Human rights and genomics: science, genomics and social movements at the 2004 London Social Forum

Welsh, Ian; Plows, Alexandra; Evans, R. J. W.

doi:10.1080/14636770701466816

Cited by 21 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…None of these papers was meant to be comparative across cultural boundaries, of course. Nevertheless, in setting their own scene in relation to other global STS work, they each still carry some such comparative substance, and this is framed in all cases by a highly rationalist conceptual form which does not naturally bring out any embodied and habituated cultural dimensions of such processes (Butler 1999;Bourdieu 1991;Welsh et al 2007;Wynne 2001). Levidow's analysis of different aspects of the EU controversy over GM crops and foods probably most clearly delineates what can be seen as the interpenetration of, on one hand, interest-based strategic-calculative and deliberative reasoning processes in policy, and its shift towards participatory idioms to try to accommodate and domesticate mobilised public dissent; and on the other, more implicit, unreflexive, habit-shaped institutional processes and representations which automatically reinforced dominant assumptions, ideological stances, framings, and classifications-including classifications of what publics should properly leave to 'those who know better' on their behalf.…”

Section: Three Perspectives Three Arenas: Similarity and Differencementioning

confidence: 99%

Public Participation in Science and Technology: Performing and Obscuring a Political–Conceptual Category Mistake

2007

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In this paper, I attempt to explain how existing work in the science and technology studies (STS) sub-field of public engagement with, or participation in, public issues involving science and technology, has performed a serious category mistake in allowing itself to be called 'public participation in science' research. This requires us to reflect more systematically upon how our assumed objects, here the public issues we think we are dealing with, come to be 'objectified' in the forms which they do. Using the three sister papers, I make some conceptual distinctions which carry important political implications and corresponding analytical implications for STS. I suggest that the typical reduction of participation questions to ones of 'what qualification do publics have for engagement in expert practices?' is a mistaken distraction from more important questions which not only much analytical work, but also dominant practice, continues to ignore. This reductionist tendency even in social science and STS may tend to intensify, the more the issues reach across global networks and arenas. Finally, I suggest that STS work on public participation needs to enrich itself with some relevant political theory and philosophy, which would throw due historical perspective on the deeper forces shaping scientific understandings and normative representational performances of its 'democratic' publics.Brian Wynne is Professor of Science Studies and Associate Director of the UK ESRC Centre, CESAGen, at Lancaster University. He has recently been extending his research on how scientific discourses of public issues involving science, technology and risk project normative models of 'the public' into such public arenas, to include political economic changes in global techno-scientific cultures.

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Section: Three Perspectives Three Arenas: Similarity and Differencementioning

confidence: 99%

Public Participation in Science and Technology: Performing and Obscuring a Political–Conceptual Category Mistake

2007

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“…As outlined earlier, the research identified multiple actors grappling with multiple issues, and identified social complexity and ambivalence as actors framed the stakes beyond pro and anti positions (Evans et al. 2007; Welsh et al. 2007).…”

Section: Appraising Ethnographic Methods For the Study Of Social Movementioning

confidence: 99%

“…2007; Plows and Boddington 2006), as multiple actors move beyond pro and anti, mobilising over multiple frames, stakes and identity fields. The emergent nature of the research (as these technologies are only just starting to impact on the public sphere in terms of specific applications) necessitated the identification of ‘early risers’ (Tarrow 1998) and ‘prime movers’ (McAdam 1986) who are still grappling with framing the key stakes of engagement in a complex field (Welsh et al. 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Movements and Ethnographic Methodologies: An Analysis Using Case Study Examples

Plows

2008

Sociology Compass

Self Cite

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This paper defines and discusses the viability and applicability of specific ethnographic methods for the study and theorising of social movements and related social mobilisation. Ethnographic methods are shown to be one tool in a box of available methods, but are perhaps especially suited for the in-depth study of social movements and social networks. Pros and cons of such methods are identified, using examples drawn from an ethnographic narrative comprising over a decade of research; ethnography of UK environmental direct activists, and more recent ethnography of UK publics engaging with human genetic technologies. Ethnography enables developments in latent social interactions to be identified in the field, providing data sources that inform social analysis and the development of theoretical stakes. This ethnographic narrative has contributed to the theorising of complexity in movement collective identity and complex social mobilisation patterns; namely the theorising of social movement. Findings can be disseminated to a range of stakeholders, including the research participants. Thus, ethnography can be both a method for studying social movements and a means of 'upstream' public engagement, understanding what is happening at the grassroots, with the aim of enabling capacity building between all actors in the research process. This methodological rationale is defined as 'action research'.1524 Using Ethnographic Methods to Understand Social Movements

