Expertise and the Fractal Model: Communication and Collaboration between Climate-Change Scientists

Abstract

This thesis examines how scientific communities which are heterogeneous among themselves communicate and collaborate to produce knowledge on climate change. Climate-change science is a relatively new field of investigation and it includes experts from virtually all areas of scientific enquiry. This field is not, however, a homogeneous transdisciplinary area of research so that the different scientific communities that compose it have to bridge the gaps among themselves to be able effectively to communicate and collaborate. I use Collins and Evans’ (2007) realist theory of expertise combined with other relevant Science and Technology Studies concepts, particularly the notions of trading zones (Galison 1997; Collins et al. 2007) and trust (Giddens 1990, Shackley and Wynne 1995b; Reyes-Galindo 2011) to explain how different groups of experts build bridges between their heterogeneous forms of life. As climate-change science is too broad to be covered in one PhD project, I focus on paleoceanography, a subfield of geology that reconstructs past oceans and their interactions with the climate system. I use the fractal model (Collins 2011) to move through different levels of analysis and examine the different bridge-building mechanisms between expert communities at work at each of them. The main contribution of the present work is to identify and explain how the various mechanisms that mediate communication between expert communities come into play at different levels of analysis.

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