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Scientific communities such as journals or professional societies have their own ways of creating and sharing knowledge called "epistemic cultures." Drawing on prior reflexive scholarship and conversations with eight preeminent consumer researchers, this article explores some of the central tenets of epistemic culture at the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR): midrange scope, differential insight, meaningful impact, and multidisciplinary field. It also provides some guidance to new consumer researchers on how to accomplish epistemic fluency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how and why simulation training facilitates professional learning by investigating how simulators and simulations are used and conceptualized in two professional domains, nursing and maritime navigation, and offer a reconceptualization. Our aim is to move beyond past theorizing of simulators and simulations that has mainly centered on representational issues like validity, fidelity, and authenticity. Instead, we approach simulators as epistemic objects and simulations as epistemic practices. These concepts offer a lens to examine the situated and sociomaterial practices that make simulators into simulations and simulations into entry points to the epistemic culture of a profession. As a result, we pinpoint three central mechanisms for transforming the simulation experience into an event that facilitates the enrollment of students into their future profession. The first mechanism involves the instructional practice of “filling in” aspects of the work context that might be missing in the simulator. The second mechanism, sometimes labeled the “as-if” mode of simulations, manifests through the participants’ ongoing commitment to treat the simulation as-if it was a real professional encounter. The third relates to how simulation-based learning activities afford a crucial pedagogical orientation towards defining what constitutes exemplary professional practice in specific training situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the unfolding of increased political interest in research infrastructure at the practical level. As a case study, I examine the European Commission's (EC) Human Brain Project (HBP). The HBP is a large-scale interdisciplinary project that aims to build a web-accessible digital research infrastructure for neuroscience, medical research, and information technology. The project provides a unique study case for observing interdisciplinary interaction within a large-scale project for infrastructure building in brain science, where small-scale research has been the norm. I analyze how the stances of the EC and the HBP members on the project's goal and organization have co-evolved by focusing on the project's two radical reorientations. Thus, I describe the HBP's tangled trajectory as the result of the project's shifting definition between research and infrastructure construction or between politics, science, and engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A death that occurs inside a prison cell initiates a distinct set of procedures from those around a death on the outside. When a confined space within a penal institution of total surveillance and control becomes a crime scene, it may reflect the prevailing institutional cultures and the ways in which they react and adapt. This paper analyses the case of Marcos, who was found dead in a Portuguese prison cell which he shared with another individual. From the discovery of the body to the crime scene inspection by the police, and from the autopsy to the trial, the qualitative analysis of the inscriptions produced in this case reveals and highlight the epistemic cultures involved. As each culture is developed from the professional practices and modes of acquiring and using knowledge, the analysis of their logic contributes to an understanding of how forensic evidence is co-produced and appropriated in the Portuguese legal context. We identify five epistemic cultures: institutional defence, hunch, office, bubble, and 'rubber stamp'. We argue that the apparent neutrality of an inquisitorial criminal justice system enables the development of particular ways of producing, understanding and using scientific knowledge and forensic evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lists of endorsed and discouraged scholarly publications recently emerged as an important transition in Chinese journal evaluation. Among the targeted users of these lists are researchers, who are to avoid publishing in discouraged journals and focus efforts on endorsed journals. However, it is unclear how these lists affect researchers' valuations when choosing publication outlets. This explorative study investigates the reception of such journal lists in Chinese scientists' research practices. Our findings suggest that three logics interact in respondents' journal valuations: institutional evaluation regimes, differing epistemic cultures, and the influence of the commercial publishing industry. The reactive effects of both endorsed and discouraged journal lists appear to differ with the ranking status of universities, the seniority of scholars, and research fields. Apart from the new institutional evaluation regimes in this interplay, there appear to be more predominant factors than journal lists that inform publishing choices: quantitative indicators, publishers' branding, epistemic cultures, and editorial procedures and publishing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article closes the special issue Alignment Work for the Movement of Knowledge. It argues that the concept of alignment work, through making it possible to think about collaborations of different epistemic cultures, provides a useful addition to Knorr Cetina's (1999) concept, keeping it relevant for current concerns in Science and Technology Studies (STS). The article discusses central issues in STS, namely how different academic and professional cultures exchange knowledge, including trading zones, boundary objects, and aspects of Actor-Network Theory, alongside an interest in epistemic cultures and knowledge production. We argue that and demonstrate how knowledge exchange can be understood through epistemic differences and their persistence in collaborative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This synoptic review surveys the philosophical literature on the epistemology of emotions to identify the role of emotions in knowledge production. It analyses their evaluative, motivational, hermeneutical and social functions as embedded in epistemic practices and cultures. The focus on situated epistemic emotions stresses the importance of developing an ethics of knowledge production. The review