledge, as Barad argues, does not come from standing at a distance and representing the world but rather from a direct material engagement with the world. Therefore, if the dominant sensorial universe in science stays that of vision as seeing is believing, I am doubting if open science is able to take care of world-making. Following Puig, there are alternative ways of seeing, arguing for touch as a matter of involvement and committed knowledge. Knowing practices engage in adding relations to a world by involvement in touching and being touched by what we observe. If reality is a process of intra-active touch, then science may have to feel for/ with the inter-dependency and relationality of things and beings in the more-than-human world. Committed knowledge may be less elucidating than knowledge at a distance, and more affecting, touching and being touched, for better or worse. I wonder if 'touching visions' is a taking care in science that keeps in touch with political and ethical questions at stake in scientific and other academic conversations. A different world of science to imagine.