Evidence-based policing (EBP) is perhaps the most significant police reform movement of the last 30 years. Most notable for identifying what does or does not work, and for trying to integrate science into policing, much of EBP’s focus remains on program evaluation methods and investigating crime prevention strategies. This vision for policing often characterizes the craft of police work as an obstacle rather than a useful contributor to science. This is changing, as proponents of EBP begin to embrace a wider variety of methods to assess a broader range of outcomes, and to treat both science and experience as necessary elements of successful police reform. In this chapter, we recommend that EBP focus more attention on assessing the choices that patrol officers make in their everyday encounters with the public. Drawing on a case study of a neighbor dispute, we show how EBP could benefit from listening to practioners and learning what their rich experiences have taught them about how best to respond. We also suggest ways that research might help generate knowledge on the essential normative or moral questions that characterize street-level discretion, and thus combine knowledge about what works with knowledge about doing the right thing.

In our 2011 paper on Police Science (Weisburd & Neyroud, 2011) we set our belief that a radical reformation of the role of science in policing will be necessary if policing is to become an arena of evidence-based policies. In this revised and updated version of our paper, we reinforce our argument that the advancement of science in policing is essential if police are to retain public support and legitimacy, cope with recessionary budget reductions, and deal with the myriad of problems that encompass modern police responsibilities. We outline a proposal for a new paradigm that changes the relationship between science and policing. This paradigm demands that the police adopt and advance evidence-based policy and that universities become active participants in the everyday world of police practice. But it also calls for a shift in ownership of police science from the universities to police agencies. Such ownership would facilitate the implementation of evidence-based practices and policies in policing and would change the fundamental relationship between research and practice. We add in this paper a new emphasis to our model that focuses attention to moral and ethical elements of research and practice that are an essential part of science in universities and must become a key element of EBP.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, phrenology as folk science featured prominently in two contrasting sites: the city, with its nooks of seamy thrills; and the bush, the stomping ground of itinerant male labourers. While phrenologists had long taken rooms in city markets and arcades, their work transformed by century’s end into a mystical hybrid of bumps, clairvoyance, palmistry and even tea-leaf reading. Urban diviners emerged concurrently with another archetype: the bush phrenologist of the new, masculinist ‘radical nationalist’ literary tradition. Bush phrenologists – real and imagined – echoed the resourcefulness of city diviners, switching between occupations and combining heads with palmistry and even water divining. But while urban divination was feminised and stigmatised, the male bush phrenologist often escaped the mark of perceived irrationality and exemplified a muscular identity. When pitted in court against working-class women or girls reporting assault, even the most disreputable bush phrenologist benefited from legalistic misogyny.

Phrenology mediated everyday moments in Aotearoa New Zealand. It became associated with the spiritual leadership and healing practised by Māori tohungas and featured in the tactics of a stage performer during a tense diplomatic exchange in Te Rohe Pōtae (the King Country) in 1878. Meanwhile, for members of the colonial government and its administrators – both Māori and Pākehā – phrenology became a symbol of the irrational and anti-modern, a smear on the idea of progress at a time of debate over Māori survival. Phrenology’s critics were right to apprehend the authority that it garnered. As an appropriated European ’science’, it became one among various practices and technologies that shaped evolving Māori cultures and polities. Although moments of phrenological encounter are pebbles in the broader terrain of Māori life during this period, they nevertheless illuminate the questions that Māori were forced to ask themselves when navigating an upturned world

More than one in ten lecturers in the Tasman World also served as lay preachers or clergyman, with Methodists particularly represented. Sometimes they occupied both roles at once as scientific men of the cloth. At other times, one identity slid away as another formed. Such preachers were almost all men, owing to the gendered nature of pulpit and platform. The configurations of authority that they navigated are best studied from the fissures revealed by court cases or scandals. In 1893, Wesleyan minister Ralph Brown benefited from gender and class advantages when charged with indecently assaulting a teenage girl after mesmerising her. At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert James Abbott, nurseryman, practical phrenologist and leader of Melbourne’s Free Christian Assembly, faced allegations related to perceived scientific powers. Layered authority helped these men to recover from the rubble of their excesses. Popular science proved a resilient safety net when God departed.

The introductions provides a presentation of the books main claims and an overview of the chapters.

Ethical self-formation and epistemic virtues have been a focus of attention in the history of science for over three decades, and yet, despite some important early contributions, anthropologists of science have only recently started to pay more sustained and explicit attention to the ethical. This chapter argues that anthropologists of science could benefit from taking a closer and more systematic look at recent developments in the anthropology of ethics. Conversely it suggests that anthropologists of ethics might gain from a closer consideration of some of the specificities of Euro-American science as an (internally and externally contested, multiple, and perhaps in part fictitious) ethical tradition. The first half of the chapter explores the rather fitful genealogy of an interest in the ethical in the history, sociology, and anthropology of science, and points to some of the elements from which the anthropology of science as an anthropology of ethics might be (re)built. The second half of the chapter gives one extended, ethnographically grounded example of what such a (re)building might produce, and suggests some of the ways in which anthropology’s exploration of both science and ethics might benefit.

Antarctica (Figure 3.1) is at the forefront of the climate change crisis. We know that it is an important player in global circulations of the atmosphere and the ocean, and that the gain/loss of ice on the continent exerts a major control on sea level. We are also aware that Antarctica has been pivotal in modulating past climate change and sea levels. This appreciation has only been achieved through scientific research over the past fifty years – a remarkable evolution in understanding, considering it was a remote and unknown continent in the early 1900s. Indeed, the first expeditions in which targeted scientific discovery was the sole focus date only to the late 1950s. Considering the rapid evolution in our understanding of Antarctica’s ice sheet, and the continent on which it flows, it is worth taking time to review briefly how we arrived at this point.