introduces some new proposals for fostering inquiry in this field, drawing from agency-based accounts of emotions (enactivism, in particular) and virtue epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the virtue epistemology literature on epistemic emotions and challenges the individualist, unworldly account of epistemic emotions. It argues that epistemic emotions can be truth-motivating if embedded in co-inquiry epistemic cultures, namely virtuous epistemic cultures that valorise participatory processes of inquiry as truth-conducive. Co-inquiry epistemic cultures are seen as playing a constitutive role in shaping, developing, and regulating epistemic emotions. Using key references to classical Pragmatism, the paper describes the bridge between epistemic emotions and co-inquiry culture in terms of habits of co-inquiry that act as the scaffolding of epistemic emotions. The result is a context-sensitive and practice-oriented approach to epistemic emotions that conceives of those emotions as being shaped by co-inquiry epistemic cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The epistemic cultures approach exposes the different ways knowledge production channels are built up among the various fields of study. In revealing these differences, the fragmentation of science can be clearly seen. Digital humanities is one such field. It is an inter- and transdisciplinary field, composed of diverse epistemic cultures and marked by distinct knowledge production practices. In the current landscape of scholarly communication, namely the open science paradigm, open practices have been at the forefront of conversation and research. The discourse’s true focus, however, is more along the lines of the epistemic cultures of the hard sciences, meaning that it does not fully consider other domains of knowledge. Thus, through a literature review, this study aims to frame the digital humanities’ epistemic cultures in the discourse of open science. The conclusion is, a conversation needs to be had specifically about the openness of knowledge, also considering other epistemic cultures’ diversity of scholarly communication practices. This would include the humanities. While simultaneously opening up this discourse, it is considered that digital humanities can also contribute to its consolidation.

Global sustainability challenges transcend disciplines and, therefore, demand interdisciplinary approaches that are characterized by cross-disciplinary collaboration and integration across disciplines. In accordance with this need for interdisciplinary approaches, sustainability professionals have been reported to require interdisciplinary competencies. Although the necessity of interdisciplinary competencies is generally agreed upon, and there has been extensive research to understand competencies for interdisciplinarity, there is still no comprehensive understanding of how individual competencies shape the ability to integrate knowledge across disciplines. Therefore, based on empirical research and literature review, we propose a novel framework to understand competencies for interdisciplinarity. The empirical data were collected through written reflection and interviews with 19 students in the context of an interdisciplinary master's course. We describe four typical behaviours—naïve, assertive, accommodating, and integrative. Based on these behavioural typologies, we define two sets of competencies that collaborators require to engage in interdisciplinary knowledge integration: Epistemic Stability (ES) and Epistemic Adaptability (EA). ES competencies are the competencies to contribute one's own academic knowledge, such as theoretical and methodological grounding in one's own field and confidence, and EA competencies are the competencies to engage with academic knowledge contributed by others, such as curiosity, openness and communicative skills. Our findings show that interdisciplinary knowledge integration requires ES and EA competencies. Our framework for interdisciplinary competencies offers insights for revising and designing more interventions to prepare (future) professionals for interdisciplinary work on sustainability issues, providing insights on criteria for assessment, management, and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study maps, visualizes, evaluates and interprets scientific papers in journals dealing with the site (place) and subject-matter of Istria. The approach is interdisciplinary. The data were taken from the Web of Science (WoS) citation database, processed with the VOSviewer program, and analytically evaluated. The occurrence and distribution of terms in titles and abstracts of articles clustered in characteristic groups of related studies are assumed as topics and agendas. Granulation of clusters reveals differences in research approaches across and within disciplines. Within the natural sciences, distinctive bio- and geological clusters emerge. Social sciences and humanities permeate each other in a single cluster, with marked terminological heterogeneity. The main conclusion is that Istria's epistemic contexts and methodological approaches manifest themselves on four contextual levels: 1. Istria as a site is one of many topics in a wider context within the natural sciences; 2. here can also be the subject of single narrow and specific topics; 3. nation-specific (state-) can be found in various disciplines; 4. the social sciences and humanities are associated with diverse multicultural, crossborder related topics. The analysis of the organization and production of knowledge suggests that the multifaceted and elusive regional character of scientific endeavors co-shapes Istria's evolving specific supranational sociocultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes and explores how translational research models, embedded in institutions and standards, interact with the epistemic and material practices of cell biologists of ageing, a field re-energized by emergent technoscientific promises that hinge on the possibility of eliminating or manipulating senescent cells to tackle age-related diseases. Drawing on a 3-year long lab ethnography, the paper suggests that knowledge making in cell biology of ageing relies on two different epistemic and material cultures, to then argue that these cultures combine in four different types of experimental systems, only one of which can properly be seen as pertaining to translation as usually conceived. The paper further analyses how cell biologists articulate the linear temporality of translational research with the unfolding experimental chains where, by shifting between types of experimental system, cell biologists are able to generatively reconfigure their epistemic objects, and the consequences of this fragile arrangements for the field.

