This article analyses the discursive practices of scientists engaged in controversial science in their narrated accounts of encounters with activists. It explores what happens when scientific credibility and authority are challenged in a public debate on the benefits and risks of such science. The aim is to understand how scientists discursively negotiate and make sense of their encounters with activists, the range of subject positions they claim, and how power is implicated in identification with the public. The article shows how (...) scientists counter emotional appeals, utilizing both scientific and public identities respectively to legitimate the epistemic and moral authority of science and to marginalize opposing activists. It is argued that a unitary view of scientific identity is inadequate. Rather, in times of public challenge and controversy, scientists may utilize a multiplicity of subject positions to achieve identification with public interests. The discursive construct, public interest, is interpreted as a contested discursive space and a discursive resource for influencing public opinion. (shrink)

By conducting a critical discourse analysis of a scientific research article that claims additional potential for using transgenic marmosets in biomedical experiments, this article critiques instrumental approaches to scientific progress as they are expressed in scientific research that uses nonhuman animal experiments. Following an analysis that focuses on issues associated with access to publication, assertions about scientific breakthrough and scientific facts, and the construction of science as impartial, the article concludes that manipulating the genetics of nonhuman animals to engineer a (...) predisposition to the development of feared human health hazards represents moral deterioration rather than progress. (shrink)

This study is about the interaction of scientific expertise and local knowledge in the context of a contested issue: the quality and quantity of safe drinking water available to some residents in one Canadian community. The authors articulate the boundary work in which scientific and technological expertise and discourse are played out against local knowledge and water needs to prevent the construction of a water main extension that would provide a group of residents with the same water that others in (...) the community already access. The authors draw on an extensive database constructed during a three-year ethnographic study of one community; the data base includes the transcript of a public meeting, newspaper clippings, interviews, and communications between residents and town council. The authors show not only that scientists and residents differ in their assessment of water quality and quantity but also that there is a penchant for undercutting residents in their attempts to make themselves heard in the political process. (shrink)