Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science by Isabelle Stengers

A book that shifted my epistemological awareness by insisting that knowing is never neutral, and that education, too, is an ecology of practice shaped by power, stakes, and the worlds we make together.

Why I read this

Another Science Is Possible changed how I understand knowledge itself. It pushed me to rethink the habits and assumptions I had absorbed as “truth,” and to ask what those truths do, who they serve, and what they make harder to notice. Stengers doesn’t offer critique for critique’s sake. She asks for a different kind of attentiveness: one that treats knowledge as situated, contested, and responsible to the worlds it helps bring into being.

What I’m learning from it

One of the most lasting impacts of this book is how it politicizes what can otherwise be treated as purely intellectual work. Stengers reinforces complexity rather than smoothing it out. She writes in a way that keeps practice in view, and she refuses the fantasy that we can stand outside a situation and simply describe it “objectively.” For me, this has been a crucial orientation shift for education. It clarifies that teaching and learning are not neutral processes. They are shaped by histories, institutions, and the pressures to simplify, measure, and control.

The book also helped me name education as an ecology of practice. Knowledge is produced within relationships, infrastructures, and constraints. Questions are never just questions; they carry stakes. Methods are never just methods; they organize what becomes visible and what falls away. Reading Stengers strengthened my commitment to forms of inquiry that can stay with complexity without turning it into paralysis or performance.

A note on “the witches”

I’m also drawn to Stengers’ scholarly attention to “the witches.” The figure of the witch becomes a way to think about knowledge that has been dismissed, feared, or disciplined out of legitimacy. It’s an invitation to ask whose ways of knowing get authorized, and what kinds of intelligence become illegible under dominant standards of reason and evidence. In education, that question matters. It changes how we think about expertise, authority, and what counts as knowledge in a classroom or a childcare centre.

Connections to education and curriculum

This book sharpened my sense that curriculum is never simply content or a set of outcomes. Curriculum is a way of organizing the world. It carries assumptions about what matters, what can be known, and what should be done. Stengers helped me take seriously the ethics and politics of those assumptions, especially in spaces where “best practice” and certainty are treated as professional virtues. Her work supports a pedagogy that can resist premature closure and keep questions alive long enough to matter.

Questions I’m sitting with

• What assumptions about “truth” are operating in our educational practices, often without being named?

• What becomes possible when we refuse the demand to simplify complexity into quick answers?

• Whose knowledge is treated as credible, and whose is treated as noise, bias, or “not academic”?

• What might it mean to take education seriously as an ecology of practice, with real stakes?

Invitation

If you’ve read Stengers, I’d love to hear what shifted for you. Was there a concept, image, or passage that changed how you think about knowledge, education, or practice?