The epistemic cultures approach exposes the different ways knowledge production channels are built up among the various fields of study. In revealing these differences, the fragmentation of science can be clearly seen. Digital humanities is one such field. It is an inter- and transdisciplinary field, composed of diverse epistemic cultures and marked by distinct knowledge production practices. In the current landscape of scholarly communication, namely the open science paradigm, open practices have been at the forefront of conversation and research. The discourse's true focus, however, is more along the lines of the epistemic cultures of the hard sciences, meaning that it does not fully consider other domains of knowledge. Thus, through a literature review, this study aims to frame the digital humanities' epistemic cultures in the discourse of open science. The conclusion is, a conversation needs to be had specifically about the openness of knowledge, also considering other epistemic cultures' diversity of scholarly communication practices. This would include the humanities. While simultaneously opening up this discourse, it is considered that digital humanities can also contribute to its consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of biological evidence in judicial settings raises particular modes of entanglement between professional cultures and perceptions of the probative value of evidence. When DNA evidence reaches court, it also challenges the perceived margins of critical assessment of the work and understandings of previous links in the chain of custody, like the criminal police, forensic experts and the public prosecution services. Given the apparent neutrality of judicial institutions, how do Portuguese judges perceive and value biological evidence? And how do judges see their articulation with other operators of the criminal justice system? An analysis of 14 interviews carried out with Portuguese judges reveals the challenges in the evaluation of biological evidence, which is characterised as a 'safe haven', grounded as it is on an indisputable scientific authority. The suggestion of the presence of a cultural rift emerges, which, taken with the work of other epistemic cultures, leads to biological evidence being seen as 'ready-made evidence' on its arrival in court, thus limiting the role of judges in its appraisal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government funding entities have placed data sharing at the centre of scientific policy. While there is widespread consensus that scientific data sharing benefits scientific progress, there are significant barriers to its wider adoption. We seek a deeper understanding of how researchers from different fields share their data and the barriers and facilitators of such sharing. We draw upon the notions of epistemic cultures and collective action theory to consider the enablers and deterrents that scientists encounter when contributing to the collective good of data sharing. Our study employs a mixed-methods design by combining survey data collected in 2016 and 2018 with qualitative data from two case studies sampled within two scientific communities: high-energy physics and molecular biology. We describe how scientific communities with different epistemic cultures can employ modularity, time delay, and boundary organisations to overcome barriers to data sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The approach to epistemic cultures exposes the differences in the construction of the processes of production and creation of knowledge between the different academic fields, which, in turn, implies the fragmentation of knowledge. The digital humanities are an inter and transdisciplinary field composed of different epistemic cultures marked by different knowledge production practices that differ from each other. In the current scenario of academic communication, the discourse around open practices in the course of research has increasingly taken a prominent place. However, this discourse, under the open science paradigm, proves to be more framed in the context of the epistemic cultures of science, and does not fully consider other domains of knowledge. This study aims to frame the epistemic cultures of the digital humanities in the discourse of openness of knowledge, through a literature review about digital humanities and open science. Its conclusion points to the need to adopt a specific discourse around the openness of knowledge, which considers the diversity of academic communication practices, including those that are specific to the humanities, as well as to the fact that the digital humanities can contribute to the consolidation of this discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes and explores how translational research models, embedded in institutions and standards, interact with the epistemic and material practices of cell biologists of ageing, a field re-energized