Description
Book SynopsisScience Interrupted examines how scientists in China pursue environmental sustainability within the constraints of domestic and international bureaucracies. Timothy G. McLellan offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the formal procedural work of Chinese bureaucracywork that is overlooked when China scholars restrict their gaze to the informal and interpersonal channels through which bureaucracy is often navigated.
Homing in on an agroforestry research organization in southwest China, the author takes the experiences of the organization''s staff in navigating diverse international funding regimes and authoritarian state institutions as entry points for understanding the pervasiveness of bureaucracy in contemporary science. He asks: What if we take the tools, sensibilities, and practices of bureaucracies seriously not only as objects of critique but as resources for re-thinking scientific practice?
Extending a mode of anthropological research i
