Scientists continually face public concerns over the potential risks of biotechnology. This article reflects on the 1970s when leading molecular biologists established a moratorium, and initiated the second international Asilomar conference, on recombinant DNA molecules. Since then, this event has been widely perceived as an important historical moment when scientific actors took into account public concerns. Yet, by focusing on the history of the Public Understanding of Science discourse, we gain new insight into how ‘‘science’’ and the ‘‘public’’ have in (...) the meantime been framed in political discourses as homogeneous but antagonistic concepts. This sheds new light on the ways scientific, political, and administrative actors in biotechnology perceive the events, which occurred in the 1970s. Through interviews, we found that, with the Asilomar II conference serving as a quasi role model, the quest to reconcile ‘‘science’’ and the ‘‘public’’ is being traced back to a moment in history when such divisions had yet to be considered. This leads us to ask whether the politics of PUS contributed as much to the production of these two entities as it is claimed to have done in bridging the differences between them. (shrink)

Science and technology policy is both faced by unprecedented challenges and itself undergoing seismic shifts. First, policy is increasingly demanding of science that it fixes a set of epochal and global crises. On the other hand, practices of scientific research are changing rapidly regarding geographical dispersion, the institutions and identities of those involved and its forms of knowledge production and circulation. Furthermore, these changes are accelerated by the current upheavals in public funding of research, higher education and technology development in (...) the wake of the economic crisis. The paper outlines an agenda for science & technology policy studies in terms of a research programme of a ‘cultural political economy of research and innovation’ (CPERI). First, the implications of the overlapping crises for science policy analysis are discussed. Secondly, three rough constellations of contemporary approaches to science policy are critically compared, namely: a techno-statist Keynesian governance; a neoliberal marketplace of ideas; and co-productionist enabling of democratic debate. CPERI is then introduced, showing how it builds on the strengths of co-production while also specifically targeting two major weaknesses that are of heightened importance in an age of multiple crises, namely neglect of political economy and the concept of power. (shrink)

The idea of conducting “upstream public engagement,” using nanotechnology as a test case, has been subject to criticism for its lack of any link to the political system. Drawing on the theoretical tools provided by Habermas, this article seeks to explore such a “link”, focusing specifically on the capacity of civil society organizations to distil, raise and transmit societal concerns in an amplified form to the public spheres at the European Union level. Based on content analysis and semi-structured interviews with (...) relevant actors, this article examines the evolution of CSO approaches towards nanotechnology over the past decade and investigates whether and how upstream public engagement could contribute to more vibrant public spheres and facilitate the formation of communicative power. The answer to these questions is twofold: on the one hand, moving public engagement “upstream” enables CSOs to be better informed and to become part of the debates more quickly. A “green alliance” is taking shape, which calls for more stringent regulation on nanomaterials. On the other hand, upstream public engagement has turned out to be unsuccessful in generating substantial and sustained interest. A number of CSOs have quit this field in frustration at the tokenistic engagement and out of fatigue after the intense lobbying battle for Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals. (shrink)

The paper offers a political-philosophical analysis of the state and publics in the age of technoscience to propose three distinct categories of publics: scientific-citizen publics constituted by civil society, quasi-publics that initiate another kind of engagement through the activation of ‘political society,’ and non-publics cast outside these spheres of engagement. This re-categorization is possible when the central role of the state in its citizens’ engagement with technoscience is put upfront and the non-Western empirical contexts are taken seriously by Science, Technology (...) and Policy (STP) studies. The paper argues that in most of the world the state maintains a political contract with technoscience to form a functional coupling as the state-technoscience duo, which shapes public engagement with science through different functional modalities of government. Civil society is the sphere of legitimate engagement and participation in technoscientific issues for the scientific-citizen publics. The quasi-publics choose to be in the shady zone of political society establishing a paralegal relationship with the state-technoscience duo, while the non-publics come into being due to conditions of extra-legality created by the duo. The non-publics are implicated in the political community paradoxically as an excluded category who cannot be included in deliberation because of their status as being expelled from political community in a ‘state of exception.’ The paper proposes that the scientific-citizen publics are mobilized in contrast to the quasi-publics and with reference to the non-publics, helping STP studies to identify the ‘missing masses’ of technoscience. (shrink)

The close coupling between media and science becomes predominant in the context of public controversies over science during disasters like earthquakes. The paper discusses some crucial aspects of this dynamic by investigating the role of regional press in Kerala, India, in initiating and maintaining a public controversy over a series of micro earthquakes in 2001 amidst growing public skepticism over the competence of Earth Science to convincingly explain the phenomenon. The press employed various strategies to challenge the official scientific explanation (...) of the phenomenon and broke open the ground for a spectrum of alternative interpretations and critical interventions, affirming greater public participation in science. Most of the experts continued to downplay the concerns raised by the media, but closure was attained when a lesser-known team of experts convincingly interpreted the geological events while participating in the deliberations. The paper analyses how the media played a crucial role in revealing and enhancing the entanglement of science with diverse actors and institutions during the controversy. (shrink)

