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Behind today's headlines stands an unobtrusive army of science advisors—panels of scientific, medical, and engineering experts evaluate the safety of the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cars we drive. This book studies, theoretically and empirically, the social process through which the credibility of expert advice is produced, challenged, and sustained.
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How the regimes governing biological research changed during the genomics revolution, focusing on the Human Genome Project. The rise of genomics engendered intense struggle over the control of knowledge. In Reordering Life, Stephen Hilgartner examines the “genomics revolution” and develops a novel approach to studying the dynamics of change in knowledge and control. Hilgartner focuses on the Human Genome Project (HGP)—the symbolic and scientific centerpiece of the emerging field—showing how problems of governance arose in concert with new knowledge and technology. Using a theoretical framework that analyzes “knowledge control regimes,” Hilgartner investigates change in how contro...
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 a...
In the life sciences and beyond, new developments in science and technology and the creation of new social orders go hand in hand. In short, science and society are simultaneously and reciprocally coproduced and changed. Scientific research not only produces new knowledge and technological systems but also constitutes new forms of expertise and contributes to the emergence of new modes of living and new forms of exchange. These dynamic processes are tightly connected to significant redistributions of wealth and power, and they sometimes threaten and sometimes enhance democracy. Understanding these phenomena poses important intellectual and normative challenges: neither traditional social sci...
The vast majority of European countries have never had a Newton, Pasteur or Einstein. Therefore a historical analysis of their scientific culture must be more than the search for great luminaries. Studies of the ways science and technology were communicated to the public in countries of the European periphery can provide a valuable insight into the mechanisms of the appropriation of scientific ideas and technological practices across the continent. The contributors to this volume each take as their focus the popularization of science in countries on the margins of Europe, who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may be perceived to have had a weak scientific culture. A variety of scient...
From tabloid headlines to scientific discoveries to investigative documentaries, the claim that truth is being revealed is commonplace today. Such attention-grabbing claims can conjure allure, sell products, launch careers, cement authority and much more besides. And yet, despite the familiarity of revelation-talk, this notion has been subject to limited academic theorizing to date outside of matters divine. Revelations sets out to examine how the making available through revealing is accomplished as well as the implications of revealing. In other words, it is concerned with how revelations are realized and what is realized through them. Central to the argument will be treating attempts to make available as processes that can entail mix – that is, as processes that combine treating truth as publicly demonstrable but also as beyond simple verification, as alternately intelligible but also as unknowable. In taking the pervasive appeal to revealing as its topic, and through drawing inspiration from a range of disciplines, this book should appeal to a variety of audiences, including those interested in secrecy, conspiracy, expertise, celebrity, science and technology.
Science is a defining feature of the modern world, and popular science is where most of us make sense of that fact. Understanding Popular Scienceprovides a framework to help understand the development of popular science and current debates about it. In a lively and accessible style, Peter Broks shows how popular science has been invented, redefined and fought over. From early-nineteenth century radical science to twenty-first century government initiatives, he examines popular science as an arena where the authority of science and the authority of the state are legitimized and challenged. The book includes clear accounts of the public perception of scientists, visions of the future, fears of an “anti-science†movement and concerns about scientific literacy. The final chapter proposes a new model for understanding the interaction between lay and expert knowledge. This book is essential reading in cultural studies, science studies, history of science and science communication.
The untold story of the rise of the new scientific field of ancient DNA research, and how Jurassic Park and popular media influenced its development "Fun and thought-provoking. . . . Jones builds a wry, often wise, study of science as a very human endeavor. She makes a powerful case that ancient-DNA research feeds off media attention as much as the media feeds off it."--Victoria L. Herridge, Nature Ancient DNA research--the recovery of genetic material from long-dead organisms--is a discipline that developed from science fiction into a reality between the 1980s and today. Drawing on scientific, historical, and archival material, as well as original interviews with more than fifty researchers...