Global unquestionables and globe skeptics: aporia or scientific revolution

Following Pierre Bourdieu's essay 'Rethinking the State' (1998), this paper focuses on current fringe challenges to the foundations of the idea of the 'global' and its naturalization through the power of unquestionable discourses such as government and media narratives, scientific theories and 'just so' stories. For Bourdieu the 'grip of the state is felt more powerfully' in the 'realm of symbolic production' (1998:38).

I analyze excerpts from conversations with Globe Skeptics - an emerging form of identity and relatedness - and how they challenge the bases of UN's universalist global ontology, and even question the accepted reality of the globe, a supposed 'unquestionable'. I look into how Globe Skeptics articulate alternative positions regarding vaccines, home schooling, government, media, and the cosmologies of academic astrophysics, down to the shape of the earth as a globe (or oblate spheroid) and its purported movements.

Globe Skeptics question mainstream science and many of its assumptions, conduct their own experiments and produce original art. They imagine alternative futures that disrupt the established foundations and conventions of the current dominant Global cosmology and its accompanying transhumanist futurism.

The ensuing discussion invites us to meditate on the concept of 'unquestionables' and the assumptions that accompany supposedly established facts about nature and the world itself. Are we at the onset of what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift and a scientific revolution? Globe Skeptics seem to believe so, but they often learn the hard way that questioning dominant unquestionables publicly can marginalize them.

Source: Conference abstract ↗