Ulrich Beck's Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity provides a lens through which we can analyze contemporary debates over risk regulation of agricultural biotechnology. This article establishes the political and cultural context into which genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were introduced in the European Union, by reviewing the HIV-contaminated blood scandal, mad cow crisis, and dioxin contamination episode. These public health and food safety scandals exemplify the side effects of modernization as outlined by Beck. Beck also predicted the development of a solidarity arising from the public's anxiety over the global distribution of modernization's risks. The impact of these cases on risk regulation illustrates the political and social reaction to the invisible, global risks of late modernity. The subsequent response to this reaction in European risk regulation further demonstrates the tension between a globalizing market and public anxiety in risk society.
Announcements in 2017 and 2018 that scientists used a gene editing technique called Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) to permanently alter human embryos have highlighted the urgency in regulating the technology’s ethical, political, and legal implications. To better understand how a regulatory regime might evolve in response to CRISPR, we must examine how the media covers it. This article reviews online and television news sources in the United States to determine the tone, content, and frequency in media coverage of CRISPR. We find that coverage remained ambiguous and infrequent, as scientific research into CRISPR’s clinical potential for treating human disease surged. This infrequent coverage indicates that the media have not yet established the salience of CRISPR to a degree that engages the public or policymakers, though the issue will continue to gain importance as CRISPR transitions from experimental efforts into clinical practice.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has prompted numerous gender and sexuality controversies. We describe and analyze those involving assisted reproductive technologies (ART). ART in the United States has been regulated in piecemeal fashion, with oversight primarily by individual states. While leaving state authority largely intact, the ACA federalized key practices by establishing essential health benefits (EHBs) that regulate insurance markets and prohibit insurance-coverage denials based on pre-existing conditions. Whatever their intentions, the ACA's drafters thus put infertility in a subtly provocative new light clinically, financially, normatively, politically, and culturally. With particular attention to normative and political dynamics embedded in plausible regulatory trajectories, we review--and attempt to preview--the ACA's effects on infertility-related delivery of health services, on ART utilization, and on reproductive medicine as a factor in American society.
ecosystem may be on the verge of a big shift" because increasing awareness of gender disparities has begun (it is hoped) to lead to meaningful changes in the institutions and practices of our discipline. Our description of a series of innovations made to the hiring process-designed to counteract institutional and behavioral dynamics that work to decrease the representation of women in the discipline-is an example of these changes. Our review of that process suggests that a few relatively simple changes can contribute to greater gender balance in the field. Moreover, these changes are relatively simple and costless to adopt.These are practices that can (and, we think, should) be implemented by anyone conducting a search in political science. However, given the historical and (resulting) demographic composition of most political science departments, it is likely that most department chairs/heads and most search committee chairs are male (Mitchell and Hesli 2013). Of course, this is particularly likely to be the case in fields that historically have been male dominated (Charlesworth and Banaji 2019). Within political science, this includes the subfields of quantitative methodology, formal theory, normative political theory, and international relations. Indeed, the Society for Political Methodology's diversity report recently noted that "the majority of the positions of (formal and informal) power in our field are occupied by non-minority men" (Hidalgo et al. 2018, 12). To the extent that such changes are implemented by primarily male faculty and administrators, their effectiveness offers the potential for multiplier effects because higher numbers of female faculty in turn may be empowered to assume these roles.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.