To claim Russia as an Arctic empire requires some consideration of both the concepts of Arctic and empire. First, despite the fact that little of Russia’s imperial territory lies above the Arctic Circle, its rulers have nonetheless long governed predominantly cold lands and seas – colder, in fact, than many places north of the circle.1 Therefore, this chapter will discuss Russian activities that sometimes occurred far outside a strict geographical understanding of the Arctic. These include the area known as the ‘Russian North’ (Russkii Sever) around the White Sea basin and to the south along the Northern Dvina River and its tributaries. It also includes the northern Urals and large portions of northern Siberia. Very little of Siberia lies above the Arctic Circle, but much of this part of Eurasia experiences Arctic conditions. Treeless permafrost predominates north of 60°.

In 2012, Britain’s National Environmental Research Council (NERC) proposed a 25 per cent budget cut for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the organization responsible for science and administration in the British Antarctic. When BAS Director Nicholas Owens learned of these proposed cuts, he ignited a political maelstrom by taking the matter straight to the Foreign Office, sidestepping NERC Director Duncan Wingham. In response, Prime Minister David Cameron pledged support for BAS and ordered the funding dispute resolved. Then the crisis worsened when Owens was suspended and temporarily replaced by Ed Hill, the director of the National Oceanographic Centre.

At a global level, the perception of Antarctica has been largely determined by the hegemony of English-speaking accounts and visions, and of central and northern European countries – despite being on the opposite side of the planet – as has been the case with other large regions colonized during the rise of imperialism. Paradoxically, the relationship with Antarctica of the region that is closest to it, and whose main Antarctic countries have the largest and oldest permanent presence on that continent – as well as the strongest sense of belonging – is often ignored or simply interpreted as a simple case of ‘territorial nationalism’1 or even ‘Latin Lebensraum’.

In the twenty-first century, scientists and the media track the health of the planet in the polar regions. Shrinking sea ice in the Arctic and Southern oceans, melting ice shelves in Nunavut, Greenland, and West Antarctica, and thawing permafrost in Alaska and Siberia are signals of global warming. This has led people to refer to these regions as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ or the ‘ground zero’ and ‘epicentre’ of climate change.1 Such metaphors impart an abstract quality to the polar regions, with rising temperatures and loss of ice serving merely as numbers on the dashboard of Spaceship Earth. This view of the polar regions as integral yet neutral – transparent indicators of a global system – has an intellectual and political history. Created by the scientific context of the Cold War, it provides a powerful, panoptic perspective of the planet while obscuring the heterogeneity and pluralism of beings and places.

During the Cold War, at about the time Ian Fleming was penning From Russia with Love (1957), the Soviet Union stunned the world with a successful launch of an artificial satellite, Sputnik. While Western and Soviet spies, real and fictional, were hatching plans to acquire field and signals intelligence, the world’s scientific community helped to create their own daring initiative. The International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58 was audacious in scope and scale – scientists around the world were going to explore and interrogate outer space, the polar regions, and the oceans, and share the ensuing data for the sake of global knowledge generation.

In Mao’s China (1949–1976), coal shortage limited industrialization and economic growth. Under the conditions of a Western embargo, the adoption of Soviet mining technology in accordance with the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance (1950) was the only choice when the Chinese coal mining industry was predominantly manual and needed mechanization to increase its output.

The Soviet and Chinese documents examined in this chapter from 1956 to 1965 on Sino-Soviet co-operation in science and technology in the coal industry reveal a genuine sense of fraternal co-operation but different managerial cultures within the socialist ecumene, with not only different expectations but also different ways of doing things and very different resource bases. This chapter provides new insights into China’s position in the Eastern Bloc and vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The findings confound our understanding of this period as one of deep ideological hostility on the part of the PRC party-state toward the capitalist West, showing instead that in international trade and co-operation, the priority was not ideology but rather economic development.

People often assume that to give ourselves a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we need either inspired political leadership, or a moral revolution in society. Both would be nice to have, but there are more plausible ways to make faster progress. They involve thinking differently. We need science that gives us risk assessment instead of prediction; economics that understands change instead of assuming stability; and diplomacy that focusses on international collaboration instead of unilateral national action.

Neither scientists, nor economists, nor insurers, nor military planners have assessed the risks of climate change in full. Heads of government are left to guess. A clear understanding of the scale of the risks will not on its own guarantee a proportionate response. But unless we have such an understanding, we can hardly be surprised if our response is inadequate.

This chapter introduces the reflection in the book and the work of the ESG Workgroup on the Representations and Rights of the Environment (ESGRREW), with its intercultural and interdisciplinary process of Research & Dialogue: a critical appraisal of how humankind conceive its relationship with the environment, towards a clear vision of how to apprehend it in law and governance. The reflection takes heed of the change in vision in different fields of knowledge and the message of Indigenous peoples with other critical voices regarding humankind’s present predicament. It champions social and environmental justice, and highlights the crisis of representations and perception of our world. Rekindling the conscience of diversity of languages, cultures and modes of knowing and being, it advocates a wide and relational approach, considering lived experience. It contends that we need to remove ‘barriers to understanding’, create and nurture a common space towards a ‘new common sense’. Reconnecting with other legal traditions will contribute to rethinking legal frameworks and practices for a new legal consciousness.

In science, to be ‘conservative’ is to understate your findings. In insurance, it means the opposite: erring on the side of overstatement of risks. For a clear assessment of the risks of climate change, we need these two cultures to meet in the middle. This requires a separation of tasks: between those who gather information, and those who assess risk.