Sixteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

The production and transfer of knowledge through satellite images achieved unprecedented visibility in 2016, when President Obama signed The Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act, a bipartisan measure to eliminate the sale of archaeological artifacts looted by terrorist groups. The Act’s supporters built their case on satellite images and testimony from experts with varying levels of technical understanding of how such images are made, why their fidelity varies, and whether they constitute sufficient evidence for federal policymaking. This paper examines the standards of data reliability and robustness operationalized by scholars and civil servants who populated the conflict archaeology subfield at the height of its influence (2015-18) and introduced a new “professional vision” (Vertesi 2015). Conflict archaeology is a dynamic subfield whose participants converged briefly, working under intense media and political pressure, to provide specific knowledge. We draw from interviews and lab ethnography to show that standards of epistemic evidence were displaced by “good enough” performances of credible experience in crucial moments of knowledge transfer. Cross-disciplinary boundaries were dissolved so quickly that the media itself became the “trading zone” that coordinated scientific collaboration (Galison 1998). Contributing to Science and Technology Studies (STS) work on scientific collaboration with public stakeholders (Panofsky 2014; Stampnitzky 2015), we reveal the processes whereby evidentiary standards are relaxed or abandoned in spaces of scientific urgency.