by emergent technoscientific promises that hinge on the possibility of eliminating or manipulating senescent cells to tackle age-related diseases. Drawing on a 3-year long lab ethnography, the paper suggests that knowledge making in cell biology of ageing relies on two different epistemic and material cultures, to then argue that these cultures combine in four different types of experimental systems, only one of which can properly be seen as pertaining to translation as usually conceived. The paper further analyses how cell biologists articulate the linear temporality of translational research with the unfolding experimental chains where, by shifting between types of experimental system, cell biologists are able to generatively reconfigure their epistemic objects, and the consequences of this fragile arrangements for the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second FQS thematic issue on "The Refiguration of Spaces and Cross-Cultural Comparison" differs from the first as follows: 1. it covers a wider range of disciplines, 2. authors emphasize more strongly the spatial instead of the temporal aspects of the refiguration of spaces, and 3. focus is placed on researchers' practices of comparison rather than on how to compare different subject matters. These practices of comparison become particularly obvious when comparing "fundamental" sciences such as sociology with applied sciences such as urban planning. In research practice, researchers have to balance what Norbert ELIAS (2007 [1987]) called "involvement" and "detachment." In different disciplines with diverging epistemic cultures, involvement and detachment have been balanced differently. Using the examples of Germanlanguage sociology and urban planning, we illustrate this by discussing how fundamental and applied scientists weigh involvement and detachment in research practice and how this relationship of involvement and detachment has been changing in the course the refiguration of spaces. We conclude by reflecting on how differences in the balance between involvement and detachment in different epistemic cultures influence the relationship between practices of cross-cultural comparison and the refiguration of spaces, as well as what question should be asked in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a collective reflection on how militant commitment shapes urban agriculture research in France and in the United States. It is based on a qualitative literature review complemented by a series of seminars and interviews devoted to researchers' experiences of engagement. In the United States, researchers who define themselves as activists clearly refer to critical and radical traditions of geography. Scholar activism is associated with identified epistemic communities and designates relatively codified ways of conceiving research to serve community struggles and projects. In France, the political commitment of intellectuals is above all an individual affair. Research on urban agriculture exemplifies these differences. In the United States it is largely conducted by scholar-activists and focuses on community gardening, and promotes the overall goal of food justice. In France, it borrows from various registers and focuses on much more diversified spaces and actors, and is globally marked by a lack of critical and political reflexivity. The article concludes with a call for more reflexivity in clarifying the ontological and epistemological assumptions of this field of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second FQS thematic issue on "The Refiguration of Spaces and Cross-Cultural Comparison" differs from the first as follows: 1. it covers a wider range of disciplines, 2. authors emphasize more strongly the spatial instead of the temporal aspects of the refiguration of spaces, and 3. focus is placed on researchers' practices of comparison rather than on how to compare different subject matters. These practices of comparison become particularly obvious when comparing "fundamental" sciences such as sociology with applied sciences such as urban planning. In research practice, researchers have to balance what Norbert ELIAS (2007 [1987]) called "involvement" and "detachment." In different disciplines with diverging epistemic cultures, involvement and detachment have been balanced differently. Using the examples of German-language sociology and urban planning, we illustrate this by discussing how fundamental and applied scientists weigh involvement and detachment in research practice and how this relationship of involvement and detachment has been changing in the course the refiguration of spaces. We conclude by reflecting on how differences in the balance between involvement and detachment in different epistemic cultures influence the relationship between practices of cross-cultural comparison and the refiguration of spaces, as well as what question should be asked in future research.

