Democratic Experiments : Problematizing Nanotechnology and Democracy in Europe and the United States

Laurent, Brice

doi:10.26530/oapen_628777

Cited by 38 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Guidance and evaluation criteria that are more attuned to the politics, contingencies, exclusions, and effects of participation (e.g., Mohr, Raman, and Gibbs 2013) Acknowledging controversies about democratic innovations as instances of informal technology assessment and social learning Controversies as informal "technologies of participation" assessment (cf. Laurent 2017;Meyer 2017) In much the same way that STS scholars have sought to engage scientists in reflecting on and taking responsibility for the possible social and ethical implications, imagined futures, and ordering effects of their work (Kearnes, Macnaghten, and Wilsdon 2006;Doubleday 2007;Balmer et al 2015;Fisher et al 2015), social scientists can engage in similar forms of reflexive engagement with the mediators, designers, experts, entrepreneurs, innovators, and institutions devising new forms of participation and democracy. STS scholars have already formed such interactions in relation to deliberative and dialogic forms of democratic innovation (Chilvers 2008(Chilvers , 2013Pallett 2015), but this should be extended to the actors and organizations associated with diverse forms of participation identified in wider ecologies, whether lab-based or in the wild, ranging from social science research groups, consultancies, behavior change programs, digital platforms, activist and grassroots community groups, and so on.…”

Section: Imbue Evaluation Criteria and Learning Infrastructures With mentioning

confidence: 99%

Remaking Participation in Science and Democracy

Chilvers

Kearnes

2019

Science, Technology, & Human Values

206

148

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Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in public engagement with, and the democratization of, science and technology. Despite notable successes, such developments have often struggled to enhance public trust, avert crises of expertise and democracy, and build more socially responsive and responsible science and innovation. A central reason for this is that mainstream approaches to public engagement harbor what we call “residual realist” assumptions about participation and publics. Recent coproductionist accounts in science and technology studies (STS) offer an alternative way of seeing participation as coproduced, relational, diverse, and emergent but have been somewhat reluctant to articulate what this means in practice. In this paper, we make this move by setting out a new framework of interrelating paths and associated criteria for remaking public participation with science and democracy in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory, and responsible ways. This framework comprises four paths to: forge reflexive participatory practices that attend to their framings, emergence, uncertainties, and effects; ecologize participation through attending to the interrelations between diverse public engagements in wider systems; catalyze practices of anticipatory reflection to bring about responsible democratic innovations; and reconstitute participation as constitutive of (not separate from) systems of technoscience and democracy.

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Section: Imbue Evaluation Criteria and Learning Infrastructures With mentioning

confidence: 99%

Remaking Participation in Science and Democracy

Chilvers

Kearnes

2019

Science, Technology, & Human Values

206

148

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“…On this basis, broadening participation in scientific and technical decisionmaking can in many cases be viewed as reasonable and legitimate providing that appropriate procedures for consultation and participation can be decided upon (Nowotny et al, 2001;Chilvers and Kearnes, 2016). Creating space for a greater number of actors to express themselves, these procedures have been envisaged as an effective way of identifying problematic issues that continue to haunt and potentially undermine processes of technical innovation (Jasanoff, 2003;Nowotny, 2003;Callon et al, 2009;Feenberg, 2010;Laurent, 2017).…”

Section: Valuing Controversymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In line with such arguments Jasanoff (2003, p. 243) has asserted that participation 'should be treated as a standard operating procedure of democracy' and Laurent (2017) has added that public debate, in response to different technological choices, 'provides a relevant focus for a renewed analysis of democracy.' The shared vision behind these STS perspectives is of controversies transformed into learning processes where actors are recognised as engaged in ongoing processes of collective experimentation.…”

Section: Valuing Controversymentioning

confidence: 99%

Technological Fix or Divisible Object of Collective Concern? Histories of Conflict over the Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste in Sweden and France

2019

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Science and technology studies (STS) has cultivated a positive vision of technological controversies. By raising new issues to address, controversies are seen as generating more thorough and exhaustive processes of technology assessment. However, the ability to view controversies in this light remains dependent upon how technology is collectively imagined and understood. If it is envisioned as a classic technological fix then broader controversy is just what is intended to be overcome, not positively indulged. Albert Hirschman's distinction between divisible and non-divisible conflicts captures such varying evaluations of controversy. In particular, it helps analyse how the long-standing fix of geological disposal of nuclear waste has been persistently defended as a non-negotiable object of technological concerna recipe for escaping controversy by permanently isolating nuclear waste from the biosphere. Comparing the Swedish and French programmes for the geological disposal of nuclear waste shows how defending the technological integrity of a non-divisible disposal concept has remained an institutional fixation for Swedish nuclear waste management for over 30 years. In contrast, legislative demands for a reversible disposal concept introduced in France in the late 1990s have arguably served to unravel a technological fix into a divisible object of collective concern.

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“…Attempts at regulating nanomaterials within the European institutions have been caught in a tension between two opposite approaches (Laurent, 2017). On the one hand, the European Commission argues for a case-by-case approach to deal with nanomaterials.…”

Section: Unstable Categories Unstable Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Situated Expert Judgement

Laurent¹,

Thoreau

2019

S&TS

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In this paper we discuss the kind of expert judgement demanded by the development of a particular class of models known as “Quantitative Structure-Activities Relationship” (QSAR) models, used to predict the toxicity of chemical substances, for regulatory and other purposes. We analyse the production of these models, and attempts at standardizing them. We show that neither a technical nor a procedural standardization is possible. As a consequence, QSAR models cannot ground a production of knowledge along the lines of “mechanical objectivity” or “regulatory objectivity”. Instead, QSAR models imply that expert judgement is situated, re-worked for each new case, and implies an active intervention of the individual expert. This has important consequences for risk governance based on models. It makes transparency a central concern. It also means that new asymmetries emerge, between companies developing sophisticated models and individual experts in regulatory agencies in charge of assessing these models.

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Democratic Experiments : Problematizing Nanotechnology and Democracy in Europe and the United States

Cited by 38 publications

References 79 publications

Remaking Participation in Science and Democracy

Remaking Participation in Science and Democracy

Technological Fix or Divisible Object of Collective Concern? Histories of Conflict over the Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste in Sweden and France

Situated Expert Judgement

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