Redesigning "Facts" - Our daily bread

I've had some major technical difficulty posting this. Kind of a 2x3...

What sticks out to me is the extensive web that we've illuminated through our rain of presentations - a web of thought processes and ideologies that build discursively upon, and thus depend upon, one another. Although their manifestations in say, the pill controversy as opposed to the prison system may seem to emerge at a distance, they are of course directly linked.

For starters, without the social atmosphere required for the Eugenics movement, neither of these phenomena could exist in the way that they do today. As the prison group pointed out, the criteria for 'most likely to be disposed to criminal behavior' was at a time largely based off of physical indicators such as one's build; since certain builds might have seemed more genetically prone to particular races or types of people, and because anyone in prison would be considered a degenerate, the Eugenics folks were likely on the same page with those at the penitentiaries.
The hard work of Margaret Sanger helped to define what sort of pills one can take legally for certain purposes which some deemed immoral; on the other hand, many tenants of the prison system are there because of different results in the same battle, over what constitutes immoral medication and thus what medication is made illegal.

In the evaluation of my own group's poster on the Large Hadron Collider, our benevolent facilitator noted his relief in the depth of our presentation, mostly in light of initial doubts springing from his first look at the poster itself. The potential problem, built into our display, was that it fit the form of a 'conventional science fair' backdrop, listing facts in their respective places... in other words, it appeared to uphold what we might call a model of gridlocked reference, relying on a more or less Cartesian plane to separately list the 'science' of the LHC versus the 'skeptic' point of view - binary and basic, but as we know, not that simple.
Fortunately my group was aware of the discursive circulation in and around the LHC, including the wealth of "YouTube experts" and "cranks" whose rhetoric pervades public awareness more than I had known.
The first thing this course emphasized for me is the notion that there are no objective facts, and yet I think we continue to struggle with the years we have spent consuming just that. After all, we are irrational beings still plugging ourselves into rational grids. Our grades for this project will be charted on a grid. This course in the future will be listed on a database that depends on thousands of binary codes (the internet and the University's registration software).

I've been toying with talking about "facts" as artifacts... pieces of meaning that we find here and there and from which we build a sense of place and reality; like shards broken off of a massive and mythical black box called Life, the Universe, and Everything, facts are often interpreted through science as simple elements of truth, regardless of whether or not we know the big picture: eventually, we'll put it all together once we have enough of these little shards. Wrong!

Keep up the work. By remembering what we see in front of us now, we can continue to remind each other, and hopefully those who find themselves "settled" into reality as well, that we are not just receivers or discoverers of fact, but that we work hard to make them.