This article thinks with infrastructure about the stable movement of knowledge objects such as crime scene reports, traces, and order forms through the Swedish criminal justice system. Infrastructures span different communities and borders; the criminal justice system is made up of necessarily disparate epistemic cultures. Thus, they share a central concern: Both aim for stable movement from one context to another. Thinking with infrastructure, the article argues, makes it possible to widen analytical focus and capture the structures and the continuous work that resolve the tension between different sites and thus enable the stable movement of knowledge objects. Using sensibilities from infrastructure studies-for the resolution of tensions, for continuous maintenance, and for inequalities - the article argues that the criminal justice system enacts the knowledge objects' stability across epistemic cultures. In other words, the stable movement of evidence-to-be through the Swedish criminal justice system is the result of infrastructuring, that is, of its continuous creating of conditions that facilitate movement and create and re-create stability. This perspective may be useful for studying the movement of knowledge also in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to traditional athletes and PE students, self-organized lifestyle sport practitioners usually have no podiums to reach or grades to earn. They have no authorized instructor available, but seem to treat this apparent deficiency as an opportunity to facilitate their own learning processes. However, from a traditional learning perspective, it can be challenging to understand how these processes unfold. Drawing on theoretical concepts from the educational sociologist Knorr Cetina, the aim of this study is therefore to understand how a self-organized mixed group of trickers, B-boys, and free-runners facilitate knowledge creation when no instructors guide or control their work. Based on observations and interviews we found that the practitioners' knowledge developed in a continuous and invigorating circuit between a worldwide gym on the internet where the practitioners searched for updated knowledge, and the local gym where they practiced knowledge development as intra- and inter-disciplinary embodied interactions. The knowledge object conveyed by the practitioners as 'kinesthetic understanding' was not a fixed a-priori product that could be completely achieved, and the practitioners' acceptance of the knowledge object's essential incompleteness seemed to create a never-ending desire to glimpse the unattainable. The group of tumblers studied in this paper represent an alternative epistemic practice that should be explored in physical education contexts. However, such exploration requires the development of an affective and processual language that reflects the relational intimacy between students and their knowledge objects, rather than a constative language reflecting distance, achievement, and external assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of crime scene technicians in the Swedish criminal justice system, and particularly how Swedish crime scene technicians not only examine crime scenes but also facilitate the criminal justice system's joint production of forensic evidence. It proposes thinking about the criminal justice system as a conglomeration of epistemic cultures, that is, of communities with different ways of producing and understanding forensic evidence. Such a perspective makes it possible to understand interprofessional frictions as epistemic frictions as well as to draw attention to the facilitations, mediations and translations that crime scene technicians perform. This perspective also makes it possible to illuminate how the crime scene technicians' professionalization – a professionalization from the outside – affects both their future crime scene work and their facilitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores issues of trandisciplinarity through an autobiographical lens. Specifically, the essay attends to tensions between the discipline of sociology and interdisciplinary science, knowledge, and technology studies, with an emphasis on differing epistemic cultures in each. The author suggests the promise of border-crossings outweighs the challenges, and advocates for a reflexive practice that names our intellectual and political commitments. Eschewing traditional notions of objectivity, the author calls for transdisciplinary and public engagement.

Design is a notoriously ambiguous word in English. Similarly, it is also an ambiguous research field for Science and Technology Studies (STS). Introducing the special section A Matter of Design, the paper discusses the place of design in the overall context of Science and Technology Studies, with an emphasis on relevancies and difficulties in making two different epistemic cultures meet.

Der vorliegende Beitrag plädiert für eine differenzierte Interpretation der Open-Science-Idee, nämlich sowohl als umfassendes strukturelles als auch als kulturelles Phänomen. In der öffentlichen Diskussion wird Open Science oftmals auf die strukturelle Öffnung des Publikationsmarktes für die Nachfrageseite reduziert. Dabei wird vernachlässigt, dass Wissenschaft auch aus darüberhinausgehenden Strukturen besteht, beispielsweise der Sozialstruktur wissenschaftlicher Gemeinden, bei denen Mechanismen der Schließung und Öffnung zu beobachten sind. Open Science sollte darüber hinaus als kulturelles Phänomen interpretiert werden. Unter Verwendung des Begriffs „Wissenskulturen“ zeigt der Beitrag, dass sich Open Science in der wissenschaftlichen Praxis als prozesshaftes und heterogenes Phänomen darstellt und dass Offenheit für verschiedene Gruppen der wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaft unterschiedliche Bedeutungen aufweist.

Systematic Knowledge Research is the approach used to (i) describe the specific characteristics of various forms of knowledge (such as e.g. conceptual and non-conceptual knowledge; explicit and implicit knowledge; knowing-how and knowing-that). It (ii) investigates the overlapping points among the various kinds of knowledge forms, and it (iii) elucidates the mechanisms of interpenetration among them. Systematic Knowledge Research (iv) grasps the dynamic of various forms of knowledge and their interplay, and (v) describes the practices and the manifestations of knowledge. Systematic Knowledge Research provides analyses and suggestions for modeling each of the five fields as well as their interconnections. Because of these objectives Systematic Knowledge Research is different from both the traditional theory of knowledge and the varieties of science studies and meets the current desideratum to systematically broaden and revise the territory of epistemology.