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“…Finally, attention is drawn to mobilizations of radical science movements (Nowotny and Rose, 1979;Ravetz, 1990;Rose and Rose, 1969) and radical democratic participation and science activism (Hess, 2007b;Woodhouse et al, 2002). Many of these positions reflect radical critiques of technological, scientific and medical rationalities (for example, Illich, 1979;Marcuse, 1991; for a discussion see Feenberg, 1995) and are historically rooted in the social movements of 1960s and 1970s -in particular feminist, anti-war and anti-nuclear and ecological movements, and in the new social movements after the 1990s (Hess, 2004(Hess, , 2007aWelsh et al, 2007). It is no coincidence that standpoint theory, which marked an important historical moment in the development of grounded politics, resonates strongly with a Marxist view of social organization.…”

Section: Grounded Politics and The Indeterminacy Of Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Alter-ontologies: Towards a constituent politics in technoscience

Papadopoulos

2010

Soc Stud Sci

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This paper identifies four recent conceptualisations of politics in relation to technoscience, which focus on expertise, institutional participation, the inclusion of non-human others, and the importance of marginalised experiences. The paper argues that each of these forms of politics is mainly concerned with renegotiating the already constituted terms of inclusion in a specific technoscientific field. While in many cases such a strategy is necessary, the paper aims to open up discussion of alternative forms of politics that act as constituent forces of radical social and material transformation in technoscience: alter-ontologies.Keywords alter-ontology, assembly, constituent politics, expertise, objectivity, participation, situated knowledges, technoscience Attempts to find definite descriptions of the connection between technoscience and politics are usually prone to reductionism and oversimplification. The traditional way in philosophy of science to think of this relation was epistemology, where the content of technoscience and the associated politics were subordinated to ways of knowing and defining truth (Alcoff, 1998). Social studies of science emerging in the 1970s contested this view, but their attempts to question traditional epistemology devolved into a new cycle of epistemological disputes between proponents of rationality and sociality (Longino, 2002). These debates will be briefly discussed later in this paper. My argument here is that epistemology is less useful as a tool for discerning and navigating through the intricacies of scientific knowledge/politics than as a tool for reproducing them by other means. The covert politics of epistemology culminated in provoking the science wars of the 1990s.The response to these heated debates in science and technology studies (STS) was an attempt to exit epistemology altogether. Furthermore, there is an increasing tendency to consider science together with technological and other applications --as technoscience or in the words of Jerome Ravetz (2006) post-normal science. These changes led to a new understanding of objectivity; one that limits its validity in time and space to a certain field but nevertheless recognizes that technoscientific knowledge holds objective status within that -2-field. That is, knowledge is shaped by the actual process of technoscientific research and its objects and simultaneously shapes social relations and material arrangements in each particular field. Here, I use the expression 'regions of objectivity' to refer to the ultimate horizon against which any question about politics in technoscience can be discussed. In the sections that follow, I will discuss four current conceptualizations of how politics is considered to be operative in a region of objectivity. I start with a formalist approach to politics, which is mainly concerned with rethinking expertise and creating the appropriate procedures for considering legitimate experts in a debate. A second approach to politics, participatory politics, is concerned with the ex...

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Human rights and genomics: science, genomics and social movements at the 2004 London Social Forum

Cited by 21 publications

References 19 publications

Public Participation in Science and Technology: Performing and Obscuring a Political–Conceptual Category Mistake

Public Participation in Science and Technology: Performing and Obscuring a Political–Conceptual Category Mistake

Social Movements and Ethnographic Methodologies: An Analysis Using Case Study Examples

Alter-ontologies: Towards a constituent politics in technoscience

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