No funeral bells Jasanoff, Sheila; Simmet, Hilton R
Social studies of science,
10/2017, Volume:
47, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The label ‘post-truth’ signals for many a troubling turn away from principles of enlightened government. The word ‘post’, moreover, implies a past when things were radically different and whose loss ...should be universally mourned. In this paper, we argue that this framing of ‘post-truth’ is flawed because it is ahistorical and ignores the co-production of knowledge and norms in political contexts. Debates about public facts are necessarily debates about social meanings, rooted in realities that are subjectively experienced as all-encompassing and complete, even when they are partial and contingent. Facts used in policy are normative in four ways: They are embedded in prior choices of which experiential realities matter, produced through processes that reflect institutionalized public values, arbiters of which issues are open to democratic contestation and deliberation, and vehicles through which polities imagine their collective futures. To restore truth to its rightful place in democracy, governments should be held accountable for explaining who generated public facts, in response to which sets of concerns, and with what opportunities for deliberation and closure.
In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that work in the social studies of science and technology can be appropriated, or consciously deployed, to serve political ends. Correspondingly, ...pressure has risen on scholars in this field to choose sides in controversies involving science and technology. This paper argues that 'co-production' - the simultaneous production of knowledge and social order - provides a more satisfying conceptual framework than 'controversy' for understanding the relationship between science and society, and the scholar's role in that relationship. Political engagement is better achieved through reflexive, critical scholarship than through identification with apparent 'winners' or 'losers' in well-defined but contingent controversies. Reflexivity is especially desirable when selecting sites for research, styles of explanation, and methods of articulating normative positions.
Pathologies of Liberty Jasanoff, Sheila
Cahiers Droit, Sciences & Technologies,
11/2020
Journal Article
Open access
This paper discusses the diverse grounds on which litigation during the Covid-19 pandemic tested the nature and limits of power in a public health system that has long functioned like a state within ...a state. The pandemic revealed a tension between human beings as biomedical subjects, more acted upon than acting, and as social and political subjects, more acting than acted upon. In the regime of what this paper calls public health sovereignty, people are required to observe potentially severe restraints on liberty in the name of the common good and are governed by the disciplinary mechanisms of biopower described by Michel Foucault. As sociopolitical subjects, however, people can use the competing apparatus of constitutional law to assert solidarities and express affiliations that challenge the reduction of life to the purely biological. In the United States, such resisting claims have included the right to forego treatment on religious grounds, the rights of assembly and association, and the right to demand accountability for the government’s uses of expertise. This paper first describes the landscape of US health and safety regulation, in which responsibility for public health protection is divided between the federal government and the states. It offers a brief history of three earlier episodes that pitted public health sovereignty against claims of individual liberty: compulsory vaccination, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis. The paper then looks at three arenas in which the Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to conflicts between public health and individual liberty: elections, religious freedom, and the scope of executive power. The paper demonstrates that the apparatus of liberty can be used either to promote or to constrain political expression by substituting judicial expertise in law for executive expertise in public health. The paper concludes that American legal thinking has yet to develop modes of reasoning that will consistently strike a judicious balance between claims of personal liberty and the demands of public health.
Hardly a day passes without some major accusation in the media that the nation's highest office has become a source of unfounded stories, claims without evidence, even outright lies. As the charges ...against the executive branch pile up, the White House counters that institutions long seen as standing above partisan wrangling can no longer be trusted: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Congressional Budget Office, the federal judiciary have all felt the heat of presidential pushback. It is tempting to turn the clock back to January 2009, when the answer seemed both easy and overdue: restore science to its rightful place as humanity's most rigorous and reliable pathway to truth. But today's questions are not easy, nor are they new. Democratic states earned their legitimacy in part by demonstrating that they knew how to ensure public welfare-securing frontiers, improving public health, guarding against economic misery, and creating opportunities for social mobility and betterment.
•A focus on sociotechnical imaginaries (STI) illuminates crucial governance issues in transformations to sustainability.•The STI concept helps to uncover the dimensionality and temporality of human ...needs, expectations, and uses of natural resources.•The STI concept illuminates the taken-for-granted assumptions that shut down promising imaginations and makes visible alternate pathways.
The contribution makes use of a sociotechnical imaginaries (STI) framework to expose crucial but neglected governance issues in sociotechnical areas of key relevance to sustainability transformations such as energy systems. It explores how the STI concept can contribute to understanding transformations to sustainability (T2S) by illustrating their multidimensionality and temporality. It takes as its starting point a ‘co-productionist’ view illuminating how collective visions of desirable (or resisted) environmental futures limit or enable political imagination and the search for alternative transformative practices. It demonstrates how a focus on imaginaries can help reveal the complex multidimensionality of human needs, expectations, and uses of natural resources — and associated societal phenomena to enable T2S. By more explicitly addressing the technical as well as political and normative dimensions of T2S, this approach helps uncover the taken-for-granted assumptions that often shut down potentially promising imaginations, as well as makes visible alternate pathways and possible constitutional relationships in the triad of state and society.
Building on recent theories of science in society, such as that provided by the the “Mode 2” framework, this paper argues that governments should reconsider existing relations among decision-makers, ...experts, and citizens in the management of technology. Policy-makers need a set of ‘technologies of humility’ for systematically assessing the unknown and the uncertain. Appropriate focal points for such modest assessments are framing, vulnerability, distribution, and learning.
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