The article presents an in-depth analysis of epistemic cultures in conflict by exemplifying the epistemic conflict between high energy physics (HEP) and astronomy which emerged after the discovery of 'dark energy' and the accelerating expansion of the universe. It suggests a theoretical framework combining Knorr-Cetina's concept of epistemic cultures with Whitley's theory of dependencies in the sciences system, which explains that epistemic conflicts occur, if the strategic and functional dependency of two incommensurable epistemic cultures is suddenly growing. The pre-history of the conflict is discussed on a micro-level for the two research groups involved in the breakthrough. The analysis of the consequent epistemic conflict on a macro-level reveals that it embraces the preferred epistemic strategy, the collaboration style, the instrumental concepts and the question how social legitimacy can be generated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only two decades ago, finance was mainly the province of economics, a territory into which only few outsiders wandered. Nowadays, finance has be- come a central topic and various social science and humanities disciplines, have made inroads into this territory. Should the social sciences (and STS in particular) just analyse finance, or should they mainly criticize it, or maybe even provide what some have called an alternative narrative to capitalist finance? Stemming from an ironic and innovative overview of social studies of finance (SSF), the paper presents the core characteristics of such a perspective, taking in- to account also the main critique that SSF attracted. The contribution concentrates then on the three issues where STS investigations of finance promise good yields: (1) agency and robots; (2) epistemic cultures; (3) expertise.

Advancing the opinion that global mental health supersedes public and international levels and deals with an integrative approach, this paper elaborates some of the implications of a differential ethics theory as outlined by H.M. Sass. Rejecting the extremes of moralizing generalizations and narrow scientific stances, it considers the need for cultural competence and praxis-relevant thinking in ethical evaluation. This does not only apply to the relationships between experts and lay people but also to the pluralistic constitution of ethics committees, in which different epistemic and value cultures must be integrated along a continuum of decision making processes including deontological and teleological stages. Key Words:

It is generally accepted that the development of the modern sciences is rooted in experiment. Yet for a long time, experimentation did not occupy a prominent role, neither in philosophy nor in history of science. With the 'practical turn' in studying the sciences and their history, this has begun to change. This paper is concerned with systems and cultures of experimentation and the consistencies that are generated within such systems and cultures. The first part of the paper exposes the forms of historical and structural coherence that characterize the experimental exploration of epistemic objects. In the second part, a particular experimental culture in the life sciences is briefly described as an example. A survey will be given of what it means and what it takes to analyze biological functions in the test tube.

The forced evacuation of Jewish Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank in August 2005 (known as the Disengagement) was an extremely controversial political event in Israeli public discourse. This article seeks to explore how political differences in the public sphere were reflected in the professional narratives of mental health practitioners. Based on my field notes documenting the processes of the narration of the Disengagement within various professional settings of Israeli mental health experts, I compare the narratives produced by practitioners who hold different ideological positions vis-à-vis the settlement project. I contend that the political views of practitioners expressed in causal explanations of the Disengagement experience and in the modes of mediation of this experience in order to mobilize empathy with evacuated settlers. By focusing on the professional narration and mediation of the experience of a controversial group of sufferers ('the bad victims,' as they might be called), this research highlights the importance of the anthropological perspective on therapeutic empathy as a socially mediated reflection of the moral experience of health practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing pressure on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to follow the evidence-based approach promoted in allied health and medicine, in which the randomised control trial represents the evidence gold standard. However, many CAM advocates see these methods as undermining the holism of CAM practice. This paper explores how such tensions are managed in CAM university departments – settings in which particular forms of knowledge and evidence are given 'official' imprimatur by CAM educators and researchers. By comparing two types of CAM, the paper also unpacks differences within this broad category, asking whether CAM academic disciplines comprise different 'epistemic cultures' (Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Interviews were conducted with 20 lecturers in Chinese medicine and osteopathy, across five Australian universities, and augmented with observation in two degree programs. Findings reveal contrasting ontological and epistemological perspectives between the two academic fields. Chinese medicine lecturers had largely adopted bioscientific models of research, typically conducting laboratory work and trials, although teaching included traditional theories. Osteopathy academics were more critical of dominant approaches and were focused on reframing notions of evidence to account for experiences, with some advocating qualitative research. The study illustrates CAM's 'epistemic disunity' while also highlighting the particular challenges facing academic CAM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]