States of Knowledge Jasanoff, Sheila
2004, 20040731, 2004-07-31, 20040101
eBook
Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1. The Idiom of Co-production Sheila Jasanoff 2. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society Sheila Jasanoff 3. Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political ...Order Clark A. Miller 4. Co-producing CITES and the African Elephant Charis Thompson 5. Knowledge and Political Order in the European Environment Agency Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne 6. Plants, Power and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914 William K. Storey 7. Mapping Systems and Moral Order: Constituting property in genome laboratories Stephen Hilgartner 8. Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon 9. Circumscribing Expertise: Membership categories in courtroom testimony Michael Lynch 10. The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental order and social order in early twentieth-century France and America John Carson 11. Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century Peter Dear 12. Reconstructing Sociotechnical Order: Vannevar Bush and US science policy Michael Aaron Dennis 13. Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies Yaron Ezrah 14. Afterword Sheila Jasanoff References Index
A New Climate for Society Jasanoff, Sheila
Theory, culture & society,
03/2010, Volume:
27, Issue:
2-3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article argues that climate change produces discordances in established ways of
understanding the human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and
opportunities for the interpretive ...social sciences. Scientific assessments such as
those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped establish climate
change as a global phenomenon, but in the process they detached knowledge from
meaning. Climate facts arise from impersonal observation whereas meanings emerge from
embedded experience. Climate science thus cuts against the grain of common sense and
undermines existing social institutions and ethical commitments at four levels:
communal, political, spatial and temporal. The article explores the tensions that
arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of climate change
projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative
imaginations of human actors engaging with nature. It points to current environmental
debates in which a reintegration of scientific representations of the climate with
social responses to those representations is taking place. It suggests how the
interpretive social sciences can foster a more complex understanding of humanity’s
climate predicament. An important aim of this analysis is to offer a framework in
which to think about the human and the social in a climate that seems to render
obsolete important prior categories of solidarity and experience.
Persistent mismatches between problems, policy framings, and solutions point to unsettled ethical conundrums in the ways that the energy transition is being imagined at the centers of global power. ...First, development is too often seen as the means to achieve more sustainable futures, even though experience points to complex and uncertain relationships between prosperity and sustainability. Second, while technological change is seen as essential to the transition, less attention is paid to the fact that disparities within societies demand differentiated solutions. Third, there are few principles in place for how to effect an energy transition with due attention to social justice in an unequal world. This article reflects on all three points.
Designs on nature Jasanoff, Sheila
2005, 2008., 20110627, 2011, 2005-01-01, 20050101
eBook, Book
Biology and politics have converged today across much of the industrialized world. Debates about genetically modified organisms, cloning, stem cells, animal patenting, and new reproductive ...technologies crowd media headlines and policy agendas. Less noticed, but no less important, are the rifts that have appeared among leading Western nations about the right way to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology. These significant differences in law and policy, and in ethical analysis, may in a globalizing world act as obstacles to free trade, scientific inquiry, and shared understandings of human dignity.
This paper explores the politics of representing events in the world in the form of data points, data sets, or data associations. Data collection involves an act of seeing and recording something ...that was previously hidden and possibly unnamed. The incidences included in a data set are not random or unrelated but stand for coherent, classifiable phenomena in the world. Moreover, for data to have an impact on law and policy, such information must be seen as actionable, that is, the aggregated data must show people both something they can perceive and something that demands interrogation, explanation, or resolution. Actionable data problematize the taken-for-granted order of society by pointing to questions or imbalances that can be corrected or rectified, or simply better understood, through systematic compilations of occurrences, frequencies, distributions, or correlations. The paper describes and analyzes three different modes of authorized seeing that render data on global environmental phenomena such as climate change both visible and actionable. It argues that the political force of environmental data compilations derives from the divergent epistemological standpoints and expert practices associated with producing views from nowhere, everywhere, and somewhere.
STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of ...science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of "sociotechnical imaginaries." Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state's central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective "containment." In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of "atoms for development" which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement.
Resumo A partir de teorias recentes sobre a ciência na sociedade, tal como a abordagem do “Modo 2”, este artigo argumenta que os governos devem reconsiderar as relações existentes entre tomadores de ...decisões, experts e cidadãos na gestão da tecnologia. Formuladores de políticas precisam de uma série de “tecnologias da humildade” para avaliar sistematicamente o desconhecido e o incerto. Pontos focais apropriados para essas avaliações modestas são o enquadramento, a vulnerabilidade, a distribuição e o aprendizado.
Abstract 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.
Building on recent theories of science in society, such as that provided by 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.
STS has become a discipline in the sense that it offers new ways to read and make sense of the world. It remains an amalgam, however, of two linked yet separate lines of inquiry, both abbreviated as ...STS. Science and technology studies refers to the investigation of S&T as social institutions; science, technology and society, by contrast, analyzes the external relations of S&T with other institutions, such as law or politics. This essay reflects on the implications of this ambiguity for institutionalizing STS as a field of its own, drawing on the author’s experiences in building STS at two universities.
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