Abstract
Why do scientists have to work within a frame? How do they increase their frame, and what are the challenges of doing so? These are the questions I wish to address in this paper. I will argue that framing is a necessary but problematic practice for anyone engaged in producing and communicating knowledge. Scientists have to frame the world in order to produce – at least temporarily – an enclosed space containing stable objects of interest. Yet there are now many ways in which frames are being enlarged. Interdisciplinarity, for instance, draws on more than one discipline to tackle a given issue. Transdisciplinarity expands knowledge production beyond academic disciplines, by involving the public or the government for example. And, finally, representativity is one of the keys to the powerful and authoritative status of scientific knowledge, as it enables knowledge to travel from one place – the present, the original place where data was gathered – to another place where this knowledge is represented, generalised, translated.
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