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and scientific controversies are often the common denominators in most of the cases that have significantly shaped science and society relationships in the Global South during the past two decades. National and international NGOs and their network have often facilitated the “opening up” of regulatory governance in multiple sectors. This article draws from three cases—the bottled water controversy, the agribiotechnology debates, and the nanotechnology initiatives—and charts out the role of the NGOs and controversies in (re)defining the science-society (...) relationship in India. The three cases illustrate how NGOs and controversies by their presence or absence at various stages of technology development shape the regulation-making exercise and the overall regulatory governance of science and technology. (shrink)

The promise of scientific and technological innovation – particularly in fields such as nanotechnology – is increasingly set against what has been articulated as a deficit in public trust in both the new technologies and regulatory mechanisms. Whilst the development of new technology is cast as providing contributions to both quality of life and national competitiveness, what has been termed a ‘legitimacy crisis’ is seen as threatening the vitality of this process. However in contrast to the risk debates that dominated (...) the technological controversies of the late 1990s the vitality of technological innovation is now cast as vulnerable to lack of public confidence and trust in the regulatory and governance structures upon which such innovation depends. In order to address this deficit in public trust, science policy has increasingly turned to the social sciences, suggesting that public values might be incorporated into the development of nanotechnology at an early stage. Public ambivalence therefore constitutes the problem addressed by the increasingly central role that public engagement and participation play in contemporary science policy. Although the recent proliferation of public engagement activities is premised on the need to address this ambivalence through direct engagement, we re-interpret ambivalence as an engaged – rather than passive – mode of relating to technological determinism. Whilst the move toward forms of direct public engagement might be regarded as symptomatic of the emergence of affective mode of governance we interpret public ambivalence as a nested set of enthusiasms and anxieties. Accordingly we suggest that public engagement might be re-thought, utilising ambivalence as a creative resource, rather than as the problem. (shrink)

The concept of “ethical research” holds considerable sway over the ways in which contemporary biomedical, natural, and social science investigations are funded, regulated, and practiced within a variety of countries. Some commentators have viewed this “new” means of governance positively; others, however, have been resoundingly critical, regarding it as restrictive and ethics bodies and regulations unfit for the task they have been set. Regardless, it is clear that science today is an “ethical” business. The ways in which formal and informal (...) ethical discourses and practices—what might be called “regimes of normativity”—structure scientific work and the meanings it is ascribed with have, however, been underexplored. This article attends to how science and ethics articulate; how they are, in many ways, co-produced. Exploring these processes of co-production casts into sharp relief the essential emotionality of science; the relationships investigators have with their colleagues, work, and research participants pulse with emotion, potentially shaping in important ways the very kinds of knowledge that laboratories produce. (shrink)

Emerging genomic technologies promise more efficient infectious disease control. Whole genome sequencing is increasingly being used in tuberculosis diagnosis, surveillance, and epidemiology. However, while the use of WGS by public health agencies may raise ethical, legal, and socio-political concerns, these challenges are poorly understood. Between November 2017 and April 2018, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 key stakeholders across the fields of governance and policy, public health, and laboratory sciences representing the major jurisdictions currently using WGS in national TB programs. (...) Thematic analysis of the interviews was conducted using NVivo 11. Respondents identified several ethical and practical challenges associated with WGS in TB care and surveillance, all related to issues of trust, including: 1) the power of public health; 2) data sharing and profits derived from surveillance efforts; and 3) concerns regarding who has access to, and can benefit from, the technology. Additional challenges included: the potential utility that WGS adds to a public health program, the risks associated with linking necessary epidemiological metadata to the genomic data, and challenges associated with jurisdictional capacity to implement the technology. Successful implementation of WGS is dependent on fostering relationships of trust between those working with genomics technology and those directly impacted by it, including clinicians. Building trust between the public and the public health agencies and within public health agencies themselves is critical due to the inherent complexity of WGS and its implementation for communicable disease control purposes. (shrink)

The significance of political-economic context for scientific citizenship is argued through an analysis of New Zealand’s Royal Commission on Genetic Modification. My intention is not to provide an account of why the commission came to the decisions it did but to illustrate how the political-economic context and the culture of regulatory science both exacerbate public concerns about unacknowledged uncertainty and commercial influence and make it difficult for those concerns to influence the outcomes of public dialogues. The discursive flexibility of science (...) as alternately predictive and provisional silences concerns about uncertainty, while a further interpretive choice of science as the autonomous activities of individuals unconstrained by political-economic context occludes the nature of concerns about commercial influence. Rather than the increasingly prevalent focus on processes of engagement, I argue that it is essential that researchers in this area attend to how public dialogue is placed in relation to the cultures and structures of regulatory science and neoliberalism. (shrink)

This paper explores how scientists perceive public engagement initiatives. By drawing on interviews with nanoscientists, it analyzes how researchers imagine science–society interactions in an early phase of technological development. More specifically, the paper inquires into the implicit framings of citizens, of scientists, and of the public in scientists’ discourses. It identifies four different models of how nanoscientists understand public engagement which are described as educational, paternalistic, elitist, and economistic. These models are contrasted with the dialog model of public engagement promoted (...) by social scientists and policymakers. The paper asks if and in what ways participatory discourses and practices feed back into scientists’ understandings, thus co-producing public discourses and science